Ayyo!

Ritwik Priya, having decided that he is not going to nitpicky wars with me, has decided to write a series of posts summarizing his text books. But he finds himself unable to avoid taking a swipe at me:

Thus, when Ravikiran asserts here and here that retail investors in India are stupid and hence the EMH may not hold for India, it makes me wonder if he understands the EMH at all. As long as the idiot retail investors in India (or elsewhere) are idiotic in their own randomly distributed ways, the EMH would still hold. The argument is simple – the overestimations of the positive idiots will cancel out the underestimations of the negative idiots. The only problem arises when idiocy is systemic – when idiots make mistakes that are very similar to each other.

The problem with Ritwik is that he balances his undoubtedly sound knowledge of theory with an utter lack of common sense. 

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The Technical Analysts

These days, one of the great joys of my life is watching the stock markets fall. I don’t get much time to watch TV, but I follow the collapse of the market through the Rediff stocks page. The advantage of this page over other choices is that I get to read the prognostications of the “technical analysts”.  Their statements have a zen-like quality to them. For example, at 9:33 AM today,  Prakash Gaba, technical analyst has said:

 “If the market falls any further, a bounce can be expected”.

How profound!

Also, going by the evidence on this page, Ashwani Gujral, technical analyst is on CNBC Awaaz all  the time. I wonder if he gets time to do his job.