What business news channels have in common with Chacha Chaudhary


Chacha_Chaudhary_with_his_dog_Raaket
I normally don’t watch business news channels given that I find them quite flaky and get put off by their lack of depth. Nevertheless, these days with nothing better to do while having lunch, I sometimes do end up watching these channels discussing the vagaries and the volatility of the stock market.

And one of the things I have noticed is that the anchors as well as the stock market experts who offer their opinion on these channels speak with a lot of conviction and confidence. They appear to be in control of things. They appear to know what is happening, when the world around them is probably going crazy. We never hear them use words like probably, maybe or phrases like I don’t know. Further, they seem to have this uncanny ability to understand and explain something just as it has started to unravel. Their story telling abilities are simply terrific.

The uncanny ability of these anchors and experts to explain things at the speed of thought reminds me of a thought bubble in the Chacha Chaudhary comics, which used to say: “Chacha Chaudhary ka dimaag computer se bhi zyada tez chalta hai (Chacha Chaudhary’s mind works faster than a computer).These anchors and experts are perhaps the Chacha Chaudharies of this day and age.

How is such speed possible? If the anchors and experts are so much in control and seem to have so much insight with such clarity, why are they not making money out of it? Why are they offering their advice for free on TV?

As the British economist John Kay writes in his new book Other People’s Money—Masters of the Universe or the Servants of the People?: “We deal with radical uncertainty through storytelling, by constructing narratives…The reality of market behaviour…relies on conviction narratives – stories that traders tell themselves, and reinforce in conversation with each other. Such narratives are the means by which we cope with radical uncertainty – the unknown unknowns that characterise… business and securities markets.”

The anchors and the experts appearing on business news television are in the business of telling us stories, which offer an explanation for why the market moved the way it did on a particular day. These days the most offered explanation is that economic jitters in China caused the stock market to fall. But this explanation is always offered after the stock market has fallen. No anchor or market expert ever says: “The stock market will fall today because there is economic trouble in China”.

As Kay writes: “The ‘explanations’ provided…by…market commentators…are little more than rationalisation of the noise generated by…market volatility.” And given this, it is worth asking that how useful is it for investors to listen to these explanations and make investment decisions after that.

Bob Swarup calls this phenomenon the illusion of explanation. He defines the term in his book Money Mania as: “Believing erroneously that your arguments…explain events.”

Further, how is it that the anchors and the market experts have an explanation for everything that happens in the stock market? And what is even more surprising is how they are able to come up with explanations so quickly. As John Allen Paulos writes in A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market: “Commentators…provide a neat post hoc explanation for every rally, every sell-off, and everything in between…Because so much information is available—business pages, companies’ annual reports, earnings expectations, alleged scandals, on-lines sites and commentary—something insightful can always be said.”

Over and above this there are many data releases which can also be used to come up with explanations. These data releases include inflation as measured by the consumer price index and the wholesale price index, index of industrial production, export and imports numbers, bank credit growth, and so on. And if all this does not fit into a convincing narrative you can always blame the Reserve Bank of India for not cutting interest rates.

Investing in specific stocks is not easy as it is made out to be by business news television. In fact, what anchors and market experts specialise in is making things simplistic rather than simple, given that they have limited time at disposal to say what they want to say. In this situation, where everything has to be said in thirty seconds to a minute, it is hardly surprising that things ultimately become simplistic. And this is clearly not good from an investor point of view.

What works for these anchors and experts is the fact that while coming up with explanations and predictions, their past record is not available for examination.

As Jason Zweig writes in Your Money and Your Brain: “Whenever some analyst brags on TV about making a good call, remember that pigs will fly before he will broadcast a full list of his past predictions, including the bloopers. Without that complete record of his market calls, there’s no way for you to tell whether he knows what he’s talking about.” This is a very important point that needs to be kept in mind when listening to anchors as well as experts on television.

Also, it is worth remembering here that which way a stock market will go is impossible to predict regularly on a day to day basis.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan—The Impact of the Highly Probable lists a certain category of experts who tend to be…not experts. In this list he includes economists, financial forecasters, finance professors and personal financial advisers.

As he writes: “Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don’t move seem to have some experts. In others words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem…I am not saying that no one who deals with the future provides any valuable information…but rather that those who provide no tangible added value are generally dealing with the future.” Given this, the stock market experts clearly have an expert problem.

Hence, the next time you switch on your television to try and understand what is happening in the stock market, do remember all that has been pointed out above.

Happy investing!

