What we have gained since last Diwali

SCRIP	PURCHASE PRICE	Price as on 11-10-2015	GAIN	%AGE gain
ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK	410	639.80	229.8	56
EVEREADY IND	110	278.00	168	153
CENTURY PLYBOARDS	183	180.50	-2.5	-1
GRANULES	76	148.00	72	95
LLOYD ELECTRIC	180	267.00	87	48
NUCLEUS SOFTWARE	223	234.00	11	5
R S SOFTWARE	283	122.70	-160.3	-57
SUVEN LIFE SCIENCES	122	274.20	152.2	125
T V TODAY NETWORK	170	249.10	79.1	47
CHOLAMANDALAM FINANCE	610	622.00	12	2
ZICOM SECURITY	173	134.40	-38.6	-22
BAJAJ FINSERVE	1450	1950	500	34
overall gain	from last diwali to this diwali			40.35%

Festivals are auspicious and joyful, not necessarily investment days...

The best way to invest this Diwali (or indeed, any Diwali) is to pretend that it's not Diwali. In other words, to have an un-Diwali investment strategy. I realise that this may sound sort of sacrilegious--perhaps it is--but investments are serious business and it's never a good idea to make investing decisions based on custom or habit or ceremony.
Diwali, like all other festivals, is a great time to celebrate, to be with friends and family and to conduct whatever rituals and traditions that are customary for your community. However, unlike many other festivals, Diwali is intertwined with wealth and investments and prosperity which gives it an additional aspect of being an auspicious time to invest.
However, any rational analysis as an investor would perforce lead one to the conclusion that there is no reason to treat a date--any date--as special. Whether the date is a calendar new year like January 1, or a traditional new year like Diwali, or the start of a new decade, it has no more significance to how you invest then your own birthday.
Therefore, just like one does for these other 'round number dates', I'd say that the investment strategy to be followed should depend entirely on what your needs are, and not on what the calendar shows. However, that immediately brings up the question of dealing with what your needs are and how to map them on to the investments you make.
The trick here is to divide your investments into specific financial goals, a goal being defined as the combination of a target amount and a target date. For example, you'll need money for your daughter's higher education after three years. You'd like to buy a house at least ten years before retirement. You'd like to go on a vacation to Europe after two years. You'd like Rs 2 lakh to always be available for emergencies.
Each of these goals is very precise. The risk you can take with it, as well as the amount of money needed can be quantified quite precisely. Therefore, it is relatively easy to decide what kind investments should be made for each of them. Instead each individual must have many portfolios, one for each financial goal. And then can you tune each portfolio's level of conservativeness or aggressiveness to the right level by choosing the right kind of assets

Riding an ailing horse? for how long???

        Investment advisors' commonest lament is that investors are not patient with their investment. Investors buy and sell too often, and have an excessively short-term perspective. However, this is an impression that is primarily true of equity investors. Equity investors tend to sell their holdings for three possible reasons: one: they've made a loss, two: they've made a profit, and three: they've made neither a loss nor a profit.
         However, mutual fund investors seem to be guilty, if anything, of the reverse sin. There are far too many investors who hang on to mediocre funds for long periods of time, losing large chunks of potential returns. Upon compounding over many years, investors lose a majority of their returns too. Does that mean that investors should be trigger-happy about getting out of their investments? Not really. It means that most of us who invest in mutual funds need to distinguish short-term declines or under-performance from long-term poor performance.
          When I look at the assets being managed by equity funds, they naturally mirror the long-term performance of those funds. In general, funds that have done well have had good inflows and are thus managing a large amount of money, and vice versa. The interesting thing is that there are lot of anomalies to this. There are funds that are doing badly but have a lot of money to manage. Mostly, they are funds that have done well for extended periods of time in the past so have a set faithful investors who are hanging in. That makes sense.
          However, there are many funds that have never done well, have always lagged the markets as well as their peers and yet have thousands of crores of assets. The building up of these assets can be attributed to salesmanship, but the blame for its sustenance must go to investors who are not paying attention to their money. A lot of us have investments we are ignoring but which are bleeding potential returns. Investors need to weed out non-performers from their portfolios.

