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.

Import duties on gold and silver

So it has happened! Import duties on gold and silver have risen to 15 percent from 6 percent.

India does not have gold and silver mines, all our gold and silver is imported.

This is a move to save foreign exchange. It has been tried before, and rolled back too since it didn't succeed or had other unintended consequences.

Other consequences, like what? Well, when duties are so high, the arbitrage for smugglers becomes attractive. At 15 percent, the arbitrage is salivating.

Gold is especially easy to smuggle among all the items that are smuggled worldwide. It has very high value to weight / volume ratio. It can be cast and recast into any shape you want. And there is a thriving market in it across the world, after all it is the oldest form of wealth known to mankind.

Now watch all jewelers perk up, especially the kerala based ones. No doubt the newly elected government there is already setting up a gold smuggling coordination cell, not for curbing it silly, but for aiding the smugglers!  Kerala is especially famous for this. No doubt others will follow.

What could be the scale of this smuggling?  The world production of gold is about 3000 tons per annum. India traditionally consumes about one third of the world production. We are talking of the Indian retail market here. Which is about a thousand tons.

Let us assume twenty  percent of this is smuggled. That is 200 tons.  

Gold is currently at 4700 dollars an ounce, which is 150,000 dollars a ton, which is about 1500 crore rupees. The cost of 200 tons works out to 3 lakh crores, and the import duty margin at 15 percent is 45000 crores. This is not counting the gst arbitrage which at 3 percent is another 9000 crores. 

Now once that gold comes in, money has to be sent out through the hawala channels. Instead of money, often it is a reverse flow of goods. Like drugs. Originating from the golden triangle or golden crescent, flowing through india. Or it could be other goods.

There are second order and third order consequences to such a decision.

All governments hate gold. It is for the same reason that all religions hate sex. It is a force they cannot control.

We have highly interesting times ahead, increase in duties on gold was only the first salvo.

Meanwhile, the price of my gold and silver holdings would have risen by 9 percent. Let me go check.