Month: May 2014

There is a common notion that the older you get, the lesser equity you should own, and the rationale for this is you shouldn’t be invested in too much equity when you’re retired or towards retirement because a drop in the market may not leave you enough time to recover from it, and you may be forced to sell your stocks while you are still at a loss.

I don’t quite agree with this idea in the sense that you can’t just say that if you’re old you should have less of equity, and if you’re young you should have more of equity disregarding your knowledge and comfort with owning such a volatile asset in the first place.

In fact, in a lot of cases it makes sense to have a higher level of equity in your portfolio when you are older because your experience teaches you to deal with the volatility that is inherent in this game, and your longer term outlook to owning assets may be a lot more developed than someone much younger.

In a sense, someone who is forty years old and has owned shares for the last decade can easily see herself hold on to those shares for the next decade compared with someone who is 25 and has just started investing in shares, and can’t really develop that kind of outlook right away.

More than age, I think how much equity you own depends on the following three factors:

1. How well funded are your medium term goals? If you have have a wedding or an education expense coming up in the next five to seven years, how well are you preparing for that? Do you know how much that is expected to cost, and do you have a good sense of where you can find the money to fund that? These calculations are often simple, and quite eye opening as well, and if you do these calculations and say fund most of your child’s education through a simple RD then you will be able to invest the rest of your money in more volatile equity with a lot more peace of mind.

2. How knowledgeable are you with the stock market? A lot of people equate this to trading, or following the market closely, or reading a lot about it. But that’s not necessary, if you are grounded on solid long term principles, and reasonably aware of what is going on in the economy in general then that’s all it needs. Additionally, you shouldn’t be dabbling in penny stocks or shady companies the likes of which can go down to zero. In fact, for a lot of people, there is no reason to buy stocks directly at all, and it is good enough to buy a few good mutual funds.

 3. How patient are you with the market? There are plenty of good funds that have given just three, four, five percent return in the last three years. Some have even given negative returns, and someone who started investing when the market was relatively higher would surely not even be seeing positive returns right now, let alone returns that beat a simple FD. That’s just the nature of Indian stock markets, and I don’t think it is going to change any time soon no matter who comes to power. If you are in the market, you have to be in the market with the mentality that you are in it for five, ten, twenty years, and in that time frame, the market will at least have one up cycle which will let you cash out (if nothing else). My experience is that the cycle is much shorter, but giving yourself that much time, and ensuring that you don’t need the money in the next few years ensures that you don’t sell in panic.

So, my answer to the question of age affecting portfolio is — it should have very little impact, if anything at all, and instead you should seek yourself to educate on the market in general and also about your finances and upcoming goals.

The Nifty crossed 7,000 today, and continued the uptrend which started a few months ago or the bigger trend that started a few years ago.

If you look at the annual Nifty returns — 2011 returned a negative 25%, 2012 returned a positive 27%, 2013 returned about 7% and we have seen the Nifty up about 11% already this year.

This kind of optimism usually brings with it new investors, and emboldens existing investors to invest more in the markets, which is what we’re seeing now as well.

AMFI reported that 400,000 new accounts were added last month taking the number of total equity folios to 29.56 million, which is still less than its peak of 41.13 million in March 2009, but does speak of people gaining confidence and returning to equity.  Interestingly, if you see the chart below you would see that the peak was reached in a year when the market did tremendously well. However, what the chart can’t tell you is that the pain you feel when the market halves in value is much more than any 81% gain you could ever witness.

Even personally, I feel that more people are talking about equity right now than any time in the past and I have a feeling this will continue for at least a few more months.

In terms of investing strategy though, getting into the markets, and increasing your equity positions when there is optimism in the market is not the right way to go and I’d caution any readers who are only now getting into the market, or increasing their SIPs at this time.

What you should have ideally done is buy into the markets when they were depressed, and that would have ensured that you were sitting on considerable gains right now, but if you haven’t done that and plan to chase returns right now, then that’s a dangerous approach.

The long term plan of any investor should be to get into a mindset where they can put in a reasonable sum of money into equity every month, and adjust that sum upwards or downwards based on market conditions. The hard part about this is you must adjust that sum upwards when the market is down, and lower it a little when the market is up. I’ve been doing this for years now, and also recommending others do this, as I find that this is a certain way to accumulate stocks at a reasonable price, and then take advantage of market highs to book some profits from time to time.

If you’re in the category of investors who don’t have any equity investments, and want to start now then I’d say start with a SIP that is smaller than the maximum you can put in the markets. That way when the market falls, you can increase that allocation and take advantage of the fall.

If you are already in the market, and were thinking about increasing your allocation, then I’d say there is no reason to increase your allocation just on the basis of this market rise alone. The time to increase allocation will eventually come, and you will be able to take advantage of that if you position yourself from now and be in a mindset that looks for crashes and downfalls.

If you were investing when the market were down and are sitting on profits now – good job, and I hope OneMint had a small part to play in it.