Last week stocks went up on the hope of a good budget.

Media informed that short-covering, coupled with value buying and positive global indices helped the bulls last week. Incidentally, Tata Steel went up sharply by 16.25% to settle at Rs 253 while L&T jumped 9.26% to Rs 1,151. ONGC too jumped 9.09% to settle at Rs 211.

Going forward we will have to check how FM presents the budget. In case government increases the time limit with respect to the calculation of long-term capital gains tax in equity the market may go down sharply. In a country like India where the equity participation is less than 1% of the population if FM decides to tweak wrong taxes then investors will not tolerate it. FM is expected to give some respite to the PSU banks.

Coming Sunday we intend to conduct our monthly meet and we would be discussing about how to plan for retirement fund. We would be sending a worksheet well before the meeting to check how we are prepared for the retirement. We request the participants to fill up the form and come prepared for the meet.  This would help the members to participate better in the meet. We have some simple strategies to help you to fund your retirement. Unfortunately when it comes to investing most of the people have high expectation from the stock. Most investors want to make quick money without understanding about the stocks and finally blame the market for not making the right kind of money. If you want quick profits, you have to make risky bets. Most of the investors do not know the difference between volatility and risk and 95% of the investors do not even understand the difference between stock performance and corporate performance. Still worse most investors do not know the difference between the price and the market cap!  Most investors know the price of everything but they do not know the value of anything.  Let us discuss more about it in our next face to face meet amd fix the problem.