Multiple unchartered risks - All at the same time

The world today is going through multiple unchartered risks, all at the same time.

Finance:

1. US debt gone to unsustainable levels that multiple people have commented on the sudden fall of the US economy and the US Dollar. Ray Dalio calls it the economic heart attack. We haven't seen anything like this after world war 2 where an empire is coming down. USSR was a breakage. This is different.

2. Japan has continued the zero interest policy causing massive borrowings in Japanese Yen and conversions to USD and investments in treasuries. The increase in the Japanese interest rate would easily cause the mass selling of the USD and the treasuries to pay back the Japanese borrowings. For the first time, the Japanese central bank is at risk and a Central bank at risk has never happened before.

3. France and UK have worsening finances and are expected to go to IMF next year for debt restructuring. This is the first time, giant western economies are under so much financial stress and IMF is small to carry the load of these economies. A first again.

4. Global finance decentralisation and derisking - From Asian countries planning alternate payment mechanisms to SWIFT, multiple countries decreasing their assets of US treasuries, most countries buying physical gold, BRICS discussing a new currency, bilateral trade in some countries being done in each other's currencies. A first again.

Trade:

1. Decades of established specialisations is being turned useless with unexpected turmoil by illogical tariffs by the US Administration.

Wars:

1. No one expected a physical war in Europe when Russia attacked Ukraine. A first of its kind since world war 2. And continuing so long? That is something no one can even fathom.

2. The Israeli massacre of the starving people asking for food aid is cruelty of another era, of the bygones, or so we thought.

3. USA threatening Venezuela with war (as if we need another US based forced leadership change after so many of them)

4. 19 Russian drones in Poland shot down as on 10 Sep 2025. (Start of NATO-Russia war leading to world war 3?)

Technology:

1. AI is disrupting human work. The future of many works remains uncertain.

2. AI - singularity, where it gets smarter than millions of humans together can break human superiority and become the apex controller and the humans the slaves/ pets/ prey. Humanties' first instance of more intelligent life.

Unemployment:

1. Tariffs and geopolitical disputes (US tariffs, Bangladesh-India, Russia-Ukraine war) causing industries to rupture and unemployment to increase.

2. AI bringing more unemployment its own way

3. US cutting down departments and uncertainty of outsiders in USA by creating visa issues and even threatening green card holders.

Countries standing up:

1. India and Japan standing up to the bullying of the US

2. France being the first western country to recognise Palestine as a state

Each of the above are volatile enough to cause a cocktail of furious unexpected events to happen in multiple domains of finance and/or economic turmoil each affecting the other one and our lives in unexpected ways.

But with all these risks running simultaneously, I think the world is in the most dangerous phase I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.

Any month could be our last (in case world war 3 happens).

The long slowdown

 India is witnessing a long winded slow down in retail.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/retail/retail-chains-restaurants-shut-stores-as-consumption-slows/articleshow/119054679.cms?from=mdr

This has been in the news recently after a year or so of the slowdown which the retailers have been experiencing over a year now.

Many retailers across segments, clothing, shoes, belts, vendors across India have clearly been able to witness it firsthand. A few days or weeks have seen sales as low as during those of the covid lockdowns.

The reasons however, were never clear and many attributed it to the following:

1. Hot weather to shop

2. Lack of cash as the general elections were there in 2024

But the real reason is somewhere else.

1. Saurabh Mukherjea suggests stagnant earnings, automation-driven job losses, and an ongoing economic slowdown after the covid revenge shopping.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/income-down-debt-up-saurabh-mukherjea-gives-three-reasons-why-indias-middle-class-is-facing-a-major-crisis/articleshow/119419834.cms?from=mdr

2. Secret back door rate increases profitting the companies at the cost of the people of India.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHtBQHnyryO/?igsh=am4zeWwzcTd0bDBs

Maybe there are more plausible reasons.

Share yours thoughts in the comments

Never trust your Bank

Has this happened to you?

The bank promises you a credit card with a limit and at the time of drawal, they dont let you draw.

Backstabbed by the bank! 

The bank in question is HDFC Bank.

From yester years, the synonym of banking or lending is trust, which is the main basis of it.

The recent experience of my "trusted" bank has had me question some of my beliefs.

I have been a loyal customer to this bank from 2005, a pretty significant 18 years. And this has been my primary bank account. They have issued me a premium credit card and they have wanted to increase the limit once a year which I have denied to as I have a decent limit which I dont use.

