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NEW DELHI: There could be some consolidation going ahead, but the trend is likely to remain strong till the time 11,600 is not breached by the Nifty, according to technical analysts. Stocks like Tata MotorsNSE 1.14 %, MajescoNSE 1.12 %, Canara BankNSE -0.23 %, HDFC LifeNSE 1.83 %, SBI, Bajaj FinservNSE 0.46 % and Info Edge are likely to move up as per the charts.
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Where are We? The expiry week remained marginally in favour of bulls since the benchmark indices ended the ..
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What is in Store? At this juncture, the Nifty has formed an intermediate swing high of 11,911. Also, the daily chart of Bank Nifty depicts a ‘Shooting Star’ candlestick pattern which is a reversal one and that too exactly at 78.6 per cent Fibonacci retracement level of the previous move. Thus, there could be some consolidation or profit booking going ahead. But the trend is likely to remain strong till the time 11,600 is not breached by the Nifty. On the downside, the index has ..
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Nifty likely to trade in 11,600-11,900 till Budget

Just starting with investments in the stock market. Will not trade/do not need margin etc. Looking to invest a maximum of Rs 10000 every month. Will login and buy shares on ONE fixed day every month. There are numerous stock brokers with various offerings. How to categorize/differentiate the offerings and what to ask. Colleagues have accounts in IIFL and HDFC and each say theirs is best. The one who has an account with IIFL vouches for its mobile trading app. I will make investments on 1 fixed date every month. So mobile app etc is not a criteria for me. Please suggest

Last Week in Indian Economy

“Ab tak Colgate ka to gate khul gaya, Nestle ka to panchhi urne wala hai, Pantene ka to pant gila hone wala hai, aur do saal me Unilever ka lever kharab ho jayega." - Baba throwing shade at four of Patanjali’s biggest competitors.

Headline Stories

Earnings-Palooza Continues
The festivities for the quarter ending March continued with Airtel reporting a 3% increase in net profits and a subscriber total of 35 million Indians. Airtel’s gain turned out to be Idea’s pain. Shares of Idea traded down after the company reported almost 40% decrease in profits. That had to have hurt. The main event of the week were the banks that were reporting earnings. Profits at Axis Bank fell almost 2% as bad loans went up - it’s the bank’s first decline in quarterly profits in over a decade. ICICI Bank, the country’s largest private sector bank, reported a 76% decline in profits, the sharpest decline of quarterly profits ever in its entire history. Records like that are probably best left unbroken. Just as you breath a sign that after results like those, the worst is probably over - you realize it really isn’t. Both banks said that they expected the amount of bad loans to increase for a few quarters. Shareholders of bank stocks better get used to the pain of being burned by bad loans. Masochist shareholders of bank stocks can relax.
Maruti Suzuki: :’(
Delhi’s odd-even rule has drawn a lot of flak from residents who are being forced to take the bus every other day and smell the smells of the people on the bus. Among those unhappy has to be Maruti Suzuki, India’s biggest car maker. Maruti’s results for the first quarter of 2016 reported a 12% decline in profits. Interestingly, the company cites the Jat reservation agitation as one of the reasons for a fall in profits. But there are also people who are happy with the odd-even rule. Like a 13-year old boy who registered the domain odd-even.com and sold it to carpooling app, Orahi and now attends advisory board meetings at Orahi as a technical expert, presumably right after watching Chota Bheem. Sticking to the theme, chalk this one up as win for the militant environmentalists - Mahindra is planning to build India’s first automobile shredding plant that will focus on destroying 100,000 units of old cars, ships and machines per year. They should upload videos of machines crushing cars to YouTube.
Let’s Pretend Like This Is A Creative Title
Every time there’s technological progress, people piss themselves silly telling everyone that machines will take all our jobs now. That has been happening since the past decade or so and likely started when they invented swords to replace the jobs of all the people who made pointy sticks. But today, there is a special kind of irony when the engineers who make machines and software that replace other people’s jobs start getting replaced by software and machines themselves. One of Infosys’ co-founders says growth in hiring has decreased by 40% over the past 10 years and will likely fall further. And it’s all happening because of automation in the IT industry. There’s only one job available for every five engineers graduating every year. Psh, and they said arts students don’t get jobs. Due to this increased supply and reduced demand, salaries for new hires stayed pretty much the same despite a booming IT industry. Indians who opted for the road less traveled despite family pressure to pursue engineering cannot stop smiling right now.
Last Week In Vijay Mallya’s Life
Not to jump on the bandwagon of hating him because it’s cool now, but that Mallya fellow just can’t stay out of the news media, try as he might. Either that or the news media just can’t stay out of Mallya’s life, and they don’t even try. Brands confiscated by the banks a few weeks ago like ‘Fly the Good Times’ and ‘Fly Kingfisher’ were put on auction for the second time. And for the second time, nobody was stupid enough to make a bid. The minimum price was set at ₹367 crore. It’s safe to say - those brands are poisonous by now. The Supreme Court directed Mallya to declare all his foreign and domestic assets to the banks so they can be better prepared at the negotiations table. Mallya isn’t back in the news. He just never left the news. They also just revoked his passport - and being an MP, he’s even got one of those shiny red diplomatic passports, which is now useless. That last sentence was written before news broke that Mallya had resigned from the Rajya Sabha - so now that shiny red diplomatic passport is really useless.
Bros Again: Reliance and Iran
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 overthrew the ruling dynasty in Iran which was supported by the US. Since this was a matter of internal politics in a sovereign country outside the US territory, the US had to respond, as is tradition - and it promptly imposed economic sanctions, which were recently lifted. Reliance, which has substantial investments in the US, had suspended trade with Iran for fears of being dragged through the mud in the US. But last week, Reliance resumed buying oil from Iran after almost 6 years. Talking about oil - oil prices have crashed the floor and everyone’s predicting the end of Saudi Arabia as we know it. There was even talk about an IPO for Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, to raise cash and douse the fire lit by falling oil prices. If there is a fire, the kingdom is trying to hide the smoke. Saudi Aramco is now actually looking to expand and buy stakes in Indian petrochemical projects, possibly in a planned oil refinery on the west coast.

