Patience and Common sense : Must for Non-experts in Stock Market

[Disclaimer] : I am no expert in market, neither in technical nor in fundamentals so I am not going to give any tips or for that matter you don’t have to blindly believe what I am sharing here. All of this is my experience and mistakes I made in last 1-2 years of me actively being engaged in equity market.

If you are neither a fundamental expert nor a technical expert like me, you can still make some good returns in share market and all you need for this is Patience and Common Sense. There are always lots of opportunities and all you need is to grab very few of those and hold on and on for long time until you feel that all juice of the particular stock or sector as whole has been sucked up. For this you no need to be an expert as there are multiple credible sources like Mutual Fund owners, Credit rating agencies and individual experienced experts from where you can update yourself regularly and to be more confident try to understand the balance sheet and quarterly results of companies and what are future prospect of that sector and that specific company whose stock you own.

There are certain things I learned and experienced in last 1-2 years and I am sure it must be common to many of people who are regularly involved in equity market. Let me share few of those:

1. Do not invest money in market that you are definitely going to need in may be next less than 1-2 year. It simply means try to avoid short term investment as much as possible in market. If you are going to need that money in next less than 1 year then surely that is not long term. I had put lot of money when nifty was around 8500-8600 during mid of 2015, it went upto 9000 and then the great crash happed when market felt down to 6900. It resulted in my portfolio going down by almost 18-20% with around 4 lakh of investment. As I needed that money by start of 2016, I had to book losses despite knowing that markets would recover surely. Only if I didn’t need that money in less than 1 year of investment I would have made some handsome profit by now. 

I had many stocks at less than 20-30% of current market price. For example L&T at 1250 , SBI at 180, Axis at 390, Pidilite at 580 ,SREI Infra at 45.Tata Motor DVR at 230, Yes Bank at 700 and many many more. I sold main portion of all these by booking losses or minimal profits only as I needed that money.   

2. Do not just sell off after making some gains. This was second lesson for me and it comes from being not experienced in this field I guess. Once we get 8-9% gain we start assuming that it is much better than return on fixed deposit and try to book the profit and then ultimately see the stock going up and up every single week. In investment terms it’s called “being Greedy”. I did it many times myself and probably still doing it :). I guess we mature on these things as time goes by and especially when we have a specific goal set related to your financial future. One solution I can think of is may be to have 2 different accounts, one for long term investment and one for short terms or for trading. It might be bit costly but can work out well. 

Well these are just few and I am sure many more experiences are yet to come, hopefully of cracking some jackpots aka as Multi-Baggers :)

The Social Media Week Bangalore 2016

Social Media is new and old both at same time when it comes to how people perceive it and at the same time how they use it. Many people who have got mastery on it in last few years when it has still been evolving find it easy to deal with and others who failed to gauge its worth find it really tough. Social media has given voice, power and sense of ownership to people who use it passionately day in and day out. It has been used successfully in social issues, political issues, cultural issues and many other areas of our lives and has made a great impact on how things are looked at.

Social media week is collaboration of all such groups and individuals who have used or using Social media platforms magnificently to make a change either for themselves and their organization or to the society as whole. The Social Media week Bengaluru organized and hosted by R Square Consulting that took place on 9th and 10th of June at Leela Palace had people from all walks of life who use Social media platforms to make an impact. The event had who’s who of marketing industry like Prahlad Kakkar, Twitter made celebrity Ramesh Srivats, well known cricket journalist Prem Panicker and also had people representing social media based groups/campaigns like #SaveWhitefield and Menstrupedia. It had speakers who are working on Artificial intelligence related to social media to speaker like Sandy Carter who works with Startups for IBM, people who know all details related to various social media platforms like Snapchat and Twitter and also person like Film Director Pawan Kumar who has used Social Media brilliantly to promote his movies like Lucia and U-Turn.

I am sharing some of the details about the sessions I attended during these two days of Social media week Bengaluru.

Building brand through Story telling:

The event started with well acclaimed ad Guru Prahlad Kakkar’s session on how the brands should ditch their love of PPTs if they want to create a positive and everlasting impression. PPTs have never been engaging with audience, the audience love the brand they can relate the most with and there is no better way to relate than having a brand story with human touch. He cited example of a very old ad of a Chocolate that used Cricket and its celebration to make people love that Chocolate brand.  As per him Brands should look to Indianised if they want to succeed here and same applies on startups as well. When it came to use of technology and social media in brand building, his clear message was “Do not let technology steal the real value or content.” To break it in simple way use the technology for sure but don’t marry it, give it just enough attention that works for you. His session left many people in crowd awestruck and I am sure they all went left that room with some clear understanding of building a brand from scratch.

The Maveric Prahlad Kakkar

#SaveWhitefield :

The #SaveWhitefield campaign started with some individual who like many Bengalurueans were pissed off with bad roads, bad traffic and bad system. They created online campaign and propagated it through Social media platforms. It didn’t become successful in one go but it surely attracted some eye balls and slowly and gradually because of perseverance of team and with efficient use of Twitter and Facebook it came in lime light and became a huge mass moment forcing administration to do things which they had turned blind eye upon so far.

Now this campign is surely blend of both offline and online campaign but I don’t think it would have been this much successful if it was nor for social media and its wonderful use by SaveWhitefield team.

You can find all details about this campaign at http://savewhitefield.com 

Nitya Ramakrishnan And Utkarsh Singh

Menstrupedia - Breaking Social Taboo : 

Menstrupedia started by Aditi Gupta is to fight with stigma that has been attached with periods, a normal physical process that females have to go through. This stigma doesn’t only prevail in rural areas but also in many urban areas. Aditi Gupta who herself had to go through all this societal embarrassment decided to make people aware about all this through various offline and online campaigns. She along with her team had done campaigns with various schools, colleges and other groups to make people aware that periods are natural just like any other normal body process and there is nothing to be embarrassed about. Mestrupedia team have launched online and offline comic book to explain more about it so that it can easily be understood by people.

You can find all details about this campaign at http://www.menstrupedia.com  

Host Pallavi And Aditi Gupta

There were around 20 sessions covering all aspects of social media ranging from pure technical aspects to pure fun aspects supported by various case studies and I will be sharing details about some of those awesome sessions in upcoming posts very soon. 

- Event pictures Credit to SWMi Bangalore Facebook Page.