I was also smart enough to get my wife an add on card on the exact next day after our wedding 10 years ago so that she should not have any problem when the need arises.

Last week, my wife shopped and swiped the card for a pretty big amount well within the overall unused limit and the card was declined. I reset the password online and checked with my banker (on a sat holiday) and he confirmed that the pin generation and limit change was instantaneous. Despite this, the card was declined 3 times with no correct reason specified.

The next day, I get a call from the transaction monitoring team of the credit card asking if the transaction tried was genuine. Why didnt they call and check at that time? She also told me that the card has been blocked. When I asked why, she had no reason.

In effect, they promised me credit and at the time of drawal, they didnt let me draw. Backstabbed by the bank! 

What if the purpose of this transaction was at a hospital for an emergency? The patient could have died as I couldnt pay. Could I then make the bank a party to the murder of the patient as it was responsible for not obliging on its promises and denied getting the treatments on time?

Few lessons from this episode:
Never trust any bank. Diversify the credit cards and have 2 primary accounts with transactions in each to have good credit limit.

You need to have multiple lines of liquidity (as stated earlier in my blog) to overcome immediate payment needs.

A poem to Adani

You took on so much Debt to grow

You became world’s richest with dough.

You stocks had a 3 year hit show

And now this shit-show.

Listing your group companies for stock manipulation,

only aided your debt addiction,

becoming a growth sensation,

But this allegation has brought much aggravation.

The PE ratios of your group stocks are so ridiculous,

That it has become conspicuous.

You got so mischievous,

that you route your funds through Mauritius.

You did all this with the absence of the P-notes,

But, lo and behold, Nirmala has again authorised P-notes.

The report by Hindenburg,

May just be a tip of the iceberg.

For the report has been meticulous,

And for you, it has been strenuous.

The report has gone downtown

The groups’s stock prices have been beat down.

The group’s global bonds are in distress,

While the SEBI seems clueless.

The report mentions your Annual report’s key omissions,

And it has raised suspicions.

It questions your statutory audit,

much to your discredit.

After all this, I wonder why IHC would commit,

Unless you had agreed to remit.

Now that you have cancelled the FPO,

There are now no institutional anchors,

You may soon get margin calls from your bankers.

Financial lines of defense

One must have multiple lines of defense to call upon in need of any financial situation. I will list this order from the first line of defense to the last:
1. Credit card of self
2. Credit card of spouse (for this you both should have an add on card of each other)
3. Cash from ATMs drawing on your various bank accounts
4. NEFT/ RTGS/ IMPS transactions drawing upon the bank acccount funds
5. Taking short term loan from family and friends
6. Short term Fixed deposits in banks
7. Medium term fixed deposits in banks
8. Mortgage of physical gold to raise funds in emergency
9. Stocks or tax free bonds sold in the market/ Mutual funds
10. Selling physical assets (gold, land, building) though this will take time.
These are as per liquidity provided and the amounts available from the various sources.
These various financial instruments should be used to get the optimum level of returns for the risk and while not compromising liquidity.

A good reason to invest in equity for the long term

Many investors may be scared of investing in equity as the risk is high. Moreover, a fall in the markets can cause heavy losses to the portfolio.
A friend of mine recently made a great comment on the stock markets. He said, in the long run, stocks can give a CAGR of 10-25% (an annual growth of around 10-15% continuously year on year). Even if the stock corrects by a big margin, say 25%, it is only on the last year's price and I still have many years of appreciation intact.
This is very true for a large number of large cap stocks.
Something to keep in mind while investing in stocks.
This make it a good reason to invest in equity in the long run.

Free float

Float has many meanings depending on the context. Beverages, Finance - in terms of shares available for trading; moving/changing amounts; and also Savings and Current account of banks.

In the perspective of savings accounts of individuals, the float what I am referring to is the liquid cash lying in the savings account which is useful for taking care of emergencies, exigencies and sundry expenses. We should not keep an excess float as this earns us a lower interest rather than investments. There are a few particular situations when the float or the savings balance should be high:
1. You are expecting high expenditure soon
2. Lack of investment opportunities vis-a vis risks in those investments
3. Temporary cash while transitioning across asset classes. i.e., selling one asset to buy another or to settle some liability

As an individual, we should maintain this cash in more than one bank account for convenience and availability and risk diversification. Lets understand this aspect a little better with an example:
If you have two bank accounts with Rs.30,000 each and say, you suddenly need Rs.10,000 for an emergency. You can draw from whichever ATM is nearer (although most ATMs are now inter-operable across banks). But, say the ATM is out of order that day or out of cash, then the choice of the other ATM is your answer. On another day, if you needed, say, Rs.40,000 and the daily limit of withdrawal is Rs.20,000 then this diversification will help you draw the money when in need. If the entire money was in one bank account, this would not be possible.

