DSIJ IAPs: Educating Investors on Wealth Creation!
As we bid adieu to the current financial year, the DSIJ Family is blissful and proud of having completed 68 Investor Awareness Programmes (IAPs) across various cities in India. The IAPs were met with an overwhelming response from equally excited crowd of equity and mutual fund investors in each of the cities we had visited. The high level of enthusiasm of the IAP audiences has managed to raise our spirits and encouraged us to travel to various locations to meet and greet the wonderful investors.
Dalal Street Investment Journal(DSIJ), along with its partners, Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Sundaram MF and IIFL, toured across the country to reach out to investors in the metros, tier-2 and tier-3 cities across India with the sole mission of educating investors and guiding them to follow a well-planned and rewarding investment routine. The IAPs were conducted by the senior editorial team at DSIJ.
IAPs covered various topics on the stock market and focused on the do's and don'ts in the world of investing.
Investors were thrilled to know the golden rules of investing and were highly receptive to the idea of investing for the long term.
The IAP tour started with the first programme in the city of Nawabs, i.e Lucknow. Lucknow investors were interactive and had many questions to ask on the correct method of investing. The team was encouraged by the response in the capital city Lucknow and travelled to one of the industrious cities in India--Kanpur. The investors were apprised with the golden rules of investing again and the ways to construct a diversified portfolio to beat the markets. The speaker demystified the myths of investing .
We received a huge response and appreciation from the audience present at each of the events in Uttar Pradesh and we can definitely say the same for the event held at Meerut. The DSIJ team also covered the historic city of Agra in the same tour and met with delightful investors.
The busy month of May saw the DSIJ team travelling to six cities and covering nine events.
Massive turnouts of investors welcomed the DSIJ team in all the cities. In the beginning of the month, IAP team captivated the attention of the audience at Meerut where investors came up with fascinating questions, such as, whether stock SIP is better than mutual fund SIP? After Meerut, the team went to Gurgaon and then Noida, followed by two events in the capital city, New Delhi. All the events saw trmendous enthusiasm amongst investors in the cities of North India.
In the latter part of May, the IAP team journeyed to the wonderful cities of Ahmedabad and Surat in the business savvy state of Gujarat. The investor-audience turnout did not disappoint us, but met with our expectations in Ahmedabad, where we attended to a whopping 258 strong audience at an event in the morning session and 215 investors in the evening. The crowd was engaging and came up with multiple questions on mutual fund investing, ELSS, and also on sectors one should invest in, and all were very reasonably answered by our competent speaker. The next destination was Vadodara, where there was much talk on mutual fund in the discourse. In the rainy month of June, the travels began again, starting with Vadodara, followed by two events in Rajkot, three in Pune and lastly in Ahmednagar. The morning session in Rajkot was met with sumptuous number of around 200 engaging investors. The investors paid deep attention to the speaker who brought to notice the market mantras and let the cat out of the bag on investment.
In Pune too, the three events catered to a humongous audience of around 450 members over the two-day event in the home city of DSIJ. The month of June ended in Ahmednagar, which yet again saw an engaging crowd of over 180.
In July, the team engaged with investors in Bhopal, Indore, Raipur and Nagpur. The energetic investors of Bhopal turned to the speaker to clear their doubts concerning portfolio construction, the right time to enter and exit stocks, etc. Similar response was elicited in the remaining cities. In August, when the markets were touching new highs of 2018, the IAP team visited various cities of Gujarat and Maharashtra. The main purpose of IAPs each year is to reach out to the investors in every corner of the country and answer their numerous queries and IAPs have emerged as a vital platform to do so. We are sure that the audience at Navsari, Anand, Gandhinagar, Mehsana, Bhavnagar, Satara, Karad, Kolhapur and Belgaum would agree with us when we say that the IAPs have made a huge difference in their views about the markets, bringing in some clarity and also aiding them to construct a diversified portfolio after taking into consideration the risk profiling, understanding what an investor is buying into, studying the company’s balance sheet, taking advantage of the market when it is irrational, and so on.
The discourse in the IAP sessions held in Nashik, Vijayawada and Hyderabad was on market scenarios, investment strategies, risk profiling, mutual fund schemes. Two events were held in each of these cities, one in the morning and one in the evening, with the sole purpose of providing information of utmost importance relating to the stock market and mutual fund investing. These three cities proved to be a magnificent experience for the DSIJ team as the response from the audience was quite inspiring and the enormous numbers that showed up instilled confidence and boosted the IAP team to go on with this journey of enlightening the investors.
During the meets, it was noticed that people panic when the market is bearish, and it is mostly in these times that an investor, whether an amateur or a pro, needs to be given back the confidence in the market. IAP sessions have uplifted the investors’ sentiments through August to October when the markets corrected sharply. In October, when the market was at its new lows (Sensex touching around 33,349 level), the team was doing its duty at Solapur and Aurangabad. Both the cities reacted with tremendous response, while Aurangabad catered to one of the biggest crowds consisting of 186 people. In November, the markets picked up and so did the DSIJ team by organising 2 events in Goa and one in Hubbali. The audience asked various questions, such as investment plans post retirement, why certain indices were tanking, should one invest directly in MFs or through a distributor? The speaker shed light and deep insights on the fascinating queries of these investors.
Following the fulfilling interaction with the investors in the previous months, the IAP team near the year-end travelled to the Silicon City of India, Bangalore, and then to Mysore. The weekend turned out to be excellent with an enthralling session. Thereafter, the DSIJ team welcomed the year by travelling to major cities including Delhi and Kolkata. As expected, the investors were filled with the new year spirit and yearned to know more about where to invest and where the market was going. To fulfill the needs of investors, two events each were held in these cities. The team experienced a cheerful crowd and enjoyed a lot with the audience.
It is now the end of the fiscal year and thus a time to come to a conclusion. In February, IAPs were conducted in Pondicherry, Chennai and Coimbatore, while in March, we conducted ten events including Latur, Nanded, Amravati in Maharashtra, then moving down South to Kochi, Madurai and Thiruvananthapuram and then springing back to Maharashtra’s Sangli and ending it finally in our home city of Pune. IAP has received tremendous response and enthusiasm from people all over India. It was indeed our aim to deliver contemporary and valuable information to all our valued investors. We have successfully conveyed fruitful knowledge to the investors and we thank all the investors for their keen participation for making the IAPs a grand success.
