Haphazard Linkages

The frequency of my posts have dropped drastically. I am at a loss to decide whether this is attributable to market conditions, or me not having anything significantly intelligent to say...I am tempted to vote for the latter. After months of contemplating what to write, I settled for an exposition on something that I term "beautiful". Capital structure is something that does not get as much importance as it should by investors, analysts and management in general. What is the optimal capital structure? I wish someone knew the answer. In this post, I take a look at how the markets treat two companies that are similar in most respects except for their capital structures. I then take a look at a case of possible mis-pricing and how often, even 'good' companies never seem to get their due. Capital Structure irrelevant? Hmm... I consider Chambal Fertilizers and GNFC (fertilizers again!) for this post. Most finance experts and academics advocate having 'some' ...

My brain requested me to let it go on a vacation...So I listened and went on a sabbatical. I hope you missed me! Much has changed - both in India and globally - since my last post. Markets around the globe seem to have caught a collective cold. I am probably feeling happy after quite a while in the markets, with so much pessimism going around. The markets have now tuned their radars to pick up the slightest of negative news flows to go on a free fall. In this post, I take a look at some interesting developments in delinquency rates related to real estate and the response of the equity markets (S&P 500). Admittedly there are number of factors that have a bearing on the movement of the S&P 500 and one cannot see the causal effect of one on another in isolation. But as they say…sometimes the part is better than the whole…especially when trying to get a sense of how things fit together to form the larger picture! Delinquency rates – to put it crudely – measures how many lo...