Zoology Lessons for the Indian Investor ;)

Everyone must be aware of the fact that Apes and Humans have 98% similar DNA. The 2% variation occurred when a Gorilla opened a banana ditch and gave 1 peel to 20 others, promising them 1 banana every day if they gave him one banana each that day. Four weeks later, a whistle blowing baboon discovered that the ditch was empty and in the resulting punch up, brain damage in the tribe led to mutation.A majority of the descendants became investors. The enterprising gorilla descendants became the founder of Operators, brokers, promoters and politicians. The whistle blowing baboon didn't evolve too much. Its descendants started M.A.G.

There is a certain personality element derived from different animals,maybe,it might have actually inspired the Chinese calendar. I always knew that the Year of the Mouse or Year of the Tiger meant that in those years, a Mouse or Tiger personality would lose his life savings in the stock market.

Infact, Kung-fu evolved as a means to punish the stock broking cartels who cleaned up the ming or ping or ching dynasties. The investors had to sell all their weapons and so were left with bare hands to kill the bears.

There are 10 primary animal personas, especially for Indian investors.

1. The Bull Investor:
The Bull Investor is very well known. The Press and Media never fail to praise the bull when it invests in an over valued stock, all the time convinced that it is undervalued.
The advantage of being a bull investor is that there is mostly a bigger bull who believes the other bulls bullshit and buy at even higher prices. This is also known as the "Greater Fool Theory". Logically, we can derive that all bulls are fools.

The last bull normally ends up in the McDonalds double decker burger.

2. The Bear Investor:
The Bear Investor is the master villain in our media. The evil Grizzly Bear brings down stocks because it thinks all stocks are over valued even if the stock earns ten times its par value every quarter.
Nobody understands the psychology of a bear investor. Some psychiatrists who belong to the mixture of Freudian, Phobian and Trobian school point out that inferiority complexes in childhood could lead to a Bear investor self identifying its low self esteem with all other objects of perceived value. I think Bears should attack such psychiatrists instead of the stock market.

In any case Bears also end up being skinned when a herd of mad bulls attack them. Just being a carnivore isnt a guarantee of success at Dalal Street.

3. The Fox:
The wily Fox. It rarely loses. It will speak bull language and eat grasss amongst bulls but sneak into the bear camp when the bigger/dumber bulls start leading the herd. It also gets tired of vegetarian meals after a while. Later on, it will ditch the bears the moment it spots a large herd of even bigger and dumber bulls. Ultimately it gets to eat the bulls and wear bear skin suits.
You may find some foxes in the options and futures market. They get busted only in times of sudden disasters. Its safe to say that this rare species is the most successful of Indian investors. The Indian Investor Wildlife Fund however has the Fox Investors in the extremely rare category.

4. The Rooster:
A Rooster investor cannot wait to day trade! It will rise early each day and rush to open twenty computer screens and scan the charts, crow about its discovery of stock price support and stock price resistance. It will bravely tell other chickens entry and exit points without its feathers getting ruffled by the Index values. 99% of the time, the market will behave in the exact opposite way and as a result, the poultry industry is always stuck with the problem of over supply. Good for Chicken Tikka fans.

5. The Lamb:
The most common Indian investor personality. Excellent epertise in being slaughtered day in and day out, week after week, quarter after quarter and year after year. They (We?) always manage to get in the wrong stock at the wrong time and get out of the right stock at the wrong time. Designed for destruction, you can never fail to identify them, especially in Internet message boards where they scream for help before their bankers drag them to the abattoirs. "Abattoir" is the Corporate Head Office of Butchers, for those who are rushing to get a dictionary.Here is a typical Lamb Message in an Internet Stock Forum:

"Dear Sir,
I bought 100 shares of Pan Masala Pharma Ltd at 2440.50 rupees on recommendation from a leading analyst on @#8* Stock News Channel. The stock has since come down to 2 rupees. Should I buy 100 more to average ? Please tell me what to do!"

What can we answer! It is going to be slaughtered anyway so a Fox investor would ask the Lamb to average by buying 10,000 more.

6. The Horse:
The Horse Investors just want to run and run and run! They cannot stay with the same stock for more than 3 days, sometimes 3 hours. They are blessed with very poor mathematcial skills and this helps them avoid any guilt feelings of booking losses. A cyclical pattern emerges in their lives wherein they lose all their trading money in 2 weeks and get back to their stable, labouring to earn enough for next years loss.

Unaware, they carry a lot of Fox and Snake Investors on their backs….