There is a tradeoff between liquidity (keeping a lot of cash in the savings account) and the rate of return on investment. The more the cash in savings account the lesser the money is earning interest compared to investments.
One can never really say how much money would be required in an emergency. With medical expenses very high, it is difficult to say how much is too much. A better way to manage this emergency liquidity is to make sure your close family members (spouse, siblings and parents) also maintain some emergency money in their accounts. That way in an emergency, the pooled money would be more than enough to tide over the emergency. This two way mechanism of helping each other out in case of an emergency can help all the people from keeping excess money in savings accounts. The family members are more like your second line of source of money in case of an emergency. To truly implement this in word and spirit, each of the parties should have already enabled third party transactions and should have added the other persons' accounts to their third party transfers. The enabling of a new third party can vary from a minute to 24/48 hours depending on the banks' policies.
If this is implemented, money can be transferred from one account to another by logging in and transffering funds in a few minutes.
Remember that another very useful source of money in emergencies is a credit card.

Asset Classes in India

The world of investing may sound like a jungle or another world to a new person entering this field with so many financial terms and products and features. But, at the most basic level there are only as many as 5 different asset classes to invest in. They are:
1. Equity
2. Fixed Deposits/Bonds
3. Gold
4. Real Estate
5. Exotics (Futures and Derivatives on stocks, commodities, currencies and Alternative investments like Wine, Art, etc.)

The products which we hear can all be classified into one of these 5 categories or are a combination of these 5 categories. The marketing departments in financial firms put in a lot of effort to create more combinations of these existing asset classes and sell them as a new differentiated product suited for your need. Stripping them out of the unnecessary jargons, you will essentially flesh out these 5 categories.
Further, if you remove all the cacophony of the noise produced by these marketing, you have to just think and concentrate on 4 key dimensions of investing. These are mentioned in the post here:
http://ajitjagan.blogspot.in/2013/10/know-4-dimensions-of-investing.html

So, dont let fear of the unknown get the better of you when you are discussing or buying a financial product. Just ask them the questions on basics and force their hand to reveal the truth.

Know the 4 Dimensions of Investing

Investing and analysing investment options can seem burdensome, tiring, boring, confusing, hair-splitting to know everything about it before committing your money to it. Irrespective of what the brokers, sales guys, agents try to push to you as an excellent opportunity for you and your loved ones, it is important to know that they have an inbuilt interest in selling things to you and you have to do your own due diligence. Doing your own due diligence is often spoke about, but some of you may wonder what does this mean and how do you do it.

There are essentially 4 dimensions to understand any investment:

1. Return/Potential Return

I say return/ potential return and not just return so that you are not overly swayed by the superb past returns of an investment, but realise that not all investments will repeat their super duper track record time and again. There may have been a time and environment where something really made great returns, but this time and environment may well be very different. 

A plot in a far away village may not give you a great return on your investment without nothing new happening. But, once it is known that an international airport will be coming in the area, the investment may have great returns. And once all the development is done, the return on investment may not follow the run you saw during the days when the news of the airport was coming. Similarly with stocks. There are good times and great times for companies depending upon a myriad of factors such as demand for the product/service, cost of making things, saturation of product usage, etc.

2. Risk & Return

Each investment has a certain risk to it. Even Govt. owned companies and their shares/bonds have some risk in it. Nothing is risk free. Sometimes the risk is on the return, while on some others, the risk is on the capital deployed itself. One has be aware of the risks and consider the return on the investment proportionately to the risk involved. Derivatives are more riskier than Stocks which is more riskier than fixed deposits/bonds/gold.

Do remember that sometimes even a less risky investment can cause a major loss compared to a higher risk investment.

