"My Name is Raghuram Rajan and I do what I do"

I am data driven, predictable, don't succumb to political pressure and I take baby steps when it comes to cutting rates. And sometimes I do what Mr. Modi and Mr. Jaitley ask me to do. 

Hence today I decided to cut the repo rate by 50 bps, when everybody had factored in 25 bps and was getting used to my predictable ways of being a nosy inflation hawk, I now free myself from that situation and have suddenly mutated and grown wings to become an accommodative dove.

He said “investment is likely to respond more strongly if there is more certainty about the extent of monetary stimulus in the pipeline, even if transmission is slow. Therefore, the Reserve Bank has front-loaded policy action by a reduction in the policy rate by 50 basis points. Given our year-ahead projections of inflation, this ensures one year expected Treasury bill real interest rates of about 1.5-2.0 per cent, which are appropriate for this stage of the recovery.”

"Some may call it an early diwali bone .. no no .. cant say that ... ummm ... diwali gift and some have called me Santa Claus. But I am Raghuram Rajan and I do what I do." 

Cool sounding central banker in the house and some of the journalists went weak in their knees. Thank God, Shobha De wasn't around.

So earlier his view was that inflation trajectory was his domain and giving clarity on that aspect was key to growing investment and capex. Today he switched sides and joined the government side and said that investment would be more likely to respond to certainty about monetary stimulus. 

Even the poor economists who anyways are pilloried for their forecasting skills along with weathermen were caught scrambling for answers. By tomorrow they would have come to terms with this cut and with enough time to rationalize and apply hindsight bias, justify how they saw it coming. But today some of their ilk were more candid. “The tone and the action of the policy is surprising. There is a clear shift of focus (from inflation) to growth,” said Shubhada Rao, chief economist from Yes Bank, who expected a 25 basis point cut.

"A further monetary policy accommodation will be conditioned by the abating of recent inflationary pressures, the full monsoon outturn, possible Federal Reserve actions and greater transmission of its front-loaded past actions," the RBI press release said. Sandwiched in between these various reasons, is the real cause what I think gave the RBI Gov, the heebie-jeebies. And that is Lady Yellen, not lifting off. 

My hindsight rationalization is that  besides political pressure to cut rates more aggressively, the mother ship standing pat on rates, owning to "global concerns" (which they had dismissed earlier), may have been the game changer. And that's perhaps from where Rajan has taken his cue to cut rates aggressively by an additional 25 bps (over the 25 bps already factored in), surprise the market, please the government and markets and put the ball, with a down the line back hand smash, right into the the government's court. 

Many birds, one stone.  

Well played Sir, well played. I just hope its not a case of too little, too late and the one day euphoria in the markets is not what this decision is judged by. Because at the end of the day, Mr. Market, by whatever name you call him, does what he does. And my sense is that he has already decided to go down in the medium to longer term, shorter term pullbacks notwithstanding.

Perhaps next time Raghuram Rajan (RR) should quote Akshay Kumar from the movie Rowdy Rathore (RR) and say, "Jo main bolta hoon woh main karta hoon.. aur jo main nahi bolta hoon woh main definitely karta hoon".

Positional Trader, Investor, Phil Fisher, Buffett, Simons !!!!!

Sitting on an expiry Thursday a random question popped in my head : What is this term "position trader" (in India sometimes we say "Positional Trader"?

I googled it and found that as per Investopedia which defines a position trader as "A type of stock trader who holds a position for the long term (from months to years)". And how is that different from a long investor. Maybe the methodology may be different. The assumption that gets tagged along with trader (whether positional, swing, short term, intra-day) is that they use technical analysis and price and volume data where as an Investor uses fundamental information to make a similar decision i.e. to buy and hold for a long time frame.

Buffet says the three people who have had the most impact on him as an investor are Benjamin Graham, Phil Fisher and Charlie Munger. Now currently I am re-reading this iconic book endorsed by Warren Buffett - our congenial next door grandfatherly value investor.

The book in question is "Common stocks and Uncommon Profits" by Philip A. Fisher. Now Buffett says this about the book, “I sought out Phil Fisher after reading his Common stocks and Uncommon Profits.....When I met him, I was as impressed by the man as by his ideas. A thorough understanding of the business, obtained by Phil's techniques...enables one to make intelligent investment commitments".