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on September 25, 2015

Satyam scam: Ramalinga Raju, the man who knew too much, gets 7 years in jail

Ramalinga_Raju_at_the_2008_Indian_Economic_Summit
A special court in Hyderabad found all the ten accused in the Satyam scam guilty of cheating, forgery, destruction of evidence and criminal breach of trust. This includes the founder and the Chairman of the company B Ramalinga Raju.
The decision came more than six years after the scam first came to light. On January 7, 2009, Raju wrote a letter to the board of directors of Satyam Computer Services, in which he admitted to cooking the books of the company. A copy of the letter was sent to the stock exchanges as well as the Securities and Exchange Board of India.
In this letter Raju admitted to inflating the cash and bank balances of the company by Rs 5,040 crore. The company’s total assets as on September 30, 2008, stood at Rs 8,795 crore. 

Of this cash and bank balances stood at Rs 5,313 crore which was nearly 60% of the total assets.  This was overstated by Rs 5,040 crore. The company basically had cash and bank balances of less than Rs 300 crore.
Raju also admitted to fudging the last financial result that the company had declared, for the period of three months ending September 30, 2008. The company had reported revenues of Rs 2,700 crore, with an operating margin of 24% of revenues or Rs 649 crore. These numbers were made up. The actual revenues were Rs 2,112 crore with an operating margin of Rs 61 crore or 3% of the total revenues.
So, Satyam had made a profit of Rs 61 crore but was declaring a profit of Rs 649 crore. The difference was Rs 588 crore. The operating profit for the quarter was added to the cash and bank balances on the balance sheet. Hence, cash and bank balances went up by an “artificial” Rs 588 crore just for the three month period ending September 30, 2008.
This was a formula that Raju had been using for a while. First Satyam over-declared its operating profit. Once this fudged operating profit was moved to the balance sheet, it ended up over-declaring its cash and bank balances. And this led to a substantially bigger balance sheet than was actually the case.
The company had total assets of Rs 8,795 crore as on September 30, 2008. Once the Rs 5,040 crore of cash and bank balances that were simply not there were removed from this, the “real” total assets fell to a significantly lower Rs 3,755 crore.
Raju went on to say that: “The gap in the Balance Sheet has arisen purely on account of inflated profits over a period of last several years (limited only to Satyam standalone, books of subsidiaries reflecting true performance). What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years.”
What was Raju upto? Raju’s fraud was no Enron, where complicated derivative transactions were used to boost revenues as well as profit. He had been cooking the books since 2003 by simply over-declaring revenues and profits. In the process he ended up boosting his balance sheet as the cash and bank balances kept going up.
So, how did Raju manage to boost revenues? In order to do this Raju created fictitious clients with whom Satyam had entered into business deals. This was again something akin to Enron, which essentially entered into business deals with its subsidiaries. The subsidiaries paid Enron for the deal by borrowing money. While the revenues brought in from the subsidiaries was recorded by Enron, the debt that they had taken on, wasn’t.
Getting back to Raju, in order to record the fake sales he introduced 7000 fake invoices into the computer system of the company. He couldn’t stop at this.
The clients were fake. Fake clients could not make real payments. Given this, the company kept inflating the money due from its clients (or what Raju called debtors position in his letter).
Further, once fake sales had been recorded, fake profits were made. And fake profits brought in fake cash which needed to be invested somewhere. This led to Raju creating fake bank statements(forged fixed deposit receipts) where all the fake cash that the company was throwing up was being invested.
Raju then tried to use this “fake cash” and buy out two real estate companies called Maytas Properties and Maytras Infra (opposite of Satyam and promoted by the family) for a total of $1.6 billion. But this did not work out. As Raju said in his confessional statement: “The aborted Maytas acquisition deal was the last attempt to fill the fictitious assets with real ones. Maytas’ investors were convinced that this is a good divestment opportunity and a strategic fit. Once Satyam’s problem was solved, it was hoped that Maytas’ payments can be delayed.”
The idea was to have some “real” assets against all the “fake” cash that the company had managed to accumulate. But that did not happen and after this, Raju had no way out but to come clean.
The question is how could Raju run such a big scam for such a long period of time. Satyam’s accounts were audited by Price Waterhouse, a member-firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Ltd — since the financial year 2000-2001.
The auditor had no clue that Satyam’s assets were overstated by more than Rs 5,000 crore. When the scam first broke out a middle level executive from a Big 4 consulting firm told me: “All the auditor needed to ask was the bank statements of the various banks in which this (supposed) cash had been deposited or mutual funds it had been invested in. This is overstatement of Rs 5,000 odd crore we are talking about, not Rs 500.” The auditor clearly did not do that.
The auditor is paid to ask questions; in this case it seems to have been paid not to ask any. The company couldn’t have hoodwinked the investors without the auditor being on its side. This was no complicated accounting fraud like Enron was.
The many analysts who covered Satyam also did not have any clue about the fact that the profits as well as revenues of Satyam were fake. Brokerage analysts who follow companies need to keep companies in a good humour. Without that, they run the risk of being given limited or at times no access to the company, at all. This explains why none of the analysts caught on to what was happening at Satyam. It also explains why the number of sell recommendations on stocks put out by brokerage analysts are lower when compared to the number of buy recommendations that brokerages put out.
And finally we come to the media. It had no clue of what was happening at Satyam. One reason for this lies in the fact that the Indian media over the years has been extremely taken in by the IT companies and the people who run them.
The case with Satyam’s Raju was no different. Lot of magazines and newspaper wrote stories on him and painted him as a person who could do no wrong. This blinds investors, media and experts who follow a company. This comes from the need of the media to create a story around the individual.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his book 
Fooled by Randomness on how the Halo effect around a CEO is built up by the media: “We would get very interesting and helpful comments on his remarkable style, his incisive mind, and the influences that helped him achieve that success. Some analysts may attribute his achievement to precise elements among his childhood experiences. His biographer will dwell on the wonderful role models provided by his parents; we would be supplied with black and white pictures in the middle of the book of  great mind in the making.”
Something similar had happened with Satyam as well. And given this the media expected Satyam to do no wrong. The Halo effect was clearly at work in case of Satyam as well. Investors could see Raju doing no wrong. Raju even sold his shares in Satyam to fund social causes. How could such a man be a fraud? When the Halo effect is at work, the ability to ask incisive pointed questions clearly goes down, and that’s what happened in Satyam’s case as well.
So, while Raju ran his fraud, the auditor slept, the analysts slept and so did the media. To be fair, the media did an excellent job of exposing Raju and his many other ‘shenanigans’ after he had confessed.
Now more than six years later, the first decision in the Satyam scam has been made. Of course, we haven’t seen the last of this case, given the slow pace at which our judicial system works.
Stay tuned.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column was originally published on Firstpost on Apr 9, 2015

