We all agree on the fact that over the long run, Equity as an Asset class always beats FD return. Of course you have to pay for the extra return in terms of Volatility, riding through booms & the busts. Sensex (as a basket of top 30 Indian companies) was formally started in 1979 with the base price of 100. As I write this, Sensex closed at 38,645.18 today, a solid CAGR of 16%.

Astonishing! Isn't it? And this is CAGR of dumb Index whose members are selected just based on Market Cap. Those who were lucky to lay their hands on few of the multi-baggers, are financially independent now. So, if someone during 80s wanted a return of 16%, all he had to do was to buy the Sensex.

So, what what the reason of this mind-boggling return? And what if I am starting today? What is the guarantee that I will enjoy the similar return in future also? Aren't mutual funds repeatedly saying that past returns are no guarantee for the future?

Well, I am not going to get into usual jargon like India as a developing country has a long runway for growth or Modi's revival of economy to aid hyper-growth. Let me present you the logical reason for the higher return of Equity.

Suppose, bank gives you interest on FD @7%. The entrepreneur (or business man) takes loan from bank at rate say @10-12%. So the business man has to do only such a business that with certainty earns a return greater (say 14-15%) than the bank interest rate. If this condition is not met, then the depositors money in FD is not safe. When an industry starts earning an ROI which is even less than the cost of capital (simply say borrowing rate), then it certainly is a ticking bomb. We have witnessed several such examples in the form of defaulters like Kingfisher Airlines, Bhushan Steel, Alok Industries and now Jet Airways. So, if we assume that our money is safe in the bank; by the same hypothesis Industries will keep generating returns higher than that of the bank.

There are 3 forces which try to hold this hypothesis of Industries earning return higher than the deposit rate.

First entrepreneur himself. The business man (the captain of the ship) will give his blood and sweat to make his venture successful (read earning high ROI). Captain is always the last to abandon the sinking ship.

Secondly RBI, whose primary job is to keep the financial equilibrium (supply/demand) intact by cutting/raising interest rate. When businesses start under-performing due to economic reasons, RBI intercepts and lowers the interest rate. This eases the interest burden of businesses. At the same time, common man (depositor) gets more purchasing power leading to more consumption; in turn facilitating more sales and earnings for businesses leading to higher rate of Industry return.

Thirdly, during adverse economic conditions or slowdowns, Government interferes and provides support to businesses like free land, discounted spectrum, free landmines, tax rebates etc. So that job losses can be contained and depositors money remains safe in he bank for the overall stability of the economy.

In worst case scenario, even after these efforts, Industries are under performing, then few companies will close down. This leads to reduced supply (and high demand). Remaining companies now enjoy less competition and will raise prices to earn more than their borrowings.

Now think hard! So many unfavorable events happened between 1979 and 2019. Harshad Mehta Scam of 1992, Ketan Parekh Scam during late 2000, US Housing Crisis of 2008, BREXIT, LTCG, majority Governments, coalition governments; market has endured all. In spite of all these, market return was impressive and you know the science behind it now.
​
Hope now you have an assuring reason to repose you faith in Equities. You also now have something to explain to that friend of your father who keep pestering you for an LIC endowment policy! Next time you meet that uncle, pull out the Excel and show him the XIRR ofthe policy.
Happy Investing. Good Night!

Recently, one of my friends aged 29 Years who is a motorcycle enthusiast bought Hardley-Davidson motor cycle for about INR 8 Lacs (personal borrowing of 3 lacs), costing him his entire savings. He is an IT Professional and draws around 50K/month. His explanation for this costly affair was primarily his love for the bike for which he had been raising money, secondly he wants himself to be identified by 'HD wala' in his colony. Now, people have started judging him saying he wants to show off. Another uncle commenting 'Agar yahi paisa FD me daal deta to...'.

Few thoughts on this.

1. First thing first, it was his hard-earned legally acquired wealth which he used to fulfill his passion. Isn't it wrong to judge him for doing something unusual?

2. There are people who suggest to invest heavily for retirement by suppressing our desires, simply called delayed gratification citing example like 'Marsh mellow experiment'.Well, what if you don't reach that age itself given death is so uncertain? Why not enjoy wealth while you can, before your body starts experiencing the whole lot of old age issues. What wisdom is in living poor and dying rich?

3. I have come across several articles on personal finance discussing how foolish it is to own a car in the age of ola/uber/lyft or terming house loan as contract of slavery and advising to use that money in mutual funds. MF houses are only worried about increasing their AUM rather than making you rich. My argument for this is why lower your standard of living for the sake of saving & investment for an uncertain future. Why not think about increasing your income to afford that car/house? Robert Kiyosaki, the author of famous personal finance book 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' said that Savers are Losers. Find out why he said so?

