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Sudhanshu Ranade

Chennai, July 8 The post-March rally in stocks has seen the pivotals recover some of the ground lost earlier. For the large majority of other stocks, however, it has been anything but that.

The Sensex zoomed past 15,000 on August 30, 2007, apparently determined to notch up 1,000-point gains every second day. But soon afterwards the index had second thoughts, after closing at an all-time high of 20,827 in January 2008; taking belated note of the sub-prime crisis which had long ago become public knowledge. The Sensex then shot rapidly past 15,000, this time on its way down, meandered its way down to 8,198 over the next 14 months, and then began a somewhat breathless return to 15 K, which it breached on June 4, 2009.

As many as 312 of the 485 companies that make up the S&P CNX 500 were in negative territory on June 4.

While losses were relatively small in about a third of these companies, the picture was rather bleak for the other two-thirds.

After adjusting for stock splits and bonus issues, it turned out that 33 companies suffered an erosion of 60 per cent or more. Another 66 lost between 40 and 60 per cent, while 106 lost between 20 and 40 per cent – even though the Sensex had by now regained the perch on which it had first settled about two years ago.

It would not be possible to mention the names of all these companies, and it would not be fair to mention the names of only some. However there were a great many gainers; indeed almost 100 companies were able to notch up gains of 20 per cent or more.

So much for how the companies fared. The fate of people investing in these companies is a different matter altogether, and that story does not hinge on, and cannot as tidily be summed up as, the share prices prevailing at arbitrarily chosen start- and end-dates.

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