Back to the Basics – Fundamentals to the fore

The stock market is always in a state of flux – never static, a place where every moment provides opportunities. To seize such opportunities, to cut the losers and make the winners run, is what makes a successful investor and the two-day seminar that was organised by the Bhawanipur Education Society College (BESC) to acquaint the students about the fundamentals was a case in point. The session on day one was conducted by Prof Dilip Shah, the Dean of Student Affairs.

The discussion centred around a “Cheat-sheet for Investing your money” and Prof Shah, took the participants into the trading floor where the “efficient market” shift the grains from the chaff in real-time, where good performance is rewarded while the bad fall by the wayside, where the prudent investor, armed with the analysis of publicly available information succeed against seemingly impossible odds to emerge victorious.   

The second day of the workshop had Pankaj Gupta and alumni of IIM (Lucknow), currently an investor and mentor of Kredent Academy (Kolkata) don his garb as a Fund Manager to take the students into the ring. It was a kind of a nostalgic trip for him as he had spent more than a decade of his career as a Fund Manager in one of the country’s premier Mutual Funds.

He primarily restricted his discourse on the study of the Schedule III Balance Sheets detailing how the pulse of the company and its financial health can be gauged from the apparently innocuous figures that are published mandatorily. Networths, Discounted Cash flows, ROE and COE – and related concepts were explained threadbare and the students were provided with a rare insight into the working of a fund managers mind. Triggers that lead to buy, sell or hold decisions were also explained in great detail.

Four groups were created from among the participants who were each given a Company to study and analyse. The analysis of the students will be taken up at a follow up session where the reports will not only be studied leading all the way to the investment decisions, but the justifications explained to further aid the understanding of the fundamentals that drive the markets and how best their study can be utilised to create wealth from the movements.

(This report has been filed by Devansh Dalmia and Yash Gupta of the Expressions collective of the BESC).