Is it right time to invest or stay away???

What should an active investor do when faced with a sharp market correction? There are two schools of contradictory advice. One school says, 'Buy on declines.' The other advocates, 'Wait for the momentum to turn positive before committing more.'
It is easy to find examples where one or the other advice proved correct. There have been many short, sharp bear markets where prices rapidly recovered. In such cases, the buy-on-declines school of investors gets windfall returns. There have also been many long bear markets where cautious investors did better because they held off until the correction was ultimately over.
Every bull and bear market has some points of similarity with previous bull and bear markets. But each also has its own unique characteristics. There is no way to tell for sure if a bear market will last a year or five years. There is also no way to tell how much market capitalisation will be wiped out before any given correction ends.
The current downtrend has been triggered by global factors, somewhat like the subprime crisis of 2008 when a real estate bubble burst in America. This time, it's the slowdown of the Chinese economy and the bursting of an associated Chinese stock market bubble.
The Indian economy was in a good shape in 2008. It is in a reasonable shape now. There were no reasons to assume that India would be fundamentally affected by the subprime bubble, since the Indian economy was not directly exposed to US real estate.
But there was a recession in the US sparked by the subprime crisis and that hurt India's corporates which had exposures to the US economy. Given recession in the world's largest economy, global trade collapsed for a while and FIIs also pulled out of emerging markets in 2008-09.
In contrast, the Chinese slowdown is a symptom of slow global growth and there is likely to be a direct impact. China is a very big player in global trade and global trade has been badly affected. China's exports have also lost ground and exports from other large export-oriented economies, like South Korea, have also shrunk. India's exports have dropped for the past ten months. Whatever China does to stimulate its own economy, such as currency devaluation to push exports, will also affect India.
The Indian stock market saw a very deep, very short correction. The Nifty fell from a high of 6,357 in January 2008 to a low of 2,252 in October 2008, which was a correction of 64.5 per cent in just nine months. Share-price recovery took a long time to come. The Nifty did not register a new high until December 2013, when it finally rose past 6,400. However, investors who bought in the falling market eventually made high returns.
The global economy may take a while to recover and that could mean a slow stock market recovery this time around as well. We may see a similar pattern in 2015, of a sharp correction followed by a gradual recovery. Or, we may see prices drifting down and sideways over a long while.
FDI and FII inflows are liable to slow down or reverse for some time at least and that means GDP growth projections will need to be pared down, even though there should not be a collapse of growth. India's domestic economy is large enough and dynamic enough to sustain growth at reasonable levels. On the plus side of the ledger, low commodity prices are good and low commodity prices are guaranteed until global recovery starts.
The stock market has gained consistently since December 2011, when it rose off a low of 4,531. It hit an all-time peak of 9,119 in March 2015. That's a bull run of about 40 months. A long bull market is often followed by either a deep bear market (steep falls in a relatively short period) or a long bear market, where prices drift down over a long period.
The market hit a low of 7,545 in September 2015. That was a correction of about 17 per cent from its all-time highs of March 2015. This correction has lasted just five months so far. On the grounds of time alone, it's possible that the correction will last quite a while more.
But nothing suggests that investors should pull out of all 'risky' equity allocations. There may be a bear market for an indeterminate period. But investing through that seems likely to be a good long-term strategy. If the 2008 pattern is repeated, it will certainly be a roller-coaster. But the investor who can increase commitments in such falling markets often gains.
What are the alternative channels for savings anyway? Among other common asset classes, real interest rates are positive, commodity trends (including precious metals) are negative and the Indian real estate industry is going through a crisis.
The case can be made for higher allocations to debt as a class. But higher allocations to debt should come by reducing exposure to physical assets like real estate and commodities (including precious metals). Also, existing exposures to real estate and commodities will fall in value and therefore these assets will automatically reduce as a percentage of total savings.
Passive investors don't have to take the same difficult decisions as active investors. But even for passive investors, who maintain systematic equity exposure anyhow, it is useful to know if exposure to equity as an asset class should be increased or reduced.
It might be useful to look into this from the aspect of equity market valuations. When equity valuations are low, or falling, increasing equity exposure is a good bet. Conversely when valuations are high, increasing equity exposure is a bad bet.
There are several ways to link valuations to allocation decisions. One is by comparing earnings growth rates to the P/E ratio. An old rule of thumb, the so-called 'PEG' ratio, says that the P/E should not exceed the growth (G) rate of the earnings per share (EPS) given in percentage terms. The PEG divides the P/E (a pure number) by EPS growth (percentage). The 'fair value' is assumed as 1. Below 1, the asset is an undervalued investment and over 1, it is overvalued.
Equity valuations were high through most of 2014 and 2015. Corporate earnings have stagnated for the last several quarters. The year-on-year EPS growth is negative for the Sensex and Nifty.
The Nifty was trading at a P/E of 24-plus when it hit the 9,000 mark. It is now valued at a P/E of just below 22. The valuations seem to be high for a market where EPS has fallen for the past two quarters. In PEG terms, the index is certainly overvalued.
Another way to look at valuations is simply to see the prior behaviour. In historic terms, P/E valuations should conform to a bell curve, or normal distribution. In a classic normal distribution, the values should stay within one standard deviation of the mean 68 per cent of the time and within two standard deviations 95 per cent of the time.
In this case, the mean P/E of the past 129 months (since January 2005) is 19.35, while the median P/E is 19.29 and the standard deviation is 3.04. The valuations stay within the range of one standard deviation 69.12 per cent of the time and within two standard deviations around 94.89 per cent of the time. (See the chart and the table below.)

