Invest Without Emotions
We are getting into the Valentine Day’s mood here at StockViz. We did a quick lookup up of the market over the last few years and guess what we found? On an average, the Nifty is up 1.3% on Valentine’s day! The biggest V-day was on Feb 14, 2008: +5.1%
Good luck for tomorrow!
The Wall Street Journal has a thought provoking article by Mr. Kagan – a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The key take away are:
Read the whole thing here. It would be time well spent.
The Economist has a handy chart on the effect of the Supreme Court’s ruling on different telecom operators:
Least we forget, the ham handed sale of 2G spectrum had the perverse effect of unleashing a price war as the new acquirers of below market spectrum went on a customer acquisition tizzy. Airtel was the biggest loser with ARPU sliding from Rs. 292 in 2008 to Rs. 187 in Q3 2011.
The new entrants – Uninor, S Tel and later Videocon were willing to work at Rs. 15-40 ARPU to gain market-share. But with them gone had having to bid for spectrum in an auction, the old schoolers – Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel and RCom – should be able to increase ride the “reversion to mean” of mobile subscription rates.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Kim Asger Olsen, an investment manager, has a succinct way of looking at the timeframes in which different people live. People active in the financial markets – traders, investment managers – live in the Real Market Time (RMT). It is rather different from Economist’s Hypothetical Time (EHT) or even Newspaper Headline Time (NHT).
The ability to figure out what matters and what doesn’t is key to living in the RMT. Bloggers, on the other hand, tend to work in EHT (they dwell for too long on what already belongs in the past in RMT). And by the time it hits the Hindu (NHT) it doesn’t matter any more.
In RMT, if the can can be kicked down the road, it will be, and its good enough. People like Nouriel Roubini, David Rosenberg, etc live in the EHT – EHTers look at Greece, Portugal, Italy, China and think it spells the end of the world. The fact of the matter is that you will never have all the data you need to make decisions in real-time. Leave it to EHTers and the Hindu to be the Monday morning quarterback.
Read more here: http://economicsacloserlook.blogspot.in/2012/01/quotes-and-time-zones.html
Image via Wikipedia
The carnage in Airtel stock continues – down close to 10% since their results were announced. Their Revenue Per Minute (the amount they charged you) increased by 3.2% while minutes rose only 0.8% And the worst part is that Idea’s minutes grew 7.3% during the same period, in spite of those annoying Abhishek Bachan ads.
I am not sure which network traders are on, but having suffered through Airtel’s network for the better part of three years: no signal, dropped calls, annoying ring-tones, having to pay to talk to a customer service rep, being told that I had to buy a Rs. 20,000 “booster” to fix the lack of network around my house; it comes as no shock to me that people “used” less minutes. I have lost track of the number of times I’ve carried the rest of a conversation on Skype because Airtel dropped the call.
I guess all of those dropped calls finally translated to a disappointing quarter.
The stock is hovering around Rs. 350 now. It was around Rs. 320 in early Jan so I’m tempted to say that a correction was overdue and I’m actually warming up to a bull case here.
You can read all the news stories about Airtel here.
