Five Fictions of Modern Finance

. 1. Money is Wealth: far from it. Money is just a promissory note that others will honour that piece of paper. Meanwhile, the government continues to print more of it and distributing it as per its whims and fancies. 2. IF YOU INVEST IN MONEY, YOUR WEALTH IS PROTECTED: Sorry buddy, your money is depleting in value by the day. You need to invest in assets, and currencies are not assets 3. DEBT IS SAFE: Nothing is farther from the truth. The rate of increase of your money in debt is always less than the rate of reduction in purchasing power. In other words, your real returns from debt which is your nominal return minus inflation, is always negative. 4. GOLD IS A USELESS ASSET, AN UNPRODUCTIVE LUMP OF METAL: On the contrary, gold is currency. Gold is money. So is silver. 5. IT IS UNPATRIOTIC TO BUY GOLD, MODI ALSO SAYS SO : HA HA HA HA... If you believe blindly in patriotism you are either naive and foolish, or in the army. Patriotism is a fiction, just like religion, to keep the masses under subjugation and the rulers in power. All Central Banks including the Indian Central Bank are buying gold at a furious pace while trying to ensure that their citizens don't buy it. Let me know your thoughts

A single flight of stairs

Just watch at the airport. After check in, to go to security, you have to climb  just one single flight of stairs. 

No one takes the stairs, everyone uses the escalator.

Some of them  are people wo  will be using a Stairmaster in the gym under the supervision of a personal trainer. 

Some of them, especially the MNC types, will be participating in  one weekend marathon a year so that they can post it on linked in. 

Some of them will be tracking all their vital parameters through their smartwatch, and asking AI to analyse the results and give them an optimal life plan. 

All of them if asked, will say that fitness is key and functional fitness is more key, since that is the new mantra.

But none of them will climb a single flight of stairs.

The Pharma Devil's Dictionary

Doctor: The one whose job is to make you sicker and permanently dependent on the medical system.

Allopathy: The first resort in an emergency, the last resort for preserving and enhancing your health.

Hospital: The place where they empty your wallet to destroy your health.

Diagnostic tests: The front office of the Pharma Mafia. Their job is to bring in the Bakras 

Bakra: You 

Statins: That drug that fosters life long dependence, does nothing to help you, harms you in many ways, makes tons of money for the Pharma industry, and is completely useless and unnecessary. There are many drugs of this kind. 

Drug: a chemical designed to screw up your body, thus making you need more drugs. 

More drugs: What you always need, due to the effect of other drugs, or due to fear induced in you by the medical fraternity. 

Medical fraternity: a fraternity that works to enrich itself and impoverish you.

MBBS degree: A course of study where all common sense is driven out of you, that converts you into a pill prescribing salesman of the Pharma Industry. 

Illness: A state that you can check into but never check out of. 

Wellness: what is that? 

Vaccine: a cocktail of poisonous chemicals to destroy all natural immunity and foster dependence on more vaccines, and on the medical system. 

Immunity: something that is natural and god given and something that the medical system hates.

Alternative medicine: That fount of traditional wisdom accumulated over centuries of human existence that is best to ignore and demonise. 

Nutrition: A subject not even covered in any medical course. Where covered, it mostly  teaches the wrong things.

Common sense: something that the patient is actively discouraged from exhibiting, and something that the doctors lack.  

Diagnostic thresholds: those numbers that are constantly lowered, in order to declare more and more people sick and in need of medicine.

Scientific Research Paper: the output of a rigorous process based on fundamentally flawed assumptions. 

Doctor working for a hospital: a highly paid employee whose job is to get more and more suckers to fill more and more beds so that the hospital can make more and more money. Basically a salesman chasing targets. 

Pharma Company: the devil's workshop

Illusions

Anything that scales up and is run by a corporate soon becomes a zombie with all life and soul sucked out of it. 

In the layers of corporate hierarchy, each person has a job to fulfil which has absolutely no connection to the end customer or what is being achieved. 

Each individual working in a corporate is not a person - he or she is just a "role", an automaton recruited and indoctrinated to walk the walk and talk the talk. 

There are two kinds of people working in any corporate. Those who are sold on the illusion that they are doing something useful for humanity and for their own upliftment. HR loves such people, HR's only job is to foster illusions. These people are to be pitied. 

The other category of people is those who know they are working for the sake of their livelihood and don't subscribe to the illusions. Such people pity themselves since not buying into illusions creates great cognitive dissonance, it is surely  not a recipe for happiness. 

I definitely belonged to the latter category, but I always envy those who buy into illusions. They are probably happier

Investment strategies for today

More and more, investment strategies have to focus on the macro aspects like sector performance, asset class performance, etc.

The old mantra of "be invested in all asset classes and it will average out over time" may no longer apply.

When Benjamin Graham wrote "The Intelligent Investor", he emphasized on individual stock selection and margin of safety. With the democratisation of information,  AI analytics and the surfeit of analysts, it is not easy to find the proverbial  "cigarette butts".

Then Buffett came up with "find good companies at a reasonable price" formula.  Buffett, Peter Lynch with his Fidelity Magellan Fund, and the likes of Jhunjhunwala and Sadashiv Mankekar could do it. It is still possible to do this, but not everyone can be like these greats. It is also increasingly difficult to "discover"  hidden gems, for the same reasons as stated above.

The market is increasingly driven by instritutional and cross border money flows. They all tend to move in a herd, and there is always a lag between a trend becoming obvious and it catching on. Can you as a retail investor spot the trend, and move before the herd does?

For example, the place to be for the immediate foreseeable future is gold and silver, gold and silver mining stocks, commodities and within commodities copper and Uranium, and  commodity stocks.

I am in the process of shifting my investments to these. Whether I am right or wrong only time will tell, but there is no option but to have a view and act on it.

Ultra defensive plays like shifting predominantly to debt at 7 to 8 percent taxable is also likely to be disastrous with high inflation on the cards across the world.

We are living in very interesting times.