Take Things Forward From Here, Mr Sinha

While we talk about investments, trading, returns and do all the money talk from the Dalal Street, in every action of ours market regulator is involved. When the role of the market regulator remains so important, we also need to understand the role being played by the captain of the ship—in this case, U K Sinha, chairman of SEBI. This edition of your favourite investment and financial magazine focuses on the role of the watchdog when it comes to protecting the interests of the millions of investors. Our Executive Editor spends hours inside SEBI headquarters in suburban Mumbai to understand how this quasi-judicial body operates in a complex market and investment environment. We then bring in the positive things done by SEBI in recent times while also being unbiased and talk about the things which the market regulator could have done better. While we note Sinha and his team so far has done a noteworthy job, we being with our reader-investors for last 30 years also believe things could have been better, faster. With Sinha’s term now being extended by at least another year, we expect some more real cracking job be done by SEBI. May be a more balanced role it should play here onwards.

Meanwhile, results of a large number of listed corporate entities for the fourth quarter of the last financial year have been published and things are looking better than that of the third quarter. We expect the next quarter’s results to be more impressive bringing in much awaited smiles on the faces of the investors. After all, good numbers always make us happy and especially when numbers denote money.

Results of the five states’ legislative assembly elections have poured in and we are going to see some changes in context of Kerala and Assam. While the left parties in alliance with Congress miserably failed to dent the fort of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, Tarun Gogoi’s Congress party lost the battle of polls to BJP in Assam thus losing the chances of coming back to power for the fourth time. It will be interesting to see how BJP government in Assam handles challenges in this north-east Indian state. LDF in Kerala will also face a tough challenge coming to power as UDF lost the election fight there.

I always think India has too many public sector banks—27 is a big number. Now that SBI has got the nod of the government to go for merger with five more banks, there are ample reasons to believe very soon number of public sector banks will drastically fall and only less than a dozen will survive as stronger entities thus giving better returns to their stock-holders. Let the fittest ones only to survive.

Monsoon clouds have started playing hide and sick in certain pockets in India—West Bengal and National Capital Region have already faced the first spell of shower while the country’s commercial capital, Mumbai has been eagerly awaiting rains after a brief spell which barely drenched the city. Rural India needs good monsoon this time which can make lot of things happen—including a higher Sensex. By the time we come up with the next edition, monsoon should cool down the prevailing heat.

Till then, stay safe and invest wisely.