… Continued from PART 1 & PART 2 of the series …

@ Banking

The credit growth as on November 28 has jumped up to 29.8% yoy, the highest in the past one year. The credit demand has grown mainly on account of the drying up of the alternative sources of funds due to which corporates are turning to banks for meeting their working capital requirements. The deployment rate (i.e. the credit-deposit ratio) declined to 73.2% while the incremental credit-deposit ratio …

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… Continued from PART 1 of this series …

@ Equity markets

During November, the benchmark indices (BSE Sensex) corrected by ~7.0%, followed by an increase of ~8% during the month-to-date period (December 01–15), negating the decline in the previous month. However, the volatility in the equity markets has taken its toll on the volumes, which continued to decline in the same period. The volumes in the F & O continued to decline while that in the cash market remained largely stable …

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@ Overall Economy

India’s trade deficit stood at USD10.5 billion in October 2008 compared with USD10.6 billion in the previous month. Though the trade deficit is up by 61.2% yoy, the same remains largely flat on a m-o-m basis. With this, the year-till-date trade deficit has now widened to USD75.8 billion from USD45.5 billion in the comparable period of the previous fiscal.

In October, the country’s industrial production declined by 0.4%, the lowest in the past 15 years. This was well below …

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Despite several banks cutting their prime lending rates (PLR) recently, existing customers have not been benefited from this. Even after a month of the rate cut, a majority of home loan borrowers under floating rate schemes found out that banks including SBI, PNB, and IDBI Bank, have not passed on the rate cut to their existing customers. This benefit remains applicable to new borrowers only!

When interest rates were increased, all banks promtly increased the rates for both, existing and new …

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First Time in India - an Index fund tracking the Broadest Index in India

Scheme Highlights:

Ideal for Long Term Core Equity Portfolio
Exposure to total Indian Stock market in one investment (The Index Represents 92.61 % of Total Market Capitalization of NSE as on October 31, 2008)
The Scheme is a ‘Total Stock Market Index Fund’ that eliminates the risk of individual stocks, sectors, Styles, individual fund manager etc i.e all ‘Unsystemic risks’ only the ‘Systemic’ or market risk remains, which is common …

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Inflation has thankfully started to cool off… Crude oil, metals and minerals and food prices are now headed southwards. These were the key categories fuelling incremental inflation. Many experts believed that the inflation will come down to 6% by end-March 2009. Given the steep fall in inflation, worsening IIP and GDP data, it was expected that RBI will lower repo rate by at least 100 basis points and the reverse repo rate by minimum 50 basis points.

But will banks lower rates adequately and …

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As an analyst’s job is to analyse and not forecast, it’s time individuals used common sense approaches for picking stocks

We are going through turbulent times and investors have lost heavily as they had based their investment decisions on forecasts of the so-called experts. Many experts would agree that there are no geniuses in the markets. It’s the media who makes them (experts) or a short spell of luck.

Let’s go back just six months in time. We had practically most of the …

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