“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s eloquent quote renders this story completely irrelevant. You can stop reading now. Or, be a creature of habit and continue, simply to feed your curiosity or to sound intelligent in your next Zoom party. But please do so knowing fully well that this is an attempt to decode the past that is unexplainable and divine a future that is unpredictable. 

There is no certainty in investing. Sorry, in life. And, therefore, in investing too. At 90, even after beating the Index every single time (every 10 years over the past fifty years), an investing wizard’s future performance can be questioned and the past scrutinized. You know whom we are talking about. Well, no one on Planet Earth has been skillful enough to beat the stock market over really long periods, and the one who has done so, we are yet to prove was all skill. 

Right place, right time is chance. Right call is right only in hindsight. Welcome to the world of investing. Let me get down to business now. 

For, dissuading the rare few who still care to read will not do any good to an already broken media model. How are we scribes supposed to pay our bills?

That 225-word rant is in response to the recovery the market has seen post COVID-19, as if the pandemic and the death-like stillness of the lockdown never happened. Just a few months ago, in March 2020, the market had cracked under the global pandemic and it felt like we are headed into another Great Depression. The scale of the catastrophe was staggering, like seen only in sci-fi movies. The Nifty lost 40% in value over the first three months of the year, without a pause. Then, snap. The gloom dissipated and the Index rebounded with a vengeance. Who would have guessed? But, of course, everyone has figured out exactly why! We have fallen comfortably back into our delusion of an ordered, reasonable world.