Thursday, 29 March 2012

Investing in 2012 by Mr. Swapnil Pawar, CIO of Karvy Private Wealth

Investment avenues for 2012 can be recommended based on careful assessment of various scenarios that may pan out. The emphasis is more on action rather than on communicating  a certain "outlook". I believe the investors are often flooded with too much "outlook" and too little "actionable input". Here is an attempt to focus on the matter.

I have used what is typically referred to as scenario-building exercise. This is a powerful technique implemented by military planners, oil explorers and geo-political experts. Simply put, according to scenario analysis, the final shape of the world is a function of a few key drivers. These drivers affect the intermediate variables, which, in turn, shape the future. The important factor to consider here is the parallel impact of a given driver on different variables. Thereafter, we can easily come down to a fairly small list of candidate scenarios of how the world would shape up.


Using scenario analysis, we are trying to overcome 2 common problems typically faced in our endeavor of investment advice too specific and inherently speculative prediction on one hand, and too general and anything-can-happen sort of pseudo-prediction on the other. Real life is hard to predict. The attempt , therefore, is to forecast as few different alternative futures as possible, and design an investment strategy in that light. 

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