'Markets Will Moderate, Not Collapse Into A Bear Zone Anytime Soon'

With Indian markets at an all-time high after dithering slightly post the general elections earlier this year, it is interesting to find out how long will the bulls keep running. Shankar Sharma, founder of GQuant and First Global, shares with Nidhi Sinha, editor, Outlook Money, as part of the Wealth Wizards series, why being called the 'Big Bear' of the Dalal Street is a cliché, that we are not going into a bear market anytime soon and what his investment mantra is

- Nidhi Sinha

You are often called the Big Bear of Dalal Street. Do you identify with that?

India is a strange market. If one has been negative for a period of time, even if it is very short, one somehow gets branded as the Big Bear; and if somebody's been bullish, you are called the Big Bull.

These are very superficial terms.

In India, in particular, nobody has ever been vocally bearish at any point in time. Somehow the popular culture is that we are always supposed to say good things about markets, and never say anything remotely negative. If you say that, you are a bear.

My style of investing is that I keep a very open mind. I've been investing globally for the last 25 years and the culture I am used to is (the one prevalent) in the US. For example, (in the US) major hedge fund managers, mutual fund managers and commentators can be openly negative about markets at different points in time, and they have been. They bet based on that view; they will go short on the market or treasury or a bunch of stocks.

That's a very developed way of thinking that markets go up, and they can come down as well. It's not that markets are permanently trending upward; they do over a 3040-year period, particularly in India or the US, but in the interim, there can be very brutal periods when you can lose literally 20-50 per cent of your capital. The interesting thing is that we have again forgotten in the last four years that from 2014 till 2020 up until Covid, the market returns from India were less than bank fixed deposit returns.

For small-caps, the less said the better. From 2018 to 2020, it was a brutal small-cap bear market, in which stocks basically got decimated by 50-90 per cent. We are just living in the good times, and we kind of believe that anything which is remotely bearish is not possible.