7. Which brings us to the Snake Investor:
The deadliest possible investor. Even a Fox Investor may lose but a snake investor never loses because it has a forked tongue ie two professions: That of an Analyst or Operator or Company Promoter as well as that of an investor. It will always claim that it doesn't have any vested interests in the stocks that are the focus of its research.
[The Snake never lies to itself else it will bite its tail in disgust and commit suicide. All it will do is maintain two accounts, one for its wife or child to keep those stocks on which it manipulates consent in the general zoo of investors]

You will see snakes every day on a stock channel. They will call the right guest, another member of the brotherhood. The snake brothers would have picked up 100000 shares of ChoriLal PlasticButtons Ltd, talk about a textile boom which would boost the button market 10 times. (Why? because one shirt needs 10 buttons average, dummy) and after the show is over, dump their shares on a 20% upper circuit breaker. The company is likely to be delisted next week due to bogus accounting but the Snakes have made a killing without even having to use their poisonous fangs. The forked tongue is sufficient…Snake Investors also abound in the company of other animals. They will spur the horse to chase after the worst stock, lead lambs to the slaughter on the company ripe for the greatest fall and occasionally conduct special coaching camps for Foxes. Their mere look is enough to hypnotize a bull into action. Even Bears are not safe. Several Bears have been skinned when they short sold a stock in the morning just before a Snake releases news to lock it in 20% upper circuit freeze.

The most dangerous place for a Snake Investor to be is however an internet message board where many Lambs can visit 24 hrs from across the planet to choose the knife to get slaughtered with.Here is a sample conversation, brackets have my comments:

Snake_Investor: "Dear Friends, I have been told from the highest possible source (its maid or driver) that Khooni Knives and Razors Ltd ( Company premises are actually used to make tons of cobwebs) is coming out with a 10:1 bonus issue ie 10 shares bonus for every share held!!! Date of closure is only 30 days away, in their extraordinary general body meeting!!! Buy! Buy! Buy! Stock will triple"

[10 days later]
Lamb_Investor "Dear Sir, Thanks for the info. The share has climbed to 275 from 30. I want to buy 10,000 shares with my life savings. Is there still sufficient chances of growth?

Snake_Investor: "Dear, Stock will reach 1000+. Buy! Buy! Buy!

(suddenly, the hypnotized Bull barges in)
Bull_Investor: "I am buying! Just buy! buy! buy! "

[2 days later]
Lamb_Investor: " Bought 5000 shares as share is now 500. Thanks for the recommendation"

Next day the delisting news will come with fines slapped by the monitoring agencies. The promoters have long fled to Switzerland. Share has no buyers and eventually falls to 2 rupees.

[20 days later, in the slaughterhouse]

Lamb_Investor: "I should have bought at 275 levels itself…."

Bull_Investor : " If we escape the butcher, I have one more pick to help us recover.
Anti-Itching Finance Solutions Ltd , Target 3000 , BUY BUY …Bye Bye (Chop)…."

8. The Hog Investor:
An easy classification. Hog Investors like to make pigs of themselves in Dalal Street. Instead of bringing home the bacon, they largely end up as sliced ham in a Bear restaurant. The Bears do feel like a bit of a swine when they cut up the Hogs but its all in a days work for them. After all, these greedy Hogs should know when to stop buying a certain stock. As you "Sow", so you reap.


Heres a typical encounter, the poetic license is pure Hogwash:

Hog_Investor: "Oink! Oink! Grunt! Grunt!, I need 1000 shares more you runt! "

Snake_Broker: "Against my tendency do evil and shine, I advise restraint and silently whine."

Hog_Investor: "Oink! Oink! I need 1000 more, loafer!"
"Any delay and I change my broker!"

Snake_Broker: "This hurts me more than I thought it will,"
"Got you a 1000 more Piggy, Have your fill."

[2 weeks and 20,000 shares later, the Hog loses his profits and is 90% in loss]

Hog_Investor: "Oink! Oink! How much credit do I have to start afresh?"

Shylock_Banker: "I don't know but I will be knocking for my pound of flesh."

(Actually it will need all 100 pounds of the Hog to pay for the losses, but you get the general
idea. )

9. The Vulture Investor:
Not a bad animal persona to have. Whenever a bubble bursts and millions of bulls, lambs, roosters , horses and hogs become mincemeat in the Snake /Bear owned slaughter houses, the vultures fly down to collect the scraps of stocks left behind after the carnage.

These are the times when Dalal Street is so morose that a graveyard starts resembling a Bay Watch episode in comparision. In some ways, vultures can be more succesful than Snakes and Foxes but have a habit of exiting the scene the moment a recovery takes place.

