Anxious, stressed and desperate
The life of equity investors appears to be becoming more tense with each passing day, regardless of the indices scaling new highs. This applies more to the professional investors (fund managers etc.) as compared to the individual investors. I gather from my conversations with the professional investors that they are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their performance of the past three years. The assets under their management (AUM) have increased multifold in these three years, but the stock of quality investable equity shares has not grown at a matching pace. Some of them have been reluctantly deploying the incremental flows in the limited number of available stocks, resulting in unsustainable rise in prices; whereas the others have chosen to go down the quality ladder and invested in the poor quality or apparently absurdly valued stocks. Obviously, they lack conviction in their portfolios, but continue to hold it and even grow it due to professional compulsions. Arguably, t...