Do it yourself

The Indian stock market has once again demonstrated its remarkable ability to weather turbulent times. Despite significant geopolitical headwinds, including the Indo-Pak tensions in April 2025 and the escalating Iran-Israel conflict in June 2025, the benchmark Nifty 50 has shown resilience, recouping losses swiftly and even posting gains. Month-to-date (MTD) in June 2025, the Nifty 50 has its ground firmly , despite threatening news flow, a weakening rupee, and surging oil prices. Trading volumes on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) have surged, even as foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) are only marginal net buyers and promoter entities offloaded over  ₹ 400 billion in shares. Meanwhile, domestic institutional investors (DIIs) have though accelerated their buying and providing support to the market. One may argue that this tendency to quickly overcome geopolitical shocks isn’t new. Over the past five years, the Nifty 50 and Sensex have delivered annualized returns of 10-12%, navig...

  Reliance on imported energy, especially crude petroleum, has been one of the weakest aspects of the Indian economy for the past many decades. Though we have made significant progress in the adoption of renewable and clean sources of energy, about 70% of our primary energy demand is still met by coal and crude oil. Renewable energy meets less than 5% of the primary energy and is mostly replacing traditional biomass in the overall primary energy mix. India meets most of its petroleum requirements through the import of crude oil. Notwithstanding the ethanol blending policy, in FY23, over 87% of the domestic petroleum consumption requirements were met through imported crude oil; up from 83.8% in FY19. Despite incentives and many policy changes, domestic oil production in India has consistently declined since peaking in 2011. The current annual production of crude oil in India is around 620 thousand barrels a day; the same level it was in 1995-96, before the New Exploration Licensing ...

In past few days many market experts have highlighted that the recent fall in crude prices is a major positive for Indian economy. Through my interactions with some investors I learned that many investors do take the publically expressed random opinions of these experts quite seriously and actually base their decisions on these. Besides, small investors are also usually seen following the actions large celebrity investors. Even in recent past, there have been many instances where small investors have emulated the actions of large investor buying a meaningful stake in a stressed asset. From the regulatory standpoint there is no violation in both these cases. The market experts are free to publically express their opinions and views about the market trends and events. The companies, stock exchanges and investors are in fact obligated to make public disclosure of large secondary market deals. But there could be an ethical lacuna in these practices. For example, on...