There is a psychology experiment from 1966 that every investor should know about. A researcher named Elliot Aronson recruited college students and played them audio recordings of a candidate auditioning for a quiz bowl team. The candidates were actors. Some answered 92% of difficult questions correctly and sounded impressively credentialed. Others answered only 30% and…
Indian investors have developed an almost reflexive habit of measuring their portfolios against the Nifty 50 or the Sensex. These indices are comforting scorecards. They are familiar. They are quoted on every television ticker and in every client review presentation. But this benchmark obsession has quietly become one of the most expensive cognitive biases in…
BG Srinivas Green Revolution (wheat and rice, 1960s–70s): Driven by an acute famine threat, backed by concentrated political will, massive public investment in HYV seeds, irrigation, MSP support, and a clear geographic focus on Punjab and Haryana. The state stayed in the market through the FCI as a guaranteed buyer. Farmers had no uncertainty about…
There is a number making the rounds in global fund management circles that should unsettle every Indian equity strategist. Just 229 companies now account for 48% of all listed equity value on this planet. Thirteen of them are worth more than a trillion dollars each. The club is not growing. It is consolidating. And India,…
The Sell-Off Was Never About AI, Taxes or the Rupee. It Was About Transparency For nearly two years, India’s financial discourse has been dominated by one carefully manufactured narrative: Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) are leaving India because the country supposedly lacks cutting-edge AI companies, because taxes became unattractive, because the rupee weakened, and because global…
Imagine you are a central bank governor. Your currency is in freefall, down 20% in three months. Inflation is surging. But your government has billions in bonds maturing next month, and nobody wants to buy them. You have one tool: interest rates. Raise them to save the currency, and the bond auction fails. Cut them…
On the evening of May 10, in Hyderabad, the Prime Minister of India stood before the country and asked a question that no head of government asks lightly. He asked Indians to stop buying gold. Not forever, he said. Just for twelve months. Defer the jewellery. Skip the coin. Redirect that impulse toward something more…
Nobody thinks they are going to fall for it. That is the first thing to understand. Every investor who has ever bought near a top or sold near a bottom was, at that exact moment, completely certain they were making the right call. The market does not need you to be careless. It just needs…
USD Swap Lines, a Weakening Reserve Currency, and Why Gold Is the Only Honest Money Left The US is quietly lending dollars to the entire world so that no one is forced to dump American stocks and bonds. When you understand what that means, and what happened the last time a government tried the same…
Why the generation that invented YOLO is eating its future — one impulse purchase at a time. In 1972, a Stanford psychologist named Walter Mischel sat four-year-old children down in a room, placed a single marshmallow in front of each of them, and made them an offer: eat it now, or wait fifteen minutes and…