4. You must have come across articles on how someone would have made huge money by investing in Eicher Motors rather than buying Royal Enfield or how a man made his fortune by investing in WIPRO. These are just marketing gimmick by Fund houses/Advisors to make your believe you can make your fortune by investing in their schemes. In practical, it is very very hard to spot multi-baggers. Multi-baggers are known in hindsight. There were many contemporaries of WIPRO who vanished in the oblivion (delisted from exchange) which used to be darlings of those era. Be wary of Survivor-ship bias. Coming back to Eicher, well even Eicher did not know that RE will be their hit product and many ace investors have accepted in their interviews that they had invested in Eicher looking at future prospects of their trucks & buses. RE was a fluke.

5. Another point is if everyone turns investor and there were no consumer, then economy will collapse. Consumption is the engine of economy. America is number one economy because it is the biggest consumer. If it weren't for America, Indian IT would not have the feat it enjoys today. What would be impact on share price of Eicher if everyone just bought the shares and no one bought the bike?

6. Final thoughts, I am not against saving or investing per se but just want to convey that you cannot become rich by saving. The magic of compounding will be able to charm you only when you have a sizable capital to compound, of course time horizon is another important factor. Never imagine financial independence by just saving unless you are full time into it. The only way to become incredibly wealthy is to start your own business, one capable of scaling to a significant size. And for that you need to work your ass off, to acquire the necessary skills and resources. Your expectation from investing should be reasonable. You can’t make more than the company’s earnings growth over long term. Of all the listed companies on the two exchanges, only a minority make >15% on capital. So for common investors, expecting a CAGR of more than 15% is foolish (pro stock-pickers are excluded from this generalization though).
​
And please strike a balance between your savings and expenses. Do not suppress/postpone your desires just for the sake of saving/investing because you just live once and you don't know till when. So, if you can afford it from your own pocket; just go and spend on that dream trip with your loved one, buy that expensive car you have been longing for, buy that latest iPhone you always desired to own (if you can afford and not by selling your kidney :) ).
P.S: These are just my thoughts and not facts.

Later that week another investor in the same city had a very different experience.

Jesse Livermore returned home on October 29th to a wife who, seeing news of the day’s record market crash, was prepared to console her husband and return to a life of frugality.

Jesse said that wasn’t necessary. He was short the market and made more money in the crash of 1929 than during the rest of his life combined.

“You mean we are not ruined?” his wife asked, according to Livermore’s biography.

He replied: “No darling, I have just had my best ever trading day – we are fabulously rich and can do whatever we like.” He made, in one day, the equivalent of $3 billion.

Polar opposite stories. Germansky went broke, Livermore became the richest man in the world.

But fast-forward four years and the stories end up nearly identical.

Livermore made larger and larger bets, and went on to lose everything in the stock market. Broke and ashamed, he disappeared for two days in 1933. His wife set out to find him. “Jesse L. Livermore, the stock market operator, of 1100 Park Avenue missing and has not been seen since 3pm yesterday,” the New York Times wrote in 1933. He returned, but his path was set. Livermore eventually took his own life.

The timing was different, but Germansky and Livermore shared the realization that getting rich is one thing. Staying rich is quite another.

Everything in the economy is cyclical. Nothing great or terrible is likely to stay that way for long, because the same forces that cause things to be great or terrible also plant the seeds to push them the other way.

Bull markets make stocks expensive, expensive stocks leave little room for error, and little room for error increases the odds of bull markets ending. Same thing in the other direction. Recessions cause pessimism. Pessimism causes underproduction, underproduction leads to scarcity, scarcity leads to a new boom.

People and companies, whose behaviors are changed by their own success, are vulnerable to the same cycles.

I’ve noticed a pattern: Getting rich can be the biggest impediment to staying rich.

It goes like this. The more successful you are at something, the more convinced you become that you’re doing it right. The more convinced you are that you’re doing it right, the less open you are to change. The less open you are to change, the more likely you are to tripping in a world that changes all the time.

There are a million ways to get rich. But there’s only one way to stay rich: Humility, often to the point of paranoia. The irony is that few things squash humility like getting rich in the first place.

It’s why the composition of Dow Jones companies changes so much over time, and why the Forbes list of billionaires has 60% turnover per decade.

Andy Grove, Intel’s founder, put it this way: “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.” Scrappiness and the ability to think differently turns into complacency and the desire to keep things the same. Harvard Business Review wrote about Grove’s management philosophy in 1996:
​

Not skill, or market insight, or even hard work. Fear and humility.

Humility doesn’t mean taking fewer risks. Sequoia takes as big of risks today as it did 30 years ago. But it’s taken risks in new industries, with new approaches, and new partners, cognizant that work worked yesterday isn’t what will work tomorrow.