Yesterday at noon as I was waiting for European markets to give cues for second half of trading day, I reached Chapter Five in Part One of the book. Now a confession - at noon when I am sitting and reading an impressively titled book, my eyes are usually closed, so the other guy in my office thinks "Sir" is in deep contemplation about what we will do next. But yesterday my eyes didn't shut. I tried to shut them but they kept opening.

Perhaps that part of my brain which deals with conflicts was not letting my eyes shut. So I decided to read Chapter Five and see what the fuss was all about. And at the end of para two it finally dawned on my dull self, why my eyes were not closing: There was a line in there which said "if, having done the hardest part of the job in selecting his companies properly, an investor had made the small extra effort needed to understand a few simple principles about the timing of growth stocks." And by now my eyes were wide open. As I went on to read rest of the chapter it dawned on me that while Fisher had a taken the example of a manufacturing company and he linked the fundamental performance of the company to how the market participants would view the STOCK and how the STOCK would behave and when should an INVESTOR step in to buy.

Later on in the Chapter after Fisher has finished giving the thought process of his "timing methodology", he writes," At this point the stock might well prove to be a sensational buy. ...... The investor has acquired at the right time an investment which can grow for him for many years."

 And so if a position trader were to do this and use price and volume to buy with the same intent - he would in Buffett's lingo be called a "technician". And as he has famously said - "I have never met a rich technician". He should probably touch base with Jim Simons, Ed Seykota, Stan Druckenmiller, Bill O'Neil etc. some of whom are on the Forbes list. But perhaps he knows them already.

And now in today's day and age an Investor can do the same thing that a technician does but under the garb of Behavioral Biases. He just should not just admit that he also peeps at charts sometimes, which are nothing but the graphical representation of the market participants’ behavior over the respective time frames. In the very short term - it would be very close to random and over the very long term it would be pretty much in line with the fundamentals of the company.

"People that think they can predict the short-term movement of the stock market — or listen to other people who talk about (timing the market) — they are making a big mistake," says Buffet. And to be fair to Buffett perhaps the media takes his word out of context and just highlights the "timing" part and forgets the short term part. But then this is Warren Buffett we are talking about. He has direct access to his followers (and I am one of them) and his yearly letters are greeted with the same enthusiasm by "value investors" as Apple products as greeted by Steve Jobs’ fanboys. So perhaps over the last 45 years or so, he has had occasions to rectify this distortion but he has chosen not to.

Towards the end of the chapter Fisher takes off again. He writes," All types of investors might well keep one basic thought in mind. This thought is that the current phase of the business cycle is but one of the at least five powerful forces. All of these forces, either by influencing mass psychology or by direct economic operation, can have an extremely powerful influence on the general level of stock prices.

The other four influences are the trend of interest rates, the over-all governmental attitude toward investment and private enterprise, the long range trend to more and more inflation, and - possibly most powerful of all - new inventions and techniques as they affect old industries." Gasp!! Did Fisher just say that macros are important? But doesn’t Buffett say,” If you spend 5 mins thinking about macros, you have already wasted five minutes of your life.”

And now my tiny brain is trying reconcile Buffett’s various statements, it is starting to shut down and my eyes are droopy. And then the next question is who am I? Investor, Value Investor, Growth Investor, Technician, Techno-fundamentalist, Quant (that is for another day). Well I don't think I can neatly label myself.

Rollover (my positions) and sleep. Too much for one blog.

And then Jim Simons comes into my dream in a Ted talk and he says “Trend-following would have been great in the ’60s, and it was sort of OK in the ’70s. By the ’80s, it wasn’t.”. But someone has already blogged about it so just the links to those blogs below.

For the view

Against the view.

I am against the view. But then what do I know, I am half asleep.  

Go watch a movie called “Argo”. It’s a movie where the Americans rescued a bunch of diplomats from Iran but credit had to be given to the Canadians as it was a classified operation. It was only in 1987 or 97 that it was de-classified and the truth was discovered.  

We know what Buffett tells us he does, and we have no clue what Simons does. Rollover and sleep.