Sidebar Stories

• The presidential elections in the United States are proving to be the best drama series since Breaking Bad. And presidential candidates are all about that minimum wage. Even though the same conversation about minimum wage in India is painted less so with a political brush, last week we managed to increase the minimum wage for workers hired by contractors to ₹10,000 per month.
  
• Disclosing your salary to your coworkers can certainly make for some awkward water cooler conversation. But what if you are mandated by law to disclose your salary, not just to your coworkers but to the entire country? An RTI disclosure recently revealed that RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, the guy that basically runs the Indian economy, is paid a gross salary of ₹1.98 lakh per month. Here’s the shocker - he’s not even the highest paid employee at RBI.
  
• Warren Buffett, everyone’s favourite billionaire (sorry Bill) recently livestreamed his company’s annual shareholder meeting on Yahoo. During the meeting, he showered praises upon praises on Amazon founder and fellow billionaire, Jeff Bezos. And Jeff deserves that pat on the back - As Amazon reported profits and revenues that crushed expectations back home in the United States, Amazon India surpassed Snapdeal to become the 2nd largest online marketplace in India after Flipkart.
  
• Two weeks ago, it was about Japan building India’s first bullet train. But then there’s China who wants to build a second bullet train route in India, possibly a Delhi-Chennai connection. China does have the world’s largest bullet train network that it claims is profitable, but it also has 63% market share in the global fake goods trade (India has 2%). Considering the state of Indian Railways, fake Chinese bullet trains will probably still be an upgrade.
  

Market Movements

Let’s do the numbers. Since last week:

• BSE Sensex: ↓ 1.80%
  Week Open: 25,891.03
  Week End: 25,424.03
  
• Nifty: ↓ 0.57%
  Week Open: 7,894.80
  Week End: 7,849.80
  
• Gold prices: ↑ 4.29%
  Week Open: 29,021
  Week End: 30,266
  
• USD / INR: ↓ 0.39%
  Week Open: 66.685
  Week End: 66.425
  

Stocks that moved heaven and earth:

• HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCLTECH): ↓ 10.82%
  
• State Bank of India Ltd. (SBIN): ↓ 7.46%
  
• ICICI Bank Ltd. (ICICIBANK): ↓ 6.12%
  

The yield on 10-year government bonds fell from 7.470 to 7.437.