IBM and Xerox did this when they shifted from hardware to services. Netflix did it when it cannibalized its DVD business to invest in streaming. GE has reinvented itself about every 20 years for the last century, going from a lightbulb company to a dishwasher company to a bank to a wind turbine company.

Each could have looked at their past success and concluded they were doing the right thing, patting themselves on the back. But they didn’t. They were, for the most part, paranoid, eager and willing to jettison past success in an attempt to keep up with where the world was heading next.
It’s not easy to do.

For decades people used Coke, Gillette, and American Express as examples of companies whose success was so solidified – whose moats were so deep and protected – that you could foresee their dominance indefinitely. But now all three are under attack. Coke’s is fighting 13 consecutive years of soda decline. Dollar Shave Club came out of nowhere to take 14 percentage points of market share away from Gillette. And as Charlie Munger, one of AmEx’s largest investors said this week: “If you think you know what the state of the payments system will be 10 years out you’re in a state of delusion.” Only the paranoid survive.

We don’t know much about Abraham Germansky – only that he went from rich, to broke, to disappeared. But we know a lot about Livermore, whose life was well documented.

Livermore was was one of the most skilled people in the world at getting rich. But few people in the early 20th century had a harder time staying rich. He made and lost at least four fortunes, never going more than eight years without flirting with bankruptcy.

After his third wipeout, Livermore recognized his mistake: Getting rich made him feel invincible, and feeling invincible led him to double-down with leverage on what worked in the recent past, which was catastrophic when the world changed and the market turned against him.

He reflected:
​

We live in a disposable world. We tend to do anything and everything to achieve what we want (when we don't have it). I it holds such a high value in our minds before we posses it, but once we acquire the object or the person, we forget what it took to get it and the value slowly depreciates in our minds. When we acquire things like a cell phone,a computer, a TV; shortly after we want the newer, bigger and better model. Trading up has deprived our society of the appreciation we once had for what we worked hard to obtain. Holds true even for relationships.

This is because we begin to lose sense of the appreciation we have for the person or item and tend to stop doing the little things. If it's a cell phone, we stop cleaning it and keeping it scratch free; if it's a girl we stop telling her she's beautiful and we love her. If we were to misplace the phone we go crazy looking to find it; If the girl stops caring we go crazy trying to win her back. The key is to always appreciate the things we want most in life while we don't have it and even while we have it. That way we are always reminded of how special it is to us and will do whatever it takes to keep it feeling special and appreciated. The value of the person or item never changes, our appreciation towards them is what changes. So remember. the little things are what make up the big things, the little things matter most, the little things say the most.

I woke up today with the news of Rs 500 crore betting racket of IPL matches (I consider IPL matches a Business more than a Game) with Sreesanth, Ankit Chawan and Amit Singh admitting their involvement. But what caught my attention was this small footnote at the bottom which read : Boy Murdered to Pay for IPL Bet. The victim named Aditya Rankha, aged 13 was stabbed with kitchen knife several times by his cousins and finally burnt to death a little outside Mumbai after a ransom plan didn’t pan out the way his assailants had planned it. These muderers had lost Rs 10 lakh in illegal IPL bets and hence they kidnapped Aditya and demanded a ransom of Rs 30 Lakh for teen's safe return, to which Aditya 's father did not agree.

The killers are not strangers, but relatives Aditya had grown up with, trusted and perhaps loved. The accused are neither hard-core criminals, nor professional killers. They represent the aam aadmi on every level. So what is the malaise in our society that is leading such people to commit dastardly crimes? Do they really think they’ll get away with murder? Do they think at all? Or is the glitter and glamour of instant gratification far more compelling than the risk involved? What about the reactions of their young wives and children? Other family members? The shame and ignominy of it all?

We are used to such urban crimes and we find nothing unusual about such stories. Thats why such articles find place at the footnote at the bottom of Dailies which we wearily read, get bored and turn the page. These killers were reported splurging wildly at nightclubs and 'enjoying' themselves. This idea of “enjoyment” has become a social disease that recognises no bounds. From a slum in central Mumbai to a penthouse on Pali Hill — it is no longer a distant dream or fantasy. It is happening. It is achievable. It is worth murdering a cousin for.

The scary truth is the lure of a luxurious lifestyle has completely blinded young urban India to consequences — moral or otherwise. There seems to be nothing at stake anymore. Everybody is chasing some impossible dream that promises paradise. Sometimes, one looks at the TV commercials (especially the ones that are telecast during the ongoing IPL) and wonders. They are so clever, so subversive they startle and shock the unwary! Most tap into middle-class frustrations, with wives and children demanding more and more and more from harried husbands and fathers (exotic summer vacations, bigger TV sets, pricey air conditioners). Banks offer attractive zero per cent interest on loans (come on, guys! who are you kidding?) urging the gullible to splurge on the latest smartphone or even a beach villa. Irresistible and heady as such offers are, there is always a catch.

