Diary of a newbie

Not sure if you noticed, but Mr Rakesh Jhunjhunwala has ramped up his PR campaigns. Pretty much in line with every time that the market tends to drop a little. He's on Moneycontrol, Business Standard, LiveMint, and of course, the Economic Times. Maybe, just maybe, the star investor drops pearls of wisdom to prop up investor sentiment when everyone's frantically shouting "fire in the hole." However, you got to give it to the man for his optimism. For all you know, this is the Indian century, unless of course Vietnam, Bangladesh and the likes steal some of our country's thunder, because whatever happened to our per-capita income. Perhaps, we've just gotten a little lazy. Not all, because we certainly are doing some good work on the vaccine diplomacy side of things. Hmmm... shipping more vaccines than we have for ourselves... maybe stupid, maybe masterstroke PR. Considering that much of our population is likely to be millennial-ish (average age is what, 27-28?), ...

Not sure how many of you remember this small box called 'Suddenly something' that used to pop up in the Economic Times' Op-Ed page. Mom loved to read it. Mom's still around, however, I can't say the same for the little box that usually contained some quirky, left-of-field fact or anecdote. It always was about something that you wouldn't read about in the mainstream. This website called Finshots  is a good example of such content (well, usually). Aeon or AlDaily   are good examples too, however for long-form content. As usual, I digress.  "Suddenly something" came to mind because that's precisely what happened today. All was copacetic till about 13:33. Well, the downward slide had begun at 9:15, but it was like a nice, easy drive down a gentle ghat. The precipitous dip in the middle of lunch hour was the "many a slip between the lip and the cup." A bit like Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and shat his pants while at it. Allow me to illust...

Don't take what you read next as gospel truth. In fact, don't hold anything as gospel truth, because the world we live in is sort of wonky in its own good and bad ways. So... here goes nothing.  "Always hold on to what you have when everything else tells you to sell your holdings. In contrast, sell off what you hold the moment you develop an attachment to it." A tricky line to interpret, I bet. However, ignoring a pattern in the stock markets (and in your love lives) is called foolishness. It's also called history, just saying. I'll come back to the blurb in a bit, but here's to another Friday, and another red one at that, filled with mistakes.    This Friday, 5 March 2021, wasn't a repeat telecast of the horror story from a week ago. However, my senior colleagues from work say that volatility is on the rise. No, that doesn't mean that the stock markets will certainly fall. Volatility is when out of the blue, your girlfriend thinks that you enjoyed...