The Hindu Business Line : Savvy investors or punters?

From a hobby, to trading, to long-term investing... more and more women are entering the uncertain world of equity. While the astute investors are making money, the punters are fishing in troubled waters.

Roshini Adige has a bounce in her step these days. She has made a killing in the stock market again. A research analyst with a reputed Chennai-based firm, she started investing in equity last September, just as the market started moving up. Around that time, she came into some money and used the spare cash to invest in the stock market.

She says that her strategy is quite simple and a good one for a boom market. She buys into stocks that are appreciating, books her profits at 20 per cent and exits the stock when the price stabilises. Then she reinvests the proceeds in another stock and waits for it to rise. Fortunately for her, she has read the market right so far!

The recent boom in the stock market has drawn an entirely new set of investors who are quite different from the ones who played the market prior to the Harshad Mehta scam.

A great majority have burnt their fingers so badly that they have not come back to the market, says a market analyst. The early 1990s saw a large number of companies come out with their initial public offerings and the public fell for the tall promises made by these managements and invested in the shares only to be left with equity that was not even worth the paper it was printed on.

Then came the goat schemes, the farmlands, teak trees and finally the finance companies — all of which offered the investor quick and huge returns. Unfortunately, these did not materialise. Hundreds of people lost their money in these scams.

Today, for a large number of middle-class women, a `good' investment still remains gold, fixed deposits and land. The level of knowledge is still very much the same, says Beena Rani, manager in an investment services company. "A number of women come to my office every day to buy and sell shares. But they are not really aware of the fundamentals of the stock and are trading on some kind of gut feel," she says.

Sometimes, she adds, many of these women go totally against advice. For instance, there was this woman who was dealing in stock lots of 500, with her specialty being to sell short. When advised against this, she started dealing in stock lots of 1,000!

Mary Matthew has a totally different view of the stock market. A retired schoolteacher, with a brother who used to be a stockbroker in Mumbai, she invests in penny stocks. Mary picks up stock worth Rs 3 or Rs 4 and waits out till these stocks reach Rs 40 or more and then she exits the stock. She says that in most instances, had she waited a little longer, she would have made more money.

A totally different view has been taken by Smita Aiyar, General Manager, Expocity, who says, "It was in the mid-1970s when as a loans officer in Vijaya Bank I would see businessmen come and pledge their shares to raise more money. It was part of my work to evaluate their creditworthiness. Just out of curiosity, I asked some of them what they wanted the money for and they would say that they were going to reinvest in the market."

This got her interested in equity. "At that time, companies like Cadbury's and ITC came out with public issues, so my husband and I decided to apply for some shares. Like that, we build up our portfolio over the years."

For her, investing in shares is more of a hobby. If one really wants to make money in the market, then one has to concentrate on trading all the time. This is not possible if one has a challenging job, says Smita.

But this is not Rupa Bharat's idea of investment. A housewife, she says, "This kind of... here today gone tomorrow nature of the stock market is something that I cannot handle. I'd rather invest in land. We invested in land on the Old Mahabalipuram Road in Chennai years ago and now it has more than doubled in value.

The number of women who invest in the stock market is far less than the men, says Beena Rani. In most cases, the husband operates in the market as a proxy for his wife. In a majority of cases, he also makes most of the major decisions on where to invest the money.

Today's investors are less likely to fall for investment in goat schemes and corporate farms, says Rupa.

Enough publicity has been given to those schemes and how fraudulent they were. "Now someone has to come up with something new," she adds.

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

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