The Hindu Business Line : ‘Common man should come forward to trade in stock markets’

Kochi, Oct 17 The role of the capital market is to channelise productive resources from ordinary people to entrepreneurs for the constructive use in industrialization. The stock market would help capital formation of a company thereby benefiting the country’s economy as a whole, Mr M M Peter, Senior Manager of Geojit Financial Services, said.

Speaking at the seminar organised by The Business Line Club on Capital Market here at the Commerce Department of the St Alberts College , he said that equities was the ideal way to fetch better returns in the long-term considering the growth of the stock market in the last 21 years. The volume of index, which was 100 in 1986 is now hovering at 19,000 points resulting in an increase by 190 times.

This means that the stock market in the country has gone up by 190 times thereby providing better returns to investors. Considering the growth of stock market in the last two decades, he said that the common man should come forward to participate in share trading.

Touching upon the way of calculating the Sensex, he told students that Sensex is the barometer of the market and its function is to evaluate the stock market. It is not easy to find out the rates of each share in the market, as there are around 2,700 shares traded in the market on a regular basis. Sensex is computed by taking the prices of 30 top shares.

He said trading in Indian stock exchanges could now carried out from any part of the country and there is no geographical limitation to access the market. After the introduction of online trading, a national trading network has been set up and it has helped investors to buy and sell shares from any part of the country. The transaction of shares is now carried out in most transparent manner and there is no room for any sort of malpractices. It also helped investors to identify best prices for buying and selling of shares, he added.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Rajagopalan Nair, Head of the Department, said that the seminar is the first academic programme as part of the lecture series of the department, which is always in the forefront of organising seminars, cultural activities etc in the college.