Hello everyone,
During my time working at R K Kankaria & Co (My father’s CA Firm which I joined in Aug 2013) I witnessed that our clients, busy with their businesses & work life, were ready to pay for professional help with the tax-savings, but they weren’t investing those savings wisely since most of them did not seek for professional help and blocked their money into traditional(mostly illiquid or having a lock-in) asset classes of Real Estate, Gold & FDs. Some would even buy stocks of XYZ companies basis hear-say without doing any research or without reviewing these investments periodically.
Richfield has been ideated with the sole purpose of solving these 3 basic issues:
So, let us help you make your next investment decision because as they say – Opportunities Never Knock Twice.
There is a famous idiom – “money doesn’t grow on trees’’ and most Indian Children would have heard it’s hindi version (पैसे पेड़ पे नहीं उगते) at least once in their lives by their parents. The idiom seeks to impart that money is something which is earned with a lot of effort and that you should be careful on how much you spend, because it is not an infinite resource.
India has always been a country where people save more than they spend. They have imbibed savings in their DNA, having been drilled into them from when they were tiny tots. A debt is a huge no-no to many Indians even today. Some conventionalists still look down upon bank loans. If you do not have the money, you simply don’t buy. We don’t mind selling our property for our children’s higher education and live on rent till we accumulate funds to buy one again. Children continue to share their homes with their parents even after they’re working. This has an added benefit of saving on rent or purchasing a home. Managing finances, wealth and planning on savings thus becomes an important family affair. And so, there is more stress on savings and frugality than checking out various investment options.
It’s very funny, but In India we do 10 checks before even buying a bedsheet for our house, but we invest money basis what we hear from our friends/co-workers or random tips without any research. While we understand that it is not possible for every retail investor to be comfortable with investing in stock markets due to the volatility it encompasses along-with the sheer want of retail investors to have a safety pot in their portfolio bucket, one needs to acknowledge that being bereft of the most important wealth creator is not helping them either.
A recent RBI committee opined that 88 per cent of an Indian investor’s wealth is in gold and real estate (Reserve Bank of India, ‘Report of the Household Finance Committee’, 24 Aug 2017 - link), a dominance not seen in any other large economy of the world. Moreover, issues around illiquidity, emotional connect and unfavourable capital gains taxation make it harder for investors to move away from such existing physical investments. Secondly, the culture of stock market investments in India is only two decades old. With the regulatory supervision of the Indian capital markets still evolving and given the irregular quality of financial reporting by Indian companies, it is difficult for an average investor to make an informed decision. Thirdly, unlike the stock markets in some developed countries, the Indian stock market has very few great companies that sustain leadership over long periods of time.
Thus, it is important to not adhere to the age-old wisdom of investing heavily in fixed deposits, real estate and gold. These assets have unperformed equity by significant margins over long periods of time. In fact, these assets have often given returns lower than inflation over long periods of time and thus damaged investors’ wealth.
We at Richfield Fintech aim to bridge the knowledge gap and remove the fear that Indians have regarding Stock Markets by actively providing our clients with the chance to create a diversified portfolio with Alternative Investment Options which would generate better returns than their favorite Asset Classes of Real Estate & Gold and at the same time ensure that these investment options are far less illiquid than the Traditional Asset Classes.
All of our investment activities operate according to the unifying philosophy that follows:
Our goal is not superior investment performance but superior performance with less-than-commensurate risk. Above-average gains in good times are not necessarily proof of a manager's skill; it takes superior performance in bad times to prove that those good-time gains were earned through skill, not simply the acceptance of above average risk. Thus, rather than merely searching for prospective profits, we place the highest priority on preventing losses. It is our overriding belief that, especially in the opportunistic markets in which we work, "if we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves."
Oscillating between top-quartile results in good years and bottom-quartile results in bad years is not acceptable to us. It is our belief that a superior record is best built on a high batting average rather than a mix of brilliant successes and dismal failures.
The strategy we use here is very simple, you find an amazing company, calculate its true (intrinsic value) and pay a lot less to purchase the stock (when it is on sale in the market). Now, since you have bought the stock at a discount, you can make a profit by selling the stock when the price reaches its true value. These stocks can go on to produce exceptional returns over the long term, as Warren Buffett has proved.