3. Liquidity

This involves multiple things and is very important but unfortunately not given much importance by many people. Liquidity refers to how fast can you to convert the investment to cash whenever you need it. Another related aspect to liquidity is whether the investment can be used as a collateral against which you can get a loan. Certain investments cannot be given as collateral and no loan can be obtained against them. E.g. Bonds, Fixed deposits in some NBFC (Non Banking Financial Company)s. Some investments may have a lock in period which will limit the ability to sell the investment. Certain bonds have a lock in period before which you cannot trade it in the market. Sometimes, holding a stock/bond that is not widely traded also brings about liquidity problems while trying to sell it.

4.  Tenor

The length of the investment period. At the end of the day, you will need to match the investment tenures to the life's various goals. No point in investing in a 20 year investment that is locked if you don't have money for your other urgent goals.

All investment avenues would have the above mentioned 4 characteristics. You should know these 4 aspects of your investment and competing investments before you make a decision to invest in one based on your life's goals and risk apetite.

All hail the projections!

Bigger image available here: http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/getimage.dll?path=ETM/2013/09/30/17/Img/Pc0170800.jpg

Today's economic times report has an article titled "How clouded is our financial forecasting?"

The picture above gives the GDP growth prediction according to RBI's survey of professional economists sitting in the same financial year and making a prediction of the GDP growth at the end of the current financial year.

The numbers are shocking! If this group can get it so wrong, how will analysts of equity research and other analysts work on their assumptions, which are further derived in some way or another on this data.

I think it is time to employ monkeys to predict data as they have amply demonstrated their skills in the monkey funds.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/04/monkeys-make-better-stock-market-traders-than-people-study/

A couple of strong uses for using credit cards

It is advisable for people and their spouses to have credit cards. Either on individual basis or as an add on. There are quite some reasons to it:

1. In case of a medical emergency, the credit card comes in handy for making payments at the hospital. It is true that a debit card will also serve your purpose, but only to a certain extent. An extent to the maximum per daily swipable amount at a Point of Sale (POS). Usually, this is around Rs. 40,000 per day even if you have more money lying in your savings bank account. On the other hand, the whole credit limit of the credit card can be used for making the hospital payment. This limit varies with how premium a customer you are with respect to the bank. At the minimum it will give you some Rs.20,000 worth of limit and can run into a few lakhs too.

2. Having a credit card has other uses also. The free credit period and reward points as mentioned here in this link.

http://ajitjagan.blogspot.in/2011/10/how-to-save-more-by-using-credit-cards.html

How to find the truth behind what your (financial) agent tells you?

Here's a list of things that are mentioned here to detect lies by an agent.
How to tell when an agent (insurance, loan) is lying to you
Beyond this, there is one true test because at the end of the day, because actual "Numbers don't lie"*

Many agents typically sell you an investment product saying you pay x amount yearly for y years and the end of it, you get z amount. Plus, there is a bonus amount paid at the end of m years and every n years later. The agent says it as if the bonus is something free, something over and above what the company generally gives/supposed to give. This is just 'playing into' the customer's mind. Since, there are a number of different products, each with its own different flavour and rules, it is very difficult to comprehend what is the real returns expected out of the product. To decipher the real return expected out of the product, do the steps below. If you are not familiar with xls, take help of someone to follow the steps mentioned below:
Ask your agent to give you year wise, the ouflows (investment made, premiums paid, basically money going out of your pocket) and the inflows for every year (typically, a single or multiple bulk amounts at end of a number of years).
Open a new xls and enter the dates, the amount going out of your bank accounts as negative, the expected amounts as positive (in forms of bonus, returns, dividends, etc.) in three different rows.
Add these two amounts (outgo and inflow) in the next row (Row 4). (Click the pic below to zoom)

Then use the XIRR function with the net amounts as the first parameter and the dates as the second parameter to get the real compounded annual growth rate(CAGR).
CAGR describes the rate at which an investment would have grown if it grew at a steady rate. You can think of CAGR as a way to smooth out the returns.
Read more on CAGR

* Numbers don't lie, but reading the numbers in a false context/background/with bias, interpretation of numbers could lead to lies. e.g.: The Indian stock market had gone up by leaps and bounds between the period 2003 and 2008 and those numbers do not lie. But expecting that same kind of growth at any other point in time (as the environment would be different wrt to interest rates, policies, inflation, currency rates, oil prices, global liquidity, attractiveness of Indian stock market vis-a-vis the other global stock markets, investor sentiment, etc.) could be equivalent to lies. If an agent shows you the best period of growth and tells you that this can be expected in the future also, do ask for the worst period of returns and ask him/her why that the worst could not repeat.