Nifty valuations

Nifty	Valuation data
Total no. of sessions	2665
Mean P/E	19.35
Median P/E	19.29
Standard deviation of P/E	3.04
Max P/E (Jan 08, 2008)	28.29
Min P/E (Oct 27, 2008)	10.68
Observations b/w average +/- 1 std dev	1,842 (69.12%)
Observations b/w average +/- 2 std dev	2,529 (94.90%)
Observations b/w average +/- 3 std dev	2,665 (100%)

The Nifty's 11-year record conforms closely to the classic normal distribution. The predictability of this allows investors to identify situations where they can increase exposures and where they should pull back. The three-year return for investments made when the P/E is between 16 and 19.5 (within one standard deviation below the mean) is about 12 per cent CAGR while the return at lower P/Es is much higher.
In contrast, investments made when the P/E is above mean plus one standard deviation (above the P/E of 22) is close to zero and the CAGR falls as the P/E rises. See the scatter chart and table below.

Nifty P/E range and returns

P/E range	Total count	Avg CAGR (%)	Max ret (%)	Min ret (%)	No. of neg ret
10-16	347	24.4	48.03	-0.65	1
16-19.5	584	11.92	23.59	-5.76	56
19.5-22.5	673	6.53	15.54	-1.4	10
22.5-25.5	232	2.16	7.15	-2.88	29
22.51-30	52	-0.4	3.25	-3.35	24
From Jan 2005 to Sep 2015. Three-year CAGR averaged across P/E ranges.

It may be noted that the Nifty started trading outside the range of one standard deviation in January 2015, and despite the ongoing correction, it is still near the upper limit of mean plus one standard deviation.
Our perspective would be to hold equity exposures without change at current levels. An active, aggressive investor could consider increasing commitments if the valuations fall below the P/E of 19. Even a passive investor with a systematic approach should consider increasing commitments if valuations fall below the P/E of 16.

Foreign exchange, hedging and costs et all

Forex reserves are at a record high, while hedging levels are at a record low. The good job that Raghuram Rajan has done by managing rupee levels has led to complacence that this will continue. Even as the RBI rues the low hedging levels of nearly 15 per cent, India Inc switches off the radio and sleeps at the wheel. The result of this indiscipline is that the RBI has to be shoring up the dollar and keeping excess reserves to protect itself against a run on the rupee.