Dear Reader, are you still invested in gold?

gold
In my previous avatar as a full time journalist working for a daily newspaper with a very strong business section, I happened to interview many gold bulls. This was primarily during the two year period between September 2008 and September 2010, in the aftermath of the financial crisis that broke out in mid September 2008.
I got a lot of predictions on what levels the gold price would run up to in the years to come. Almost each one of these bulls agreed that gold will cross $2,000 per ounce (one ounce equals 31.1 grams). Some of them thought gold would touch anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 per ounce.
The highest prediction I got for gold was $55,000 per ounce. The trick with all these forecasts was that none of these gentlemen predicting the price of gold, gave me a date i.e. by such and such date, the price of gold would be at this level. All of them just gave me a price.
Interestingly, more than four and a half years later, gold prices have not gone anywhere near the levels the gold bulls had predicted. The logic offered was very straightforward—with all the money being printed by central banks all around the world, very high inflation would be the order of the day.
And in this environment people would do what they have always done—buy gold. This expectation drove up the price of gold and it touched around $1,900 per ounce, sometime in August 2011. After this, the price fell and currently stands at around $1,220 per ounce. In fact, the price of gold never even crossed $2,000 per ounce, let alone crossing $5,000 per ounce.
There are important lessons that emerge here. As Humphrey B. Neill writes in
The Art of Contrary Thinking: “The whole field of economics remains a “guessy” one. Little, if any, progress has been made over the years in attaining profitable accuracy in economic forecasting. And, mind you, this condition still exists, notwithstanding the extraordinary volume of statistics that is now available…which was not known to former forecasters.”
The Art of Contrary Thinking was first published in 1954 (even though I happened to read it only over the long weekend and I really wish I had read this book a decade back), and what Neill wrote then still remains valid.
Another interesting point that Neill makes is that people love opinions and forecasts which are definitive. Almost every gold bull I have interviewed over the years has told me with great confidence that the price of gold is going to explode in the years to come. And it’s the confidence with which they spoke that made their forecasts believable at the point of time they were made.
As Neill writes: “Forcing oneself to be definitive and specific can cause more wrong guesses and forecasts than anything I can think of. It has given rise to the cynical expression: “Often in error, but never in doubt.” It is this writer’s contention after over 30 years’ acquaintance with, and observation of, economics and Wall Street that being positive, specific, and dogmatic is about the most harmful habit one can fall into.”
What was true in the mid fifties when Neill wrote the book is even more true now, in the era of television and the social media. When you have to voice your opinion in 30 seconds or write everything that you know in 140 characters, there is no opportunity to be nuanced. You have to be as definitive as you can be, because that is what people love and there is no space for a detailed argument.
But as we have seen very clearly in the case of gold this clearly does not work. “The fault likes (1) in the pernicious desire of writers in the financial economic field [like yours truly] to forecast—to be oracles. Once bitten, it is difficult to effect a cure! Readers (2) are equally at fault in expecting that anyone can predict economic or market trends accurately and consistently,” writes Neill.
The gold bulls have been way off the mark in their predictions until now. One reason for this lies in the fact that all the money printing carried out by central banks hasn’t led to much conventional inflation. The reason as I have explained (you can read the pieces
here and here) in the past lies in the fact that people haven’t borrowed and spent money at low interest rates, as they were expected to. Given this, a situation where too much money chases too few goods and leads to inflation, never really arose. Though a lot of this newly printed money found its way into financial markets all over the world.
The broader point here is that it is very difficult to predict human behaviour. As Neill writes: “you may have all the statistics in the world at your finger tips, but still you do not know how or why people are going to act.” And given this, just because people have borrowed and spent money when interest rates were low in the past, doesn’t mean they will do so again.
Where does that leave gold? Will gold prices go up again? The answer is kind of tricky. Let me quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb here. As Taleb he writes in 
Anti Fragile: “Central banks can print money; they print print and print with no effect (and claim the “safety” of such a measure), then, “unexpectedly,” the printing causes a jump in inflation.”
James Rickard author 
Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crises says the same thing: “They can’t just keep printing…All major central banks are easing…Eventually so much money will be printed that this will lead to inflation.”
What no one knows is when this will happen. And a forecast which does not come with a time frame is largely useless. What this also means is that if you are still betting your life on gold, please don’t. Okay, I think I am making a forecast again. Let me stop here.

