Greetings from PenguWIN,
The continuous fall in the equity markets has spooked almost every investor. While 2008 was a major crash in value terms, the Corona Virus impact has caused one of the fastest crashes that the stock markets have witnessed – i.e. about 33% down in less than 2 months (Sensex reached 42,273 on 20th Jan 2020) and 31.3% down from 20th Feb which is less than a month.
The question that everyone has in their mind and some people have asked me is when will we reach a bottom and turnaround. While no one can give a correct answer, which is how the stock market works, I wanted to share my opinion as an investor in the Indian Equity market for over 18 years now.
Whenever markets have gone down it has always come back strongly and breached the previous high. It’s a question of time and that could happen in a matter of few weeks or months.
The big impact to markets in the past were factors including scams, dotcom, financial crisis and the impact of SARS, Swine Flu, Ebola which are considered more dangerous than Covid 19 was negligible. However, with the power of social media, today, the spread of news and events is extremely high and gets exaggerated. The moment the Virus gets controlled like what we hear about China, markets will turnaround extremely fast. So, please do not keep looking at market information which is the best thing to do in situations like this
The number and volume of investments in Indian Equity markets by Indian investors has become significantly high including provident fund investments, insurance companies and the steady flow of SIPs which was not the case earlier, where retail investors were very limited.
The one-year FD rate offered by SBI is 5.9%. Assuming the investor has an income of 10L plus the post-tax return will work out to about 3.9%. Equities on a long term will definitely be able to provide about 11-12% and post-tax return would be about 10%. Even if we assume that the post-tax return is only 9%, the differential return will definitely be 5%+ and hence equity markets that shakes us like this, at times, cannot be ignored.
While no one can deny the fact that the experience we are undergoing is unpleasant, without pain there is no gain. Please remember that we are in a situation today were bank depositors are put in moratorium (limits on operating the account) and other than sovereign instruments (Small savings, Provident fund), nothing is absolutely safe.
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