Balachandran S

The head of a large wealth management firm said at an event I attended: "I have given a gift of 20 lakh to my son. I told him it will take care of his retirement. 20 lakh will become 216 cr after 50 yrs at 15% CAGR." It got me thinking. But what about inflation? At 6% inflation that's 11.7 cr in today's money. At 8% it is 4.6cr. How realistic is 15% even? A 12% CAGR gives you 58 cr in future money and 3 cr in today's money. The financial industry sells dreams. They know fully well, they're not going to be around after 50 yrs or even 10 yrs in the same firm, to take accountability. Even 3 cr is good, but let's not oversell it.

All your expenses are paid for the rest of your life. What will you do now?

Criterion of migrating SME companies to the mainboard has been tightened. Minimum 3yrs of listing at SME platform. Minimum m-cap 100cr. No default of payments in 3yrs. No material SEBI case on the management in 3yrs. This, along with new SME IPO norms which came in Jan-2025, will clean up the segment. Many will never migrate and/or eventually be delisted.

BluSmart had 13 seed rounds from 2019 to 2021, and 20 Series A rounds from 2021 to 2024 Has an astonishing 180 unique investors and a lot of people are now saying "we passed", but there is a whole universe of investors with small checks The fundraising was very strange

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. There's a difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Here is the worst kept secret playbook in the SME stock manipulation. The operators were getting the daily shareholders master list. Checking who is buying and who is selling. Orchestrating people to buy. Stopping people whom they advise from selling. Tightly controlling float on a day to day basis. They even ran illegal portfolio management services by using this method. If an investor broke ranks and sold, he would be rusticated from their network. They were doing investment banking for potential SME companies. A raging private placement trade was being run by them. Premiums were paid in cash by greedy investors wanting a piece of the magical wealth pie they were cooking up. The racketeers were simply on a rage for three years. This is a full blown mafia. The irony is that all this was mistaken for investment genius even by the broader investor community. Hugely successful investors fell prey to greed and put their money on these frauds and hucksters. The exchanges could easily have caught all this. But, they chose to look the other way.

BluSmart was a loot, not a startup. SEBI has laid it bare: Anmol & Puneet Jaggi raised ₹975 Cr, routed ₹200+ Cr through a car dealer, and funneled crores into companies they privately owned. Anmol alone pulled out Rs. 25.16 Cr. •Rs. 6.2 Cr to his mother •Rs. 3 Cr to his wife •Rs. 1.8 Cr in foreign currency •Golf kits, Titan, travel and spa bills - it’s all in the order. This wasn’t mismanagement. This was design. But still there are founders supporting them saying “They meant well.” No. This was fraud - wrapped in ESG, hyped by PR, and funded by silence.

The Wrong Lessons of This Cycle That Investors Should 'Un-learn' 1. Stocks can't fall because there's so much money on the sidelines – SIP flows, FIIs, financial literacy, etc. 2. We'll hit $ XX trillion GDP, so buy stocks. 3. No need for debt, gold, or FDs – equities are the only game in town. 4. New-age themes and tech will change the world. Can't miss investing in them. 5. If the US Dollar Index falls, EMs will rise. 6. We don't need large caps – only SMIDs deliver alpha. 7. I can do it on my own. And the most blatantly wrong one: 8. Valuations don't matter.

RBI CUTS REPO RATE BY 25 BPS AT 6.00%

Senior executive of a large private bank has been asked to go for a sabbatical, pending investigation on aggressive sales practice. Any guess who?