Real options and Real life options

In finance, there is a concept of Real option valuation. It is a choice that a business may gain by undertaking certain endeavors. For example, by investing in a particular project, a company may have the real option of expanding, downsizing or abandoning other projects in the future.

The property of the real option is that they generally increase in value the more uncertain the values of the underlying variables. They generally increase in value the longer the time an option can be deferred.

Real life options are somewhat different. Real life options have many interdependent variables associated with it. And hence, unlike a real option, its value increases the more shorter the time duration of its expiry.

With a three/six month or 1 year real life option, it is very difficult to plan for medium term goals and perhaps even long term goals.

Economics is Child's play

12 year old Canadian Victoria Grant on Banks and Govt.s are in cahoots to loot the public:

Wills & Nominations - Comprehensive talks

An excellent video on how to make wills, what to include and what to be take care of with some humourous reality on how things worked a few decades ago.

Nominations

Transfer and Transmission

Investing in stocks 101

There are many who have decided that they want to jump into investing in the stock market. They might have even opened a demat account and a trading account and now they want to invest. So here is a basic guide to understand a way to start investing in the stock market. The underlying assumption is that you already know what is a stock and that you are participating in the equity of a company.

This is written with an orientation of an Indian investor (with respect to Indian websites/companies/indices, etc.)

1. Know how to choose a trading and demat account. For more details, read http://ajitjagan.blogspot.in/2011/01/choosing-demat-and-trading-account.html

2. Decide what is your investable surplus every month/every six months. This should be the amount you will not have to touch and will be invested for the long term.

3. Allocate this money between debt (PPF, fixed deposits, bonds, NSCs, etc), equity, gold, property, etc. The idea is that you can have more equity exposure if you are young and that if you are ready for the highest of the risks for highest of the returns.

4. Out of the surplus funds allocated for equity investments, you have two options: indirect investing using mutual funds or direct investment in the stock market.

5. There are broadly two schools of investing in the stock market: Technical analysis and Fundamental analysis and rarely a combination of the two

6. The stocks can further be classified under the fundamental analysis as Growth stocks or value stocks. Some stocks are also invested for some special situations (chances of a delisting, chances of a hostile takeover, policy changes favouring the company, special dividend, bonus stocks, stock splits, buyback of shares, etc.)

7. Now the most important question is "how to you know which stock is good or not to buy? where to get information"? One of the most popular websites in India for financial information is www.moneycontrol.com. For each stock, there is a separate page giving much information about the stock. From the stock prices across the two of the most liquid stock exchanges to volume traded, to financials (standalone/consolidated), news, research reports, comparison between stocks, etc. Be careful about the PE ratio reported on this website as the website takes the standalone earnings per share for the denominator and gets the value wrong in case the company has subsidiaries and has a consolidated financial. Calculate PE on your own. Go through the website's every link to understand many aspects of investing. To know more on the technical terms and what they mean in simple terms, check http://www.investopedia.com/dictionary/#axzz1s7mae7Rt. Do read a lot to understand various strategies, methods, techniques, views, opinions before trying to make your own opinion about the stock/market.

8. Create yourself a free account and put the stocks you are interested in, in the watchlist. You can even keep track of your investments by creating a portfolio.

9. I suggest instead of putting your money into the stock market immediately, I would ask you to spend a month or two choosing 3 stocks to invest in and finally 5 stocks in 3 months to invest in. Imagine you have put in the money when you were interested and put it in the portfolio. Track it as per your desire. Initial investors usually tend to be very anxious about every 1% move up or down. Spend the first three months to get used to the volatility. I hope at the end of the three months, you would have a mixed result. A few of the 5 stocks doing better than the buy price and a few worse than the buy price. Try and analyse what went right and what went wrong in the stocks. I hope you dont get most of the investments right in the first chance as that would make anyone a self-claimed expert and bring arrogance that is sure to ruin the big bets you would most likely place in the next level if you made a lot of right notional calls.

10. Give time and thought to the sector allocation, capitalisation allocation(large cap/mid-cap/small-cap),  minimum investment in a stock (based on your risk apetite and a way to minimise your demat/brokerage charges to make your transactions efficient).

