Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish writer and philosopher, called economics the dismal science. I don’t know if you’ll agree but having read economics textbooks, I certainly think they’re dismal. They’re filled with unnecessary complexity, pointless jargon and theories that have been dead and buried for decades. While economics as a discipline has progressed, the textbooks used today are stuck in the dark ages.     Then I came across Macroeconomics: An Introduction by Alex M Thomas and I regretted not having this as my textbook when I was studying. Though it’s meant to be a textbook ..read more

In the last 15 years, Indian asset management has grown leaps and bounds. One of the amazing success stories of this period has been Mirae Asset management, which is best known for its well managed equity funds.  In this episode, I caught up with Swarup Mohanty, the CEO of  Mirae Asset Investment Managers (India). Swarup has been at Mirae since day 1 during a period when both Mirae and the Indian markets have grown immensely. I hope you enjoy listening to the conversation as much as I enjoyed recording it.  In this episode, he speaks about:  0:00 - Introduction  2:55 ..read more

We are at an important crossroads in history. The pandemic might seem like it’s behind us but we have a raging war in Europe, unprecedented sanctions, currency crises, inflationary pressures, and volatile markets. There are early signs of a shift away from the dollar and uncertainty about the US led global order. So what does all this mean for India and the world? We caught up with Debashish Bose, Managing Director—Public Equities at Oaks Asset Management, to make sense of it all. In this conversation, Debashish talks about:   1. How money is created in the modern world  2. The geo ..read more

Up until the 1990s, the Capital asset pricing model (CAPM) was the dominant model used to explain market returns. But in 1992 Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama and his partner, Ken French said that market returns can be explained by three factors namely: 1. Value: the tendency of cheap stocks to outperform costly stocks 2. Size: the tendency of small cap stocks to outperform large cap stocks 3. Market factor: the risk premium of the market over the risk-free rate, like a government bond. Over a period of time, other factors like quality, momentum, and low volatility were added. Institutions were the ..read more

What does it take to survive multiple market cycles and create wealth?  This week, we have a really, really special guest. I caught up with Sankaran Naren, one of India's most admired and well-known fund managers, and the chief investment officer (CIO) of ICICI Prudential AMC. In this conversation, we spoke about his 3-decade career in the Indian markets as an investor, broker, and fund manager. He's perhaps best known for his contrarian style of investing that has helped him create immense wealth for investors. This conversation was nothing short of a masterclass on investing, and I hope ..read more

One topic we keep talking about on the podcast is debt funds. As we've alluded to numerous times in the show, most investors focus too much on the equity part of their portfolio and ignore the debt part. They often take debt for granted and invest based on recommendations or based on whatever partial understanding they have. This often ends up backfiring whenever there are bad phases in the debt markets like the IL&FS, DHFL, and Franklin episodes.  The other risk that investors don't pay much attention to is the interest rate risk. Rising interest rates are bad for debt funds, and fal ..read more

The way the markets have run up post the March 2020 crash have equally surprised and perplexed investors. Given the pace of the recent bull run, that's understandable. A lot of smart people are wondering what's happening in the markets. But that's how the markets work—they don't have to make sense and they rarely do. So, we caught up with Kalpen Parekh (MD & CEO, DSP Mutual Fund) and Sahil Kapoor (Head of Products & Market Strategist, DSP Mutual Fund) to get a sense of the madness in the markets and what you should do as investors:  In this conversation, Kalpen and Sahil talk abou ..read more

The CFA Society India recently published the second edition of The Investor’s Guide to Shareholder Meetings in India. As investors, even though we hold stocks of various companies, we rarely think about our rights. Investors also rarely realize that by virtue of the shares they hold, they are entitled to voting rights in a company. It's a chance for them to question the management and engage with them so that they aren't taken for granted as minority shareholders.  So we caught up with Sivananth Ramachandran, CFA, Director of Capital Markets Policy (India) and Amit Tandon, Founder and Man ..read more

In this episode, we have a really really special guest. We caught up with Prashant Jain, the chief investment officer (CIO) of HDFC Mutual Fund. Prashanth is a market veteran and the first India fund manager to manage a single mutual fund scheme for over 25 years. He manages some of the largest active mutual fund schemes in India. Over his nearly 25+ year career in the investment management industry, Prashant has pretty much seen all the cycles of the Indian markets. The experience and insights he shared in the conversation are all the more relevant to us given the euphoric mood in the Indian ..read more