Simhavalokana 2024: Mr. Market’s 10 lessons in the year gone by

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: The Sanskrit language has a fascinating lexicon. It may not match up to English in the size of vocabulary but more than makes up for it by morphing the same word into different context-dependent meanings.

Unravelling the common thread between these seemingly different meanings is like solving a crossword. In Sanskrit, the word for a tooth, a bird and a Brahmin is the same: Dwij. Literally translated, it means ‘twice-born’.

Milk teeth give way to permanent teeth; a bird is born as an egg before it is born in its avian form and Brahmin is believed to be spiritually reborn after the thread ceremony. Or take the word simhavalokana. As a lion walks in the jungle, he periodically stops and looks back at the path he traversed.

This retrospective glance is called simhavalokana but at an abstract level, it means reviewing elapsed time. As an investor, this is my simhavalokana for the year, or for the listicle-minded, ten (+1) things that Mr. Market taught me in 2024.

In a roaring bull market, having an investment memory can be a handicap. In two decades as a professional investor, one has lived through business and economic cycles, shenanigans of unscrupulous promoters or companies that have held promise but never delivered. I evaluated MakeMyTrip (MMYT) early in the year when the price was around $45 per share.

I had assessed the company a few times over the past decade but had opted not to invest. What bothered me was that for over a decade, MMYT had reported negative Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) for all years except two. Irrational competition or weak consumer spending had proved to be the spanners in the works.