Disclaimer: This writer has around 10% of his portfolio still invested in gold through the mutual fund route.

The column appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Apr 7, 2015

Investing lessons from Aam Aadmi Party’s Delhi win

Arvind-Kejriwal3
Last week saw David(read the Aam Aadmi Party(AAP)) beat Goliath(read the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)) in the Delhi elections. AAP won 67 out of the seventy seats in the Delhi assembly, leaving only three seats for the BJP. This led to one WhatsApp forward which suggested that Delhi should now allow tripling(three people travelling on a bike) so that BJP legislators could ride to the Delhi assembly on a bike. Another forward suggested that the BJP legislators could drive to the assembly in a Tata Nano.
Jokes apart, in the aftermath of this electoral debacle many reasons have been offered on why and how the BJP lost Delhi. Reasons have also been offered on why and how the AAP won Delhi. Let’s sample a few here. The ghar wapasi campaign launched by the Sangh Parivar backfired in Delhi. The BJP ran a very negative and a highly vitriolic campaign against AAP and that didn’t quite work.
The AAP supporters on the other hand have been pointing out to the fact that the party ran a positive campaign and that went down well with Delhi residents. Further, the 49 days that Arvind Kejriwal was chief minister of Delhi, the levels of petty corruption in Delhi had come down dramatically. And this, we are told, is something that the people of Delhi haven’t forgotten.
Long story short—the number of reasons offered on AAP’s spectacular performance and BJP’s wipe out, is directly proportional to the number of political pundits analysing the issue. Nevertheless, most of these reasons have been offered with the benefit of hindsight. Most political pundits had no clue about BJP ending with up three seats and the Narendra Modi juggernaut losing steam. But now that it has happened, they need to find reasons and explanations for the same.
As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations—Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics: “Through countless generations of natural selection, we have become hardwired to look for patterns and to think of explanations for the patterns we find…We yearn to make an uncertain world more certain, to gain control over things we do not control, to predict the unpredictable.”
Also, some political pundits have now even said that they saw the whole thing coming and offered explanations of the same. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness: “Things are always obvious after the fact…It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information…Our mind will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones.” This tendency is referred to as hindsight bias in psychology.
Daniel Kahneman defines this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: “When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate that surprise…Once you adopt a new view of the world(or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe in before your mind changed.”
This leads to a situation where one feels that one has understood as well as predicted the past and given that one further feels that one can predict as well as control the future. As Jason Zweig writes in Your Money & Your Brain—How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich: “Hindsight bias is another cruel trick that your inner con man plays on you. By making you believe that the past was more predictable than it really was, hindsight bias fools you into thinking that the future is more predictable than it ever can be.”
This is exploited in particular by financial pundits. As Kahneman writes: “Our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday.” That of course is not the case.
Hindsight bias also is also at work when we invest. An excellent example, is of investors saying after a bubble has burst, that they knew all along it was a bubble. But the thing is that if a bubble is obvious to enough investors at the time it is in its initial stage, there would be no bubble in the first place.
Zweig has an excellent example in his book of the link between hindsight bias and investing. As he writes: “In the fall of 2001, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, you tell yourself, “Nothing will ever be the same again. The U.S. isn’t safe any more. Who knows what they’ll do next? Even if stocks are cheap, nobody will have the guts to invest.” Then the market goes on to gain 15% by the end of 2003, and what do you say? “I knew
stocks were cheap after September 11th!””
The moral of the story here is that you may have been able to explain the entire situation to yourself, but you have missed out on the rally.
Then there is the case of missing out on a bumper initial public offering. Zweig offers the case of Google which first sold its shares in August 2004. At that point of time, an investor wanting to invest in the stock, would have thought back about the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the money that he had lost back then.
Using this logic he would have decided not to invest in the stock. He would have then seen the price of the stock jump from the initial price of $85 to $460 by end 2006 and told himself: “I knew I should have bought Google!”
And this would lead to a change in the worldview of the investor and may well make him “more eager to take the plunge” the next time he has “a chance to get in on the ground floor of a risky high-tech start-up.” But as Zweig puts it: “Of course, “the next Google” may turn out to be the next Enron instead.”
Given these reasons it is very important for investors not to become victims of the hindsight bias while investing.

