To provide a model portfolio of quality stocks, aligned to clients risk assessment.

After qualifying I entered industry and worked in a number of senior positions, both in the public sector as well as the private sector, both in India as well as overseas. I started my career with BPCL (Kochi Refinery) and finally ended up as Chief Financial Officer at Arabian Shield Cooperative Insurance Company, Riyadh.

 

Entrepreneur

While I was in industry, I kept getting requests from friends and colleagues on investment matters. Especially as an NRI, I found that there was a shortage of suitable qualified professionals to guide people in the complex world of investments, taxation and financial planning. I saw that there was a vacuum in this area and this gave me an opportunity to set up a business to provide investment advisory services.

I came back to India in 2009 to start a wealth management company with a friend of mine. In due course, we parted ways and I started off as a registered Investment Adviser in 2014.

When do we Sell

Some clients do question us as to when we book profits. I am basically a believer in holding on to stocks as long as they are giving steady profits and growing such profits consistently at a high rate of return. I would normally advise you to sell stocks only –

If there is a better opportunity available

• There is an error in our basic investment premise
• The company has deviated from its core values

 

Buying Low

The cornerstone of value investing is buying a dollar for less than a dollar. This opportunity often arises during market crashes.

Baron Rothschild has famously said “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.” While there is a lot of truth in this, it is very difficult to practice. I have been many years in the market but I still find it difficult to do so. The wait for a market correction is often elusive as large inflows of funds from retail investors into domestic mutual funds can keep liquidity and stock prices high.

 

Investing in Equities

I believe that true long term wealth creation can only happen by investing in a basket of equities. This is borne out by history as equity investing has given the highest returns when compared to other asset classes like fixed deposits, real estate and gold. This has been achieved in spite of various macro events like wars, recessions, taxation etc.

Volatility and Risk

People tend to confuse volatility with risk. Stock prices are volatile and can deviate from underlying value for long periods of time. However, Risk arises out of not knowing what you are buying and is defined as the permanent loss of capital.

Warren Buffett on Volatility and Risk

Stock prices will always be far more volatile than cash-equivalent holdings. Over the long term, however, currency-denominated instruments are riskier investments - far riskier investments - than widely-diversified stock portfolios that are bought over time ... That lesson has not customarily been taught in business schools, where volatility is almost universally used as a proxy for risk. Though this pedagogic assumption makes for easy teaching, it is dead wrong: Volatility is far from synonymous with risk.

It is true, of course, that owning equities for a day or a week or a year is far riskier (in both nominal and purchasing-power terms) than leaving funds in cash-equivalents. For the great majority of investors, however, who can - and should - invest with a multi-decade horizon, quotational declines are unimportant. Their focus should remain fixed on attaining significant gains in purchasing power over their investing lifetime. For them, a diversified equity portfolio, bought over time, will prove far less risky than dollar-based securities... If the investor, instead, fears price volatility, erroneously viewing it as a measure of risk, he may, ironically, end up doing some very risky things.

Markets will exhibit every aspect of volatility; sometime irrationally bullish, often flat and passive, and again extremely bearish.

Howard Marks on Volatility -

“The mood swings of the securities markets resemble the movement of a pendulum. Although the midpoint of its arc best describes the location of the pendulum “on average,” it actually spends very little of its time there. Instead, it is almost always swinging toward or away from the extremes of its arc. But whenever the pendulum is near either extreme, it is inevitable that it will move back toward the midpoint sooner or later. In fact, it is the movement toward the extreme itself that supplies the energy for the swing back.

Investment markets make the same pendulum-like swing:

• between euphoria and depression,
• between celebrating positive developments and obsessing over negatives, and thus
•  between overpriced and underpriced.

This oscillation is one of the most dependable features of the investment world, and investor psychology seems to spend much more time at the extremes than it does at the “happy medium””.

 

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Disclosure with respect to compliance with Annual compliance audit requirement under Regulation 19(3) of SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE BOARD OF INDIA (INVESTMENT ADVISERS) REGULATIONS, 2013 for last and current financial year are as under :

 

Sr No.	Financial Year	Compliance Audit Status	Remarks, if any
1	FY 2020-21	Conducted	NA
2	FY 2021-22	Conducted	NA
3	FY 2022-23	Conducted	NA
4	FY 2023-24	To be Conducted	NA