In most of my B-School classes, my students would be asked to maintain a simulated real-time portfolio. One of the key lessons they self-learnt in the process by the end of the year is that wealth creation is a process and not akin to striking the lottery jackpot overnight, the possibility of which too is one in a million to put it figuratively.
I have read several news stories in the pink papers of market operators in the guise of market educationists duping their ‘student subscribers’ via a chat room where they are ostensibly educated on the technique of getting 1000%returns. I honestly do not feel too sympathetic about these gullible subscribers.
If they were greedy and naïve enough at the same time to believe that such returns are possible or that there is some technique to do it repeatedly, good old Warren Buffet, the revered Oracle of Omaha might have been unheard of.
Friends, professional acquaintances and even patrons at times forward opinions of self-appointed market experts on mobile phone groups and at times even ‘research’ reports from ‘reputed’ brokerage houses suggesting the possibility of raking in abnormal returns.
This, to my mind, is the most basic of mistakes investors make, led on by those preying on their naivety and greed.
A directive in the past by the regulator was to ask certain entities registered with it to affix its logo, address and even a line on investments being subject to market risk in all its market communications.
Well, I may have been cynical but I felt even then that unless the intent was something else altogether the majority of the predators mentioned above would be unregistered fly-by-night operators who shed old and assume new identities rapidly.
Hence, further regulating the already regulated and also largely compliant, while these operators continue to remain unregulated and unfettered simply because they prey on the greed of investors, is akin to missing the woods for the trees.
Without getting into the relative impossibility of monitoring the proliferation of blatantly loaded messages by such fly-by-night operators, it would suffice to say that this is a menace that shows no sign of abating.
While the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) maintains surveillance to flush out and punish such ‘educators’, it remains a cumbersome task.
As is inevitable on the world wide web, such predators invariably seem a step ahead.
On our part, we repeatedly remind anyone who bothers to ask, that if only the art of investing was so easy that one could act on such pearls of wisdom (of which there is no dearth, courtesy of the hyperactive social media) and profit, then everyone ought to be doubling their wealth monthly. Alas, that must remain a pipe dream.
Hence, all we can do is once again remind investors of the Latin phrase, Caveat Emptor- Let the Buyer Beware.
(Ashok Kumar heads LKW India. The views expressed here are his own)