FINANCE
DOCS & STOCKS
The genesis of Indian doctors’ foray into the stock markets.
Doctors in India used to be notoriously poor in personal finance. Other than the anecdotal few who made their millions, share was what you did at lunchtime in school, stocks were what godowns were filled with, and mutual meant understanding. Funds, of course, weren’t a big issue after the first couple of years in practice. Such a gullible population was easy prey for all those insurance agents roaming around, ready with their flowery tongues and complicated offerings, promising to get your daughter married to Ambani’s son. And the clinically sound but financially naive fellows would hear the words ‘good investment’ and ‘insurance’ a few times and quickly sign up for some dreadful ULIP. By the time one realised that one had been swindled, the friendly agent would be untraceable and the money locked in for many years! The extent of the swindle would only be evident when you went for redemption and discovered that the value of your investments was less than that of the panelists’ views in Arnab Goswami’s debates. Only much later would experience teach the value of pure, term insurance.
A few years ago, India saw the rise of a strange malady. Some people began to treat doctors and hospital staff as punching bags. Many explanations were offered, ranging from evaporation of IQ, a fault in the space-time continuum which sucked away common sense to a sudden, patriotic urge to train for the Olympics, but the panel of medical experts debating this was beaten up by a mob and the results remain inconclusive. A fallout of this societal capital punishment was that a lot of doctors started realizing how vulnerable they were physically and financially. One serious injury and you were out of action. All income stopped, all liabilities continued and the world went on with its business. Soon you would be just a statistic, useful only as a number in a dull presentation, in some lame CME.
Doctors know their stuff but almost nothing else. In spite of generally being people of high intellect, they used to be incredibly naive when it came to anything to do with money, other than earning it. All this started changing a few years ago, when some of them discovered that one could make some (or even a lot) of money in stocks with no risk of being beaten up by some retard high on testosterone. At worst, you could lose your money, but your reputation, life, limbs and other assorted body parts would still be intact. This fire was fuelled by the easy access to information and the pestilent nuisance, benevolently called “social media”.
Whatsapp, FB and later, Telegram groups started mushrooming. Everyone was on the lookout for a ‘tip’, a ‘market call’, basically anything which would give a quick profit. The basic instinct of gambling raised its head under the garb of ‘investing’. Though conventional investing philosophies were professed to be followed, almost no one was willing to invest the time and effort required to study the nitty gritty of investing. Some of these groups withered away due to the lack of adequate member participation, but some continued, some came back in new avatars and some evolved into better, more sophisticated clusters.
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It would be a great injustice if I did not mention two major contributions towards financial literacy of the medico community. For me personally, the first was a conference called “Urofinancecon” conducted in 2018, which was an initiative by the Urology Society of India (USI) and discussed only matters of finance, investment, insurance and taxation. If there were such focused initiatives by other doctors’ associations or societies before that, then I confess to be unaware of them. This conference set the ball rolling in the USI and today we have vibrant groups discussing everything from insurance to MFs to hardcore technical analysis and even ‘asto, trading! A multitude of members have benefited immensely from the 2018 meeting and it’s subsequent snowball effect. However, the more far reaching, widespread and more structured impetus came from Dr Ramnath Ghute of Mumbai. In my opinion, this gentleman has done more for financial literacy of doctors than anyone will be able to do for the next few generations and needs to be feted for that. His ‘Wealthcon’ group regularly holds workshops and seminars, both online and offline, which are packed to capacity. They train naive medicos in the basics of fund allocation and MFs and the more advanced ones in the subtleties of Futures and Options. The financial experts in the group are all doctors ranging for general practitioners to ‘super’ specialists and hail from different parts of the country. Wealthcon is not a group, it is a movement and is already a brand and its significance may only be realised in hindsight many years down the line.
Coming back to our previous topic, the burgeoning of the ubiquitous whatsapp stocks group led to a growing participation of medicos in the share market. Some of this was with a genuine investment based philosophy, most was in the hope of making a quick buck. Basically it was FOMO!. Why should I be left behind when others (not necessarily more intelligent people) are minting money left, right and center? The sharing of success stories and jackpot trades on Whatsapp further entrenched this fear and led to even more speculation. The Covid-19 induced crash of 2020 was a big hiccup but the subsequent raging bull run which continues till today has everyone (almost everyone) happy and vindicated. How these groups will fare in a proper bear phase or recession is a matter of speculation. TIll then, a lot of people are making a killing in stocks. Some, who lost their nerve in the crash, have actually lost money. I am one of them. The bulls are still charging high on the testosterone of liquidity and it would not only be imprudent but also downright stupid to predict what will happen tomorrow. Till then, make hay while the sun is still shining!
Disclaimers and confessions:
- I do not know Dr Ghute personally nor am I an active member of Wealthcon group. However, I was an invited speaker at Urofinancecon.
- I have exited all Whatsapp groups devoted solely to stocks to cut out the ‘noise’.
- I could never get the hang of F&O. It was not for want of trying. It may be because of want of intellect.
- I tried my hand at short term trading and made a small profit too. However it would take up too much of my time and divert attention from clinical work, so I am now back to the good old SIP and top up on dips strategy.
- I have read a ton of books on finance, F&O, trading, magic spells and what not over the last 5 years. At the end of the day, I still find MFs to be the right choice for myself.