Up Next

Important Numbers being released this week:
May 2nd: India Nikkei Manufacturing Index (Apr), Quarterly Results for - HDFC
May 3rd: Quarterly Results for - Adani Ports & SEZ
May 4th: India Nikkei Services Index (Apr)
May 7th: Quarterly Results for - Grasim Industries

Footnote Stories

Amazon is doing great. But Apple has seen better days. It reported a 22% fall in profits for the previous quarter. Its stock is down 15% for the month. It’s so bad that Apple CEO Tim Cook had to go on American TV to remind everyone that it’s still the most profitable company in the world. In India, things are equally grim. Market share of iPhones dropped from 55% a year ago to just 37% today. And Samsung emerged as the leader with a 62% market share. Where are all the apple fanboys now, huh?
In a lot of the developed world, people always call out the top 1%, the richest individuals, to stop evading taxes and pay their fair share. But in India, if you do pay taxes, you are actually the 1%. Government data shows only 1.25 crore Indians paid taxes in 2012-13 which is about 1% of the population.
For the Week Ending 24th April, 2016 Accidentally deleted last week's post. Fat fingers. Ugh.
A similar series titled 'Last Week In Indian Parliament' that aims to summarize the proceedings of the parliament every week was just started by kumbhakaran. Check it out here.

Tips to remember while investing in gold
Lovaii Navlakhi of International Money Matters recommends that upto 5-7 percent of the portfolio should be invested in gold and the best way to do this is through the ETF route.
In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Lovaii Navlakhi, International Money Matters shared his views on what should retail investors do with gold now after government hiked import duty on gold to 10 percent to arrest the declining value of rupee and contain the fiscal deficit to 3.7 percent of the GDP. Below is the verbatim transcript of his interview on CNBC-TV18
Q: The government is coming down heavily on curbing the appetite for gold, what does this mean for the retail investor, what should he do with his investments? Should he branch out to gold, should he branch out of gold?
A: Gold needs to be a part of every investor’s portfolio. We normally recommend that up to 5-7 percent of the portfolio should be invested in gold. During uncertain times you can enhance that allocation to 10-15 percent. Therefore, the best way to invest in gold is going through an exchange traded fund (ETF) route.
You need a Demat account, you can buy the units of gold based on number of grams and their rate. But the real issue is when people look at the past performance of any investment, any asset class and decide to put in bulk money. So anyone who has invested prior to April or early April this year will be staring at losses at this point in time.
You should look at strict asset allocation and if you have invested 5 percent in gold, the value of gold has gone up 20 percent so your allocation to gold has increased marginally. You take out the profits every three-six months and that way you will ensure that you are within the asset allocation.
For people who have put a large chunk of their money in gold, at this point in time the thought should be how do I reduce it from 20-25 percent of my portfolio to 10 percent? They should have three-six months’ time window and in a staggered manner they will gradually reduce this allocation to gold so that they are within the asset allocation norms. Very much like an SIP, how you invest gradually, divestment also could be done gradually.
Overall, gold is a hedge against inflation and if you are expecting growth to come back in markets globally then it may not be the asset class that will outperform but it still needs to be there as part of the asset allocation.
Q: My mutual funds portfolio consists of HDFC Top 20 , HDFC Equity Fund , DSP Small and Midcap and Reliance Vision Fund . Is this a profitable portfolio or should I make some changes?
A: He has invested a variety of funds, there are couple of large cap funds, a multi cap fund and a midcap fund. So he has created a decent portfolio. I am assuming they are equally allocated.
If one was to look at performance then Reliance Vision Fund has underperformed in the last five years. It has gone only by about 13-14 percent in the last five years whereas all the other three funds have gone up by about 50 percent. So, Reliance Vision Fund is something that he should consider exiting.
Among the three schemes, DSP Small & Midcap is a midcap scheme, whereas HDFC Top 200 and HDFC Equity are large cap oriented. In the last five years they have shown equal performance. But the difference is stark in the past one year as well as three years.
While large caps have done okay, they have been flat in the last three years or so, the CNX Midcap index has fallen by 7 percent per annum. So he has to keep in mind that midcaps would typically take a longer period to perform especially if you have entered there in bad times. But it doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have an allocation to midcaps.
If I look at specific schemes in each of these three categories, there are better schemes available. So for an HDFC Top 200 may be he can replace with Birla SL Frontline Equity . With HDFC Equity he can replace ICICI Pru Dynamic Plan . He can replace DSP midcap with ICICI Discovery. It is important to look at exit loads and capital gains impact so he should keep that in mind before he does that. He should not take out and put all the money into new fund simultaneously. Best if he has a financial advisor and if he doesn’t have one he should get one.
Related Articles:
http://tanagoldfieldsarticles.quora.com/TANA-GOLDFIELDS-Articles-10-Tips-How-to-Avoid-Gold-Investment-Scams
http://tana-goldfields.wikia.com/wiki/Gold_Investment_Scams:_How_to_Avoid_Them