Dangerous To Time The Market

How the stock market will perform post Diwali and what strategy retail investors should adopt?

- Yagnesh Kansara

When you will be reading this story, in any form (print or digital), we must have entered the new Vikram Samvat 2076 and we will be witnessing a laying down of a solid foundation of a long-lasting bull run in the Indian stock market. Actually that will be a continuation of what we saw on September 20, 2019, when the finance minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman in her last of the four booster doses announced a hefty cut in corporate tax rate and we witnessed one of the highest gains in the benchmark indices Nifty and the Sensex.

Though the benchmark indices of the markets have returned only nine per cent (Sensex and Nifty gained 3,157 points and 1213 points respectively) during current Samvat year 2075, which will end on October 27, 2019 (this story was written on October 21), the stage of optimism is being set in such a way for Samvat 2076, that all-time peak level achieved by frontline measures (Sensex at 40,312 points and Nifty at 12,089 points) during June 2019 will be surpassed and new record level will be achieved. However, the journey to the new peak will be equally stormy and will pass through high volatile path. The market movements in the second half of the financial year 2019-20 (FY20), post Diwali, will be crucial and we will be discussing how to make a way out of it in the following lines.

Just a couple of weeks back, there was pessimism all around with the slowdown in economic growth, lack of consumer demand, liquidity or the crisis of confidence, negative sentiment in the capital markets leading to a huge erosion in the market capitalisation (M-Cap). It is very easy to be coloured by the newsflow and dwell on the past and present data points. The four booster doses announced by the FM for the economy, spread over five Fridays during AugustSeptember, have the vigour to kick start the economy and improve the sentiment for businesses and for the capital market participants.