The RBI has been putting pressure on banks to ensure that Indian corporates are hedged against rupee depreciation, but these hedging costs will bring the cost of forex loans at par with the cost of domestic borrowing. So, corporates are tempted to skimp on hedging costs and stay open to the risk of dollar appreciation, hoping that everything will work out all right. Where have we seen that before?

It's OK to break your leg, but don't break your neck. Some risks are acceptable, but others are not, as our fathers told us. Then why do we do such risky things again and again, and why don't we learn from past mistakes? Our uncovered forex exposure of $70 billion will force the RBI to hold reserves in excess of reasonable needs, thus incurring a cost. The return from US Treasuries is 2.5 per cent, while the opportunity cost would be, say, the India GOI bond rate of 8 per cent. This huge notional loss is being borne by the country to hedge against the private indiscipline of India Inc.

Why doesn't the RBI simply mandate a high hedge ratio, thereby creating a steep forward curve, and tell corporates to manage their hedging costs as best as they can? If people defecate out in the open, their private indiscretion creates a public cost in the form of higher sanitation cost, public-health risk and the cost of cleaning the city. This comes back to the public in some way, just that the people who defecate don't really pay the full cost.

It is the same with hedging costs. India Inc. defecates out in the open, with some sectors more to blame than others. Low-margin traders, like edible oils, tend to build big forex exposures, which come to grief during a 'flight to safety'. These are the panicky importers who created the last spike in the dollar-rupee exchange rate from 64 to 68 rupees to a dollar in the taper tantrum of mid-2013. The collateral damage on the rest of the economy (and maybe the Congress Party) is well known.

If hedging of long-term forex loans were made mandatory, the interest rate arbitrage would disappear, and people would go back to domestic borrowing, creating demand for domestic credit, which has been sluggish. For example, if the edible-oil industry were forced to hedge all its imports, this would raise the landed cost of imported oils, making domestic edible oils more competitive. This would correct the mispricing of imports, which is a good thing all round.

Corporates should be forced to manage their cost of hedging on domestic currency exchanges, which would widen and deepen Indian currency exchanges, a spin-off benefit. The market-wide impact of introducing this cost would reduce the possibility of a currency crisis by forcing importers to depend on domestic borrowings. Exporters, on the other hand, would not be affected. At least the spate of corporate bankruptcies that follows each big spike in the dollar-rupee exchange rate would be avoided.

Take the case of the edible-oil industry. Operating margins are 3 per cent, while hedging costs are around 7 per cent. The industry is fragmented, so if any particular player were to hedge its forex exposures, it would be driven out of business. So nobody hedges, leaving the entire industry open to the risk of a sudden spike in the dollar. The only way to survive in this industry is to look for, and be able to have, no imports in the pipeline when the disaster (i.e., currency crisis) strikes. As one promoter famously told , 'I have to choose between dying today versus dying tomorrow.'

So is it right to say that the entire bank lending to the edible-oil sector is actually dead, and that banks are booking false interest income from this sector to be written off at some future date? If hedging were made compulsory, the cost curve of the entire industry would shift upward and prices would reflect the correct cost (which includes the cost of hedging forex). That would save everyone, including the industry and the banks that lend to it.

Why are industries that have domestic sales in rupee allowed to borrow in forex at all? Isn't that a recipe for disaster? Shouldn't there be a clear directive to banks that net importers should not be allowed forex borrowings? If all importers are hedged, there will be no currency crisis because a lot of import demand would turn to domestic sources, thereby reducing the current account deficit and foreign commercial credit. This would increase the domestic corporate credit demand and give incentives to domestic savers to fund that incremental demand. As a corollary, this would reduce the RBI's cost of holding excess forex reserves.

A culture of interest-cost management should be promoted just the way commodities are listed to enable producers and consumers to hedge their requirements. The simple but dangerous choice, which all lesser human beings are prone to taking, is to take on forex risk to book some (interest) cost savings. This has always proved counterproductive in the long run, creating vast economic damage to the larger economy.