That’s where these killer typos get phasaoed. Unwilling to wait for goodies that require some effort to acquire, they start gambling, first with currency, then with life itself. Young Aditya’s murder is emblematic of this rotten syndrome. As of now, one can only see a further escalation of similar crimes. The stakes may get higher. But lives will definitely get cheaper.

We have an inner impulse to satisfy our desires. Eat what we want, when we want to, giving no thought how much we eat. Drink what we want,when we want to, listen to audio entertainment when we want to, giving no thoughts to the words or to how long we have been listening or to how loud it is. Surf the internet, and watch video entertainment giving no thoughts to the websites we visit, the sounds and images we take in, to how long we surf or to how straining it is to our eyes. Pursue the fulfillment of our lower desires whenever we want,with whomever we want,wherever we want, for how long we want........
In this world, there is utter, uncontrollable chaos.Nothing is controlled and no one is exercising any control.No one needs anyone else as everyone is concerned only about themselves.

Every one is on the brink of losing their hearing and sight due to intense and continuous exposure to loud music. television and computer monitor screen.The clothing industry is thriving because people have to buy new clothes every other day. Medical and other human service professionals are working overtime to address the near exponential rise in the demand for emergency medical care, counselling and endless therapy sessions for people suffering from IHLTCS(I have lost total control syndrome). The reason for this chaos is turning away from Almighty,our creator to satisfy our lower desires.Let it be rich or poor,No one is happy. Everybody is Under stress. Newspapers carrying the news of suicides have become the order of the day. Why do people who have all the means of good-livelihood and all the objects of enjoyment take this extreme steps?We are living in the world of TENSION.

In this so called fast-spaced life and modern era, people give lesser importance to their servitude(to the creator) than their servitude and services to man. the slaves and servants of man are generally fully devoted to their employers to do the work they consider as their duty. Under the employer's instruction, they run to and fro, not even concerned about their meals-whatever little comes to hand is consumed.

If you want to live peaceful life, I call you to islam.Turn yourself to ALLAH.You will be successful in this world as well as the world hereafter. Never love a woman, a man or a pet.They will all disappoint you one day. But ALLAH will never disappoint you, ALLAH is always ready to listen to your blight.Devote sometime in Tableeghi movement started by Moulana Ilyas(Rahmatullah Alaih) so that your eyes are opened before death.

Man’s urges for the satisfaction hunger; sleep and sex cover the entire spectrum of his living condition on earth. They were given to man for his survival and maintenance on earth.

The hunger and thirst that man could satisfy with a loaf and a glass of water or feeling contented with what is available to him/her at ease and at hand is destroying the human edifice in a continuous process and multiplying his problems manifold, making the human life unbearable of hundreds of millions in the developing and underdeveloped countries who have little or no access to get this natural urge satisfied at peace.  The colonial powers and the occupiers have robbed their natural resources ruthlessly to satisfy their own mania of ever-increasing life standard and are miserly holding their “robbed” capital shamelessly in their banks and financial holding companies. What a curse it is for the great powers of Europe and America!

He needs a few hours of sleep and that he could get even lying on hard stones if he is overpowered by his tiresome work. But man went on increasing the luxuries of life. He wants luxurious houses, foam or water spring beds, air condition living rooms and sleeping piles.   If he could live within the natural means available, he could live in peace. However, man is found running after these urges day in and day out, like a “mad-man”, crazy to fulfill them by hook or crook, by fare or foul means, by honest or crocked means. He never feels satisfied and always cries: more and more, creating lopsided economies in the world and in every human society, dividing it in “haves and have-nots”, affluent and deprived, rich and poor, making the scenario worst and worst with every day and night: the rich is getting richer and the poor becoming poorer even by hours.

The urge that was given to man for the continuation of his species on earth through the process of procreation and the institution of marriage between man and woman has seriously been endangered by man through his perverted behavior of having sex with the same gender or committing the most heinous crime of homosexuality, a crime against human race being committed by humans for the satisfaction of his sexual urges in the most unnatural, unhealthy and shameless manner that is worse than animal behavior. Man is again misusing his freewill to satisfy his urge for sex out of wedlock thereby belittling the institution of marriage and the future of humanity at large.

The freewill of man has a choice to do wrong as well as free to do good and there lies its accountability after death as how he acted, lived and behaved on earth to make it a hell or a heaven for himself as well as for his species. Accordingly, he will be punished or rewarded in the life Hereafter – the ultimate reality that each human being will face when resurrected after death.