(The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning on Feb 16, 2015)

Why the Rs 7,00,000 crore EPFO needs to look beyond just public sector stocks

EPFOLogoVivek Kaul

A news report in The Times of India today (i.e. October 17,2014) points out that the Employee Provident Funds Organization (EPFO) wants to invest a portion of its corpus in stocks. As the report points out “At an informal meeting with labour minister Narendra Singh Tomar on Monday, representatives from Congress-backed INTUC and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, which is affiliated to the ruling BJP, offered their support to a diversification of the EPFO’s investment mix into public sector stocks. At the same time both recommended that such investment should only be undertaken on expert advice.”
The Rs 7,00,000 crore EPFO currently invests only in government securities. Hence, from the point of view of diversification of investment, this proposal, if it goes through, makes immense sense. Nevertheless, there are several problems with the proposal in its current form.
First and foremost the EPFO wants to currently invest money only in
‘navratna’ public sector stocks. There are a couple of problems with this. If the idea is to give investors in EPFO a certain exposure to equity, then why limit it to only the best public sector companies?
The second problem is that the free float of the public sector companies is a lot lower in comparison to the overall market. Free float is essentially the number of shares that are deemed to be freely available in the market. In case of public sector companies the shares held by the government are not considered to be available for sale.
The free float of the companies that constitute the BSE Sensex works out to 53.3% currently. In comparison the free float of the public sector companies that constitute the BSE PSU Index, it works out to 29.2%.
Even if only 5% of the employees provident fund (EPF) corpus were to be invested in the stock market, this would mean Rs 35,000 crore of new money suddenly finding its way into public sector stocks. With a low free float, so much new money is likely going to drive up the value of public sector stocks. Hence, EPFO will end up buying stocks at a higher price. And this in turn will impact the return that the EPFO investor earns.
This is why it is important that the EPF invests in the best companies and not the best public sector companies. A simple way to do this would be to run an index fund which simply invests in stocks that constitute the BSE Sensex or the NSE Nifty. An index fund simply invests in stocks that constitute a market index.
Further, the EPFO wants experts to manage their equity investment. Experts repeatedly get the direction of the stock market wrong and this is something that EPFO can ill-afford at the beginning of what is basically an experiment. A better bet is to simply run an index fund and keep experts out of the equation totally. It is important that investors in the EPF, at least earn the market rate of return, first.
As far as experts are concerned, it is worth remembering what Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in
The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable, “Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don’t move seem to have some experts. In other words, professionals that deal with the future and base their studies on the non repeatable past have an expert problem. I am not saying that no one who deals with the future provides any valuable information, but rather that those who provide no tangible added value are dealing with the future.”
Stock market experts have to deal with future and base their decisions on a non repeatable past. The EPFO needs to remember this while deciding how to manage its investments into stocks.

This article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Oct 17, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)