The Vulgar Financial People

Firstly, let me explain the long silence. I recently attended the 10-day Vipassana Meditation Course in Chennai where you literally have to live the life of a monk and not utter a word. It was fantastic and I still have the hangover. Will be writing about it in detail shortly.

Now coming back to the outrageous blog title. Well I wanted to be a little soft but there is a difference between understanding anything at an intellectual level and at an experiential level. It is much easier to be compassionate and level headed when you are trying to intellectually debate something. You try to put yourself in everyone's shoe and patiently list out pros and cons of their thinking. But when you get your hands burnt, the first reaction is to burn everything in sight (Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon took it a little far by trying to burn down Bombay). My agony and disrespect for people involved in financial markets is reaching its zenith now.

The best part of this entire affair is that in the entire process almost nothing of any tangible value gets generated. Everything is dependent on speculations which people learn rather quickly to generate. Everybody seems to be a self made expert in the field. A B.Com. graduate speaks with the same flair as someone with a Ph.D. All the news readers and correspondents on the 24-hours business news channels talk in supreme confidence masking their extremely shallow knowledge by make up and beautiful prose. People with an IQ less than 100 (I personally have nothing against them!) keep getting richer and richer. And one day, it all comes down melting away years of wealth generated by legitimate sweat and illegitimate blood. No one has any clue!

Someone I know works as a "Wealth Manager" in a leading bank. According to her, they spend a pile of money on informants who keep supplying leads on how to reallocate the portfolio almost every 15 mins. This helps them to be on top of things. I then asked her the obvious question "Did you know on Friday that Black Monday is coming?". No surprises when she shamelessly said "NO. What can we do if the market crashes?". How convenient! Rake in all the bonus when the market is inflated and you have no contribution to it (stories of bonuses in crores are commonplace). But when things go wrong, just wash of your hands and move on.

I made the mistake of believing such morons from a "reputed" investment house. They assigned a wealth manager to me. I out of misplaced trust and complete ignorance handed over a sizable chunk of money and gave them a free hand to go and multiply it. Somehow there was some misunderstanding and they chose a factor << 1 for multiplication. Before I realized, more than half of the principle had evaporated. It took me sometime to come back to senses when I severed the relationship, reclaimed the dregs and started to learn things on my own. Even if I never learn and keep making losses, it would be more comforting than losing it from the hands of incompetent blokes.

If only I had enough money, I would have airdropped "Fooled by Randomness" by Nicholas Nassim Taleb over all areas heavily infested by financial pests (like Dalal Street, Nariman Point, Gujarat etc.). It's fine to be stupid. Almost everyone behaves that way at many points in their lives. But if you have made stupidity and chaos your profession, it's not a bad idea to know a little more about it. Atleast it will help you to keep the biggest hole on your face shut for better.