What I heard and saw at the Mumbai Investor Meet

On Sunday,1 Feb,2015, I had attended an investor meet conducted by Pattu of Freefincal.Com

The first session was by Pattu by FreeFinCal. He spoke about goal-based inflation, accounting for inflation etc

His presentation can be downloaded from here

The next session was by Uma Shashikant on Direct Equity.According to her:

• Buying individual stocks and succeeding is a matter of luck
• Investors can beat the market only if they have a concentrated number of stocks but then they run the risk of losing very badly
• Instead of investing directly in equity,investors should invest in index funds or diversified mutual funds with a satisfactory record

The next session was on retirement planning by Subra of Subramoney.

According to him:

• A common myth is expenses go down after retirement.It actually goes up
• People should save as much as possible for retirement…for a 35 year old,retirement savings per month should equate monthly expenses
• Retirement planning should consist of Equity/Debt mutual funds
• Stay away from instruments which have the word “pension” in them
• Not very keen on real estate in retirement planning

Post lunch,Sharad Singh of TheFundoo.Com took over.According to him:

• Winning Mutual Funds can be predicted
• His site has plenty of analytical tools which can help an investor select the right mutual fund

The last session was by Amit Trivedi on Debt Mutual Funds.According to him:

• Interest rates can’t be predicted.Hence better to be in debt funds which have short maturities
• Bet on long term gilt funds if you think interest rates are going down
• Bond Fund Managers have not been able to generate meaningful alpha for their investors.