The Hindu Business Line : Can’t wait to invest?

Sweet Sixteen for Sensex! Market-men party! If headlines such as these have you wringing your hands in frustration, because you’ve been on the sidelines of this stock-market rally, take heart. If you have the long-term in mind, it may not be too late yet to start with equity investing.

Having made the decision to take the plunge, which route can you take to select stocks? If you are a whiz at finance, you may be able to spot winners by trawling through company balance-sheets, crunching numbers and reading up every morsel of news about a company and its business plans. That’s fundamental analysis, the time-tested way popularised by gurus such as Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet, to pick stocks that can multiply your money over several years. But there is another way, for investors who aren’t trained in finance. Technical analysis — or the art of gauging where a stock is headed by looking at charts of its historical trends — tends to work equally well. Technical analysts study trends in stock prices and traded volumes to predict how a stock may behave in future.

How it works

But isn’t equity investing all about understanding the business, visiting the company and holding on to a stock for dear life? It is, but there could be problems too for those looking to buy and sell stocks based on fundamentals alone. Fundamental analysis can tell you whether a company’s business holds promise and is on the right track, but how do you know whether this is the right time to buy the stock?

Companies with perfectly good businesses may languish if they fail to attract ephemeral “market fancy.” What is more, with a potent cocktail of domestic as well as global factors holding sway over Indian stocks, timing has been a crucial factor in how well your equity investments perform. It has become quite usual, over the past year, to see stocks surging or falling by 5-10 per cent in a single day. Such moves can make or break your returns. Yet, cues about how a company’s financials or business has changed are available no more frequently than once a quarter!

When to buy

That’s where technicals come in. Chart patterns can be a useful tool in identifying the inflexion points in stock. Sushil Churiwala, an investor and trader, talks about his decision to buy Kirloskar Electric in March 2006 based on fundamental analysis. Though the company’s business was sound, the stock subsequently went into a prolonged correction. “Had I applied technical analysis, I could have exited it with profits and re-entered upon completion of consolidation. But I remained invested,” he says.

That experience has made Churiwala supplement traditional investment tools with technical analysis. “Inherently I am a long-term investor and, therefore, always rely more on fundamental analysis. I was attracted towards technical analysis to identify trends and decide on suitable entry and exit points,” he says.

The value dilemma

Another dilemma for a common investor is that, having identified a superb business, you also need to know the price you should pay for its stock. Ratios such as the price-earnings (PE) ratio or price to book-value ratio, used by fundamental analysts, may help set a value to a business, but there is a large dollop of subjective judgement involved in deciding what PE ratio you should pay for a particular company.

An investor who has made a successful transition to technical analysis says, “I was a fundamental analyst for almost six years before I picked up technical analysis. Fundamental analysts focus on forecasting a company’s earnings (EPS) for future years. But they have little idea about what the right PE multiple (price-earnings multiple) should be. A stock with an EPS of Re 1 will trade at 30 PE in a bull market, but slump to 6 PE in a bear market, with no real change in the fundamentals of the company. People attribute that to factors like re-rating and sentiment. Fundamental analysts could get their EPS forecast 100 per cent right and still go completely wrong on price move. That’s why I picked up technical analysis”.

After the relentless run-up in stock prices over the past four years, there are not that many good businesses that are trading at rock-bottom prices which would have the fundamental investor rubbing his hands in glee.

“Buy on rumour”

Another dimension to technical analysis is that it captures news flow that may not yet be available to the public at large. The old adage “Buy on the rumour and sell on the news” is often the best way to make a quick gain on a stock. Yet, balance sheets and published financials are hardly the best place to look for “rumours”. By capturing the behaviour of a large section of traders in a stock, technicals can often tip you off about a key event that is yet to become public knowledge.

Bharat Agarwala, CEO of Ways2gain.com — a Web site that provides a platform for budding technical analysts in India to showcase their talent and aims to increase awareness of technicals, talks of how he managed to spot several multi-baggers by using technical analysis during the bear markets. He remembers picking stocks such as Bharat Electronics and J&K Bank in early 2001, when the markets were pretty weak, based on technicals. They’ve turned out to be 5-10 baggers! He says he took to technical analysis way back in 1990, when he was in college. Then, people invested and traded purely based on what they heard on the street or from the broker. Agarwala wanted to be ‘one step up’ and, to give his investments a new dimension, started to plot charts on checked paper. That’s how it all started. “When I see some charts, I feel they have come alive and have started to talk to me,” says this ardent chart watcher.

Why they go hand-in-hand

But if all this suggests that you can throw a company’s business and its financials to the winds and rake in the money purely by chart-gazing, you would be quite wrong. In fact, the most successful investors (especially those who invest for the long term) are those who have married both these sciences, when it comes to their investment decisions.

For one, while technical analysis can provide cues about timing, this does not detract from the fact that a stock should be underpinned by a sound business and good management for long-term gains. Betting on stocks or companies with poor credentials based purely on technicals can leave you saddled with lemons, especially if the markets turn turtle, leaving you with very little time to exit. So the best practice would be to use fundamentals to decide which ones to buy and use technicals to know when to buy them.

Second, while technical tools can help you gauge stock price movements based on historic trends, these trends can reverse pretty quickly on dramatic shifts in the big picture (such as a US sub-prime crisis, or a spike in rupee). This is why most successful technical analysts often keep an eye on global and domestic developments on the macro front, along with the charts of specific companies they track, while deciding on their calls.

No money for jam

Finally, contrary to popular perception, whatever the method you use, there is no easy money to be made in the stock markets. Adopting technical tools may not require you to be a finance whiz, but reading charts is no cakewalk either! Just as fundamental analysis requires you to invest time in researching a company’s business, technical analysis requires considerable training in watching and interpreting chart patterns. It is interpretation, ultimately, that holds the key to what you make of the commonly available technical tools.

You also have to invest funds in acquiring the relevant charting software and live data that can support your foray into technical analysis.

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Can’t wait to invest?