Weekly Recap: The end of work?

Nifty weekly performance heatmap

The Nifty ended the week -2.83% (-3.29% in USD terms)

Index Performance

The biggest losers were the real estate and bank indices.

weekly index performance

Top Winners and Losers

BPCL +5.70%
GODREJCP +6.90%
GLENMARK +9.57%
BANKINDIA -15.77%
JPASSOCIAT -13.81%
YESBANK -11.61%
Godrej Consumer Products finally reversed its cliff dive and retraced some of its recent losses.

ETFs

GOLDBEES -0.03%
INFRABEES -0.68%
NIFTYBEES -2.74%
JUNIORBEES -3.81%
BANKBEES -6.52%
PSUBNKBEES -7.99%
No place to hide: gold, infra, mid-caps, banks all melted under the taper heat.

Advancers and Decliners

advance decline chart

Yield Curve

Look at the move at the long-end of the curve.

india yield curve

Investment Theme Performance

Our momentum theme barely broke even but the sell-off was pretty broad based.

Sector Performance

A sea of read:

weekly sector performance

Thought for the Weekend

Karl Marx saw England’s impoverished factory workers as evidence that machines were replacing workers, throwing them into unemployment and poverty. For example, the automated power loom took over tasks formerly done by handloom weavers. Over the 19th century, weaver’s tasks were progressively automated.

 

Weaving a yard of cloth at the end of the century took only 2 percent of the human labor it took to do so on a handloom at the start of the century; machines did the rest.

 

Marx observed this automation and predicted that it would result in mass unemployment. But that’s not what happened. In fact, by the end of the century, there were four times as many factory weavers as in 1830. What Marx missed was that the new technology also increased demand. The greater output per weaver reduced the price of cloth. Consumers reacted by buying more cloth. Greater demand for cloth meant more jobs for weavers despite the automation.

 

Source: Will robots steal our jobs?

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