Afterwards they may mutate to other loser animal personas or stick to vulture hood patiently for a few months more.

10. The Elephant Investor:
This one is a must have guest in meeitngs and high soceity parties! Typically a high networth individual whose great grandfather was the Nawab of Nizamabad, you will see them in IPL matches with elegant women young enough to be their grand daughters.

The names of their suits and ties will have 30-40 letters and sound like a combination of an Italian dish , a newly discovered galaxy and a latin name of an animal species.

These Elephants have the proverbial computer hard disk memory and will recall the board of directors of a company that went bankrupt 67 years ago. (I wont be surprised if the Elephants father made a killing before the bankruptcy. Most Elephants have Snakes for advisors).


Elephants have the size advantage. Ok, I know that cliché wanted you to throw the monitor into my head but I mean it. They get all the juicy IPOs first and a huge allotment thereby allowing them to get bigger. And whatever good stocks are left, the Elephants can use the Trunk advantage to hose it up. They really need to gobble up 1000s of shares of 100s of companies in a typical investment year. Market collapses and bubbles just don't matter.

The Snake and the Fox use the infinite financial weight of the Elephant to ride the Horse for profits before arranging the slaughter of Lambs , Roosters, Bulls and Hogs.

This completes the top 10. You also have several other species behaviours in Investors but they are occasional. A 100 rupee profit will make the investor roar like a horny Lion. A Donkey persona will allow the investor to make an ass of himself while stubbornly catching a falling share. A Shark Investor will loan his profits to Lambs and shear their wool before the Bear makes chop suey. So on and so forth.The moral of this zoology lesson is to overcome your animal instincts and become a Human Investor. Learning from the mistakes of different personas and leveraging their strengths help improve your trade strategies to optimal levels over a lifetime. Maybe you will turn into an Elephant Investor with an FTV model by your side ;)!

Startup idea 1

You failed the IIT-JEE?Here's a novel idea to set shop..

How to do it
You somehow manage to get in near the front of long queues (railway stations, college admissions, etc). Then tell the guy behind you he can get in front of you by giving you just Re 1. Repeat that with the next two thousand people in line. If the queue is long enough and the day is hot enough, increase the fee.

Initial investment
None. If you go to sleep by mistake and actually reach the ticket counter, you might find yourself having to buy a ticket. Even in this worst case, do not despair. See our variations below. However a true professional would not hesitate to camp overnight to secure the pole position, so a sleeping bag might make good business sense.

Salary
No upper limit. You can potentially get money from every person in India. Multiple times. Why aren't we doing this ourselves?


Growth prospects
Once you have perfected your first-in-line skills, teach friends and family and employ agents in other cities to do this for you. If you could just get one agent in every college admission and railway station line in the country, you will never have to work again.

After some time, you could open a training institute for queue sacrificers. And then there would be an entrance exam, and coaching institutes for that entrance exam. And one day you'll be like Bill Gates, and someone will start an open-source queue sacrificial institute with a few dedicated fans which never becomes popular.

Possible variations
If you actually buy a ticket/get a form by mistake, go to the 100th person in line, and perform a slow and seductive dance, dangling the ticket/form in front of his/her eyes. After five minutes of this dance (or less, depending on how young/hot you are), start an auction. Black market selling just got to a whole new level.

When you become really good, hire an accomplice - a tired old lady with a heavy bag with a mobile hospital drip line in tow. After you have pulled off your little scheme once and fallen out of the line, the lady enters. She then goes to the first guy in line and says she needs that ticket/form and she can't stand in line for more than 10 minutes or she'll die. He then, overcome by pity, offers her his place in the line. She stands in line, after having called down the blessings of a few assorted deities on his head. After 5 minutes of looking anxiously at her watch and coughing blood, she recognizes a kind gentleman she knows (that's you). You admonish her for being out here with brain, blood and lung cancer, give her money to take a taxi home and take her spot in the line. No one will stop you and there you are, first in line again with 5 minutes effort. If you feel particularly cocky maybe you can pretend to be poor and convince the guy behind you to fund her taxi trip.

A nice supplement to your daily work could be side duty as the Hand of God. Whenever a poor sucker tries to queuejump ahead of you, you jump on him and rip his throat out with your bare teeth. People will start raining money on you without your even asking. You can probably take the rest of the day off. 

Things that could go wrong
A queue sacrificer who does it out of the good of his heart. Such people should be destroyed at all costs. Just accuse them of cutting in line and rip their evil hearts out.
A frustrated person in the queue might beat you to death if you ask him for money. Hopefully before this happens, your wife and kids will be provided for...