11. Remember one simple rule to make money: "Buy Low, Sell High". This rule looks obvious enough, though its importance can't be emphasised enough. Remember that a stock is never that important as its price. People tend to buy stocks because it is a good popular stock without consideration of its valuation, its future growth prospects, the risks of the company/sector (and at usually high prices and then wonder why they didnt make money).

12. Be careful of what people say/recommend. Is there an ulterior motive for them to recommend something? Don't always trust the "experts". Many a times, your on the ground insights maybe more useful than their expert not knowing much. Listen to experts who talk to you about their wrong calls and their losses. You get to learn from other's losses more than other's successes. Be wary of people who advertise their successes and not their losses.

And All the best! :)

Investing Dilemmas

The basic dilemmas before buying a stock are:

Will it go lower or should I buy it now?

The classic dilemmas after buying a stock are:

If you are making profit, will it go higher or should I sell now?

If you are making loss, is this a dud stock and should I sell out? Else, will it go lower or should I average it now?

Other dilemmas:

I bought this stock for a long term basis, but it has shot up so fast so soon. Should I sell it now or keep it for long term?

At what price should I average it? At 5% below previous buy, or 10% or 20% or some other number? I obviously cannot keep averaging it at a lower price as it would affect portfolio and sector concentration.
What amount should I keep in cash waiting for opportunities to buy that may arise in the market?

Expert views aka Dumb analyst reports

I have come across many equity research reports which have a target price for a company which is some single digit % downside. But whats shocking is the recommendation of 'hold' next to it. Why should any investor hold on to investments that are not going to grow, but shrink by any number. If the investor sold it and kept the money in the bank, he could earn a single digit positive % return on the amount. The difference between the two scenarios can be a double digit % return.

It is interesting to note that many have instituionalised this kind of stupid thinking by defining the 'hold' range as "+5% to -5% over a year". Why should anyone hold on for an investment for over a year for a maximum of 5%? Isn't a fixed deposit better with higher returns and no equity risks?

Gold Gold Gold

From: Number Sleuth

The wise men

Once upon a time, some time ago, there were a group of men who were very very rich and owned around 40% of the world's resources. They had land, industries, gold and what not. They were wise and understood how to maintain and grow their wealth throughout time. They very well knew that value is in the thought of the beholder. If the thought of value in something vanishes, the value in the product is zero. To further help themselves, they thought upon an idea to globalise the world to make use and exploit the best of everything. Further, they spread the benefits of globalisation and free market access. At this point of time, they realised that with free markets, value is being interfered by the exchange rates. The group of wise men, decided that they will have to be proactive and move as a group to maintain order and control of the maintenance and growth of their precious valuables in the world. Since they own a substantial part of the world, and markets are never deep enough for them, they could influence the markets with ease. Moreover, they realise the people's psychology and the various govt.'s response to the situations they would create. They start buying into an 'item' initially and start spreading the word how that would be the next 'big' thing in the world. The high risk takers and loyalists start buying it immediately. As the value of the 'item' increases, more people start believing the prophecy and start buying it while all the while the wise men's value increases. After a few years, the wise men believe that they have milked the 'item' to its limit and their value has stopped growing at a fast rate. Further, before someone else calls that the 'item' is overvalued, they start selling the 'item' and buying into another 'item'. And the next prophecy of how this item is undervalued and how it is the next 'big' thing, starts to grow. This cycle keeps repeating over periods of time and the only people who are always in the green are the wise men and the loyalists, while the general public is bled and slaughtered each time when they start buying at the height of the cycle and when the wise men are selling it to the blind public. These "items" could be various currencies, gold, silver, commodities, bonds, houses, land and what not. The frequency with which these wise men are interchanging the 'items' has increased in the recent years. It is not clear whether another set of 'wise men' are on the street trying to call shots on an item which is different from the first set of wise men. This fight between the two sets of wise men having contradictory ideas on some 'items' is probably being seen in the high volatility of the markets. E.g: Crude oil falling by around 6% in a week, INR moving by 1% in a day, gold falling by over 9% in 5 days.

Moral of the story: Besides the all the financial porn being thrown by the media at us and all the talk of finding value, in the end it seems you just have to stick to the side of the 'wise men' if you want to make money/store value. If only, we could easily pinpoint who are these 'wise men' and know their next move.

P.S: This is just one of the hypothesis I have to show that most people have know idea of how the market could be working against you all the time. At times, I feel like one of the little guys who feel like they are born to just get exploited by the 'wise men'.