Coronavirus or Covid-19 originated in Wuhan couple of months ago. However,  it reached viral proportions this week on Wall Street — and literally throughout the world. Cases of the illness have stabilized in China, but its spread outside the country, to nearly 80 countries in total, is what may have truly injected uneasiness into the global stock markets.

How to play the current markets under such uncertain times? What is the right thing to do keeping in mind a long term investment horizon? We believe that the answer lies in the following famous Warren Buffet quote:  "Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy, Be Greedy When Others Are Fearful" .

As per Harry Markowitz - The father of Modern Portfolio theory, diversification is the only "free lunch" in finance world. This notion that you’d get something for nothing is nearly unheard of in economics. The key concept behind the “free lunch” is correlation—or rather, a lack of it. Typically, the performance of individual asset classes isn’t perfectly correlated. If asset values do not move up and down in perfect harmony, then a diversified portfolio will have less risk. It protects the portfolio against unexpected or unpredictable events. Diversification is spreading one’s investments to protect against unexpected/ unpredictable events.

Time and again, investors have been lured by high return potential of small-cap companies. This is because smaller companies have potential to give very high returns in a very short duration of time. There are instances when a small-cap company has given more than 10x returns within one year of time. Such huge returns are unheard of in any other segment of stock markets, viz. Large and Mid size companies. 

With such a high return potential also comes the risk of losing your capital. One of the best ways to reduce this investment risk is to time your entry. Though difficult, timing is not impossible. This article gives our in-depth analysis of how to make use of the current opportunity in the small-cap space...

Indian stock markets have been quite volatile in the calendar year 2018. If we look at the difference between the peak to the lowest point, Sensex has corrected by 15%, Midcap by 25% and Small-cap by more than 30%. It is quite natural for any investor to get worried when they see the value of their hard-earned money getting eroded. The pain compounds exponentially  if the value of the investments becomes lower than the principal amount invested. You may wonder how to protect your capital and what should be done in such a situation.

To understand the investor behaviour better, we have analysed possible reactions from the investors during such situations of market volatility. We found few common behaviour biases that needs to be tamed for better investor experience...

Most of us want to keep our money safe while choosing to invest in our long-term goals like child education and our own retirement. This is done primarily because everyone has told us that investments in equity markets are risky, and we really don’t want to take the risk with our important goals like education and retirement. While it looks like a prudent choice, but unknowingly we are making the wrong choice of investment products, like FDs, NSCs, PPF etc. Let us see three main reasons why in long-term goals, it makes perfect sense to take the risk.