Can you ban defecation in the open and put people in jail? I don't think so. You have to create cleaner options and use education and information to promote good behaviour. Just like defecation in the open (and risky sexual behaviour) is to be found more among the poor and the ignorant, here too it is SMEs and small businesses which are most prone to taking excess forex risk. To discipline them, you need to tell banks that foreign borrowings are restricted to those who show demonstrated ability to manage forex risk.

This brings us to the banking system to monitor all this. I find that frontline PSU bank officers know less about forex than they know about banking, so these assessments should be centralised with the credit-risk cells at the central office. And no forex loans (PCFC or ECB) should be disbursed until there is a clear certificate from the credit-risk department that the borrower is capable of looking after himself.

For those who remember, the structured-derivatives scam (of circa 2008) was about private banks loading invisible forex risk onto corporate balance sheets to book huge Treasury profits on their own books. The policeman turned rapist, and some banks got a huge rap on their knuckles for this. If instead, these same banks were given the mandate to sell interest-cost reduction structures for domestic borrowers, they would end up taking on the forex risk on themselves. As domestic companies reduce risk, some banks might find it profitable to take forex risk onto themselves, creating quite a profitable niche for their bottom lines.

But socialisation of the costs of private vice should be managed. This happens in many places, Greece being a good example, but when it affects a country's macro stability and the relative wealth of its population, it is a very big hidden cost that must be brought to public consciousness. The higher risk premium attached to higher volatility holds back foreign equity investment, leads to higher borrowing cost in the international market and reduces the stature of the currency and country.

One look at Switzerland and you can see how a currency can build a country. Whether it is a safe haven or a city financial centre (Singapore or Hong Kong), you will find that these countries reap huge benefits by installing the rules of good behaviour in their country's social fabric. Without aspiring to similar status, a large country like India can hardly afford to allow such risky behaviour. At the other extreme, Russia has shown that even a large country can be brought down to its knees by promoting cronyism, another pattern of bad behaviour where private vice has caused public disaster.

Personal Portfolio Management...

Personal portfolio management is not a competitive sport. It is, instead, an important individualized effort to achieve some predetermined financial goal by balancing one’s risk-tolerance level with the desire to enhance capital wealth. Good investment management practices are complex and time consuming, requiring discipline, patience, and consistency of application. Too many investors fail to follow some simple, time-tested tenets that improve the odds of achieving success and, at the same time, reduce the anxiety naturally associated with an uncertain undertaking.

  

Some advice lines….

A fool and his money are soon parted. Investment capital becomes a perishable commodity if not handled properly. Be serious. Pay attention to your financial affairs. Take an active, intensive interest. If you don’t, why should anyone else?

There is no free lunch. Risk and return are interrelated. Set reasonable objectives using history as a guide. All returns relate to inflation. Better to be safe than sorry. Never up, never in. Most investors underestimate the stress of a high-risk portfolio on the way down.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify. Asset allocation determines the rate of return. Stocks beat bonds over time.

Never overreach for yield. Remember, leverage works both ways. More money has been lost searching for yield than at the point of a gun.

Spend interest, never principal, If at all possible, take out less than comes in. Then a portfolio grows in value and lasts forever. The other way around, it can be diminished quite rapidly.

You cannot eat relative performance. Measure results on a total return, portfolio basis against your own objectives, not someone else’s.

Don’t be afraid to take a loss. Mistakes are part of the game. The cost price of a security is a matter of historical insignificance, of interest only to the IRS. Averaging down, which is different from dollar cost averaging, means the first decision was a mistake. It is a technique used to avoid admitting a mistake or to recover a loss against the odds. When in doubt, get out. The first loss is not only the best but is also usually the smallest.

Watch out for fads. Hula hoops and bowling alleys (among others) didn’t last. There are no permanent shortages (or oversupplies). Every trend creates its own countervailing force. Expect the unexpected.

