Latest Stock Market News

Adopting an equal-weighted and cost-averaging method of investing in equities can not only protect your invested capital but also help in generating sizeable returns by taking advantage of periods where prices are depressed. By assigning an equal weightage to all companies in one’s portfolio, capital allocation will also follow the same trend and essentially helps in mitigating risks associated with relying too heavily on a particular stock or sector.

Two gains and three drops in the S&P 500 this week left it down 6% on the year, but up 8% from its low. Which message to heed? Bonds are equally indeterminate. The 2-year/10-year yield curve has inverted and un-inverted in the space of two weeks.

Some strategists suspect the bottom has not been reached for stocks or bonds, and advise approaching both with caution.

“If the starting point for India is paying over 20 times earnings, then one should not expect as strong returns as we have enjoyed over five-year investing intervals. However, this is a really strong caveat to that. It looks like India would be able to deliver quite strong earnings growth because of the very favourable underlying fundamental dynamics.”

“Some of the utility stocks used to fall in the value space and most of our commodity stocks are kind of value stocks. In general, since there is a lot of uncertainty in the market, there is a gravitation towards value. This is a trend we have seen not only in India but even globally that is a theme in the last few weeks.”

I would use this opportunity to buy into IT between the big export drivers of India between pharma and IT, I think IT is clearly an outperformer, said Bagga.

We can clearly see post the buyback announcement at TCS happened there was a huge move on the downside and then a recovery back. So I think it is time that TCS, Infosys both will consolidate, said Kyal.

The weekly options data show high call writing activities between 17,800-18,000 levels. This means that there are very little chances of Nifty moving past this zone in the next week. The downsides too may be limited; Nifty is likely to continue to stay in a defined consolidation range.

Gibson said a major mistake made by most investors is that they try to call every market turn which is a tactic that has very little chance of success as not only is there a tendency to lose perspective in attempting to call every trend reversal, but also investors invariably exhaust their objectivity and ultimately lose touch with the market.

Amid the multi-year surge in global commodity prices and the threat of funds returning to the US, analysts and money managers believe that banks and financial sector companies are going to be the key drivers when it comes to Jan-March corporate profits.