Here’s our assessment of equity and debt markets in April 2019. Equity markets were muted after a strong March. Election outcome and the resulting clarity in terms of policy is expected to guide market direction post April.

A few weeks back, investor Thiyagarajan Chandrasekaran posted on a popular financial portal ‘there is no dividend for the month of December-18 and February-19’. Thiyagarajan had put his hard-earned money in a top-rated balanced scheme of a mutual fund and was surprised to know that monthly dividends were not guaranteed.

Becoming fit enough to deadlift a hundred kilos or more is far from easy. Having savings that you can count upon in an emergency or in retirement is similarly not as simple, to begin with.

It’s never too early to start planning for your retirement. As the saying goes, you can retire from work, but you needn’t retire from life. Managing your daily expenses and lifestyle desires, like travelling and spending on grand children is a part of what planning your retirement finances can help with.

Mirae Asset India Equity Fund will be renamed Mirae Asset Large Cap Fund. The fund was earlier categorised as a ‘Multi-cap fund’, which meant that it could invest across large, mid and small caps. With this change, it will be categorised as a ‘Large Cap fund’. This means, it will predominantly invest in large cap stocks only.

Here’s our assessment of equity and debt markets in March 2019. Apart from the elections, larger issues having an impact on the market are strong buying by foreign portfolio investors (FPI), a stronger rupee, and the banking sector logjam.

When markets tend to go through their occasional drops, the people who come out on top are often those who kept on investing as if nothing has happened. They had the wisdom to realize that they can’t predict when markets will go up nor when they will go down.

The per capita income itself is growing at about 10% annually. On the other hand, ‘basic needs’ like food has already been met for most of the population and will not grow at the same pace. Most likely, basic needs will grow in line with inflation or less.

Here’s our assessment of equity and debt markets in February 2019. Apart from the elections, one of the larger issues having an impact on the markets is the spate of selling by foreign portfolio investors (FPI), driven by US-China trade war.

I am writing this, as I have made several mistakes over all these years as an investor. If not for some of these mistakes, I would be far better off today and much wealthier.

With the general elections just a few months away, we have seen several investors being cautious over the equity markets and are either delaying their investments, or worse still pulling back on existing investments.

Don’t act impulsively every time you see a gain or a loss.