Act. Make decisions. No amount of information can remove all uncertainty. Have confidence in your moves. Better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Take the long view. Don’t panic under short-term transitory developments. Stick to your plan. Prevent emotion from overtaking reason. Market timing generally doesn’t work. Recognize the rhythm of events.

Remember the value of common sense. No system works all of the time. History is a guide, not a template.

Balancing, evauating and rebalancing mutual fund portfolio....

            The aim of this column is to educate investors about the parameters that they should consider when analyzing their mutual fund holdings. Before getting into this exercise, I am assuming that investors would have created an appropriate portfolio depending upon the risk profile suitable to them. A risk profiler will cover aspects like the age of the investor, investment objectives, time horizon, existing investments, income and liabilities and the ability to take risks. The portfolio created should have a proper asset allocation depending upon the results of the risk profiling exercise done by the investor with proper risk mitigation measures. These measures could include the following factors: the portfolio should not be concentrated in just 1 or 2 fund houses, the funds included should not have overlapping stocks, the market capitalization tilt of the portfolio should depend upon the risk profiler, etc. I am of the view that creating an appropriate portfolio is only work half done; investors will have to take the effort to review their portfolios on a regular basis. A regular review of portfolio does not mean that investors will have to monitor it on a daily basis; however a quarterly review should be done so that they are aware about how their hard earned money is being utilized by the expert fund managers in the industry. In this context, let me pen down some pointers which investors can consider while reviewing their portfolios.

          Performance is the first factor that can be considered while reviewing portfolios. However; this parameter can be looked at from different angles. The performance of a portfolio can be reviewed by checking if the funds in the portfolio have been able to beat their respective benchmarks or if the portfolio has been able to outperform the major indices, i.e. the Sensex and Nifty. The alternate way to check performance of the portfolio vs the benchmark is to construct an appropriate benchmark which will be a culmination of 2-3 indices by assigning suitable weights to them. Another metric that can be used is the evaluation of the relative performance of the funds; here I am referring to the performance of a particular fund vis-à-vis the peer group.

            The performance of the portfolio should be tracked over a period of time. For instance, let’s say an investment of INR 1 Lakh had been made into a mid- cap fund like IDFC sterling Equity Fund on January 9, 2012 and the fund value became INR 1, 45,802 on January 21, 2013.The normal investor psyche in this case will be to sell this investment and book profits before the market takes a u-turn. When this decision is made, the investor tends to forget the time horizon and the goals for which the investments have been made. There can also be instances when investments have been made into sector or global funds for 2 years and if the investments have been in red, then typically, investors would give an exit call. However, here the investors have to keep in mind the fact that investments into these funds should be made only if they see some future potential in these types of funds. In short, the performance of the portfolio should not be done in isolation; investors should keep themselves abreast about any changes that are being brought about in the funds that they hold in their portfolios.

             Active management is a habit that investors must cultivate to ensure that the investments turn out to be positive for them in the long run. A simple example can be shown with the help of fixed income instruments which are used to mitigate the overall risk to the portfolio. Two years back, if an investor had made an exposure into Fixed Maturity Plans (FMPs) and if these have matured now, then the best investment option in the current scenario would be to consider duration funds. In short, this is an informed decision that the investor will have to make so as to make sure that his portfolio is moving in the right direction.

             Another important factor that needs to be considered is to see if there is a change in the risk profile and if the answer is a yes, then appropriate changes will have to be made in the portfolio. For instance, if an investor had created a portfolio in his early twenties for the purpose of saving, if after 5 years he had a family, has taken a loan for buying a house, and his investment objective is to plan for his child’s education then the existing portfolio would have to be modified as per the new risk profile.

            To conclude, I would like to advice investors that they should not stop just at performance when monitoring their portfolios but should also hold accountable the fund management teams with whom they have trusted their surplus. To do this, they will have to spend a lot of time and effort for the same which is not possible in this rat race called life. This is where investors need to take the support of financial advisors and together they should be able to create and monitor the portfolios. Hence, in my opinion hand holding is needed if investors have to make the right investment decisions.