The behaviour of stock markets in the past one year has scared off many investors. Plus, there are various studies floating around which seem to indicate that, over a 10-year period, investing in equities has not been paying. The fact is that all this data are being compiled at a time when the world is beset with a financial crisis of an enormous magnitude.

Equities, to me, represent the...

The end of a big bear market does not mean the beginning of a big bull market

In the previous issue, I had suggested that “the market has been rising quite weakly which is what happens when the market is trying to come back after a vicious decline.” The rally remained weak for one more week after my piece was written and then started to give up the gains made since the end of November. Over...

"Markets are subtle organisations,” wrote John McMillan, professor of economics at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, in Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets. “The mechanisms that underpin transacting are intricate – and they are in everlasting flux.” It is easy, in our dematerialised world, to overlook the physical side of stock-market transactions. Few of us meet our...