Ignore it all

If your investing life is like a computer game, you’re doing it wrong. It should be like watching a tree grow.

I'm sorry I'm being so blunt – even rude – but as the Indian stock market has had its ups and downs, any self-declared experts have swung this way and that like a weather vane in shifting winds. One week, they're proclaiming the dawn of a new bull run, their voices dripping with conviction; the next, they're prophesying doom with equal certainty. What's most remarkable is not their ability to be consistently inconsistent but rather the unshakeable confidence with which they deliver each new forecast, all the while hoping that their audiences had forgotten the previous one.

When the markets went down in October, and everyone said that the FIIs were shifting masses of money to China, we had many articles, opinions and reels about how fabulous China was. It was a reversal, and the opinions reversed, too. Then, that cycle repeated itself in a matter of weeks. Somehow, investors are supposed to glean some wisdom from these flip-flops.

What's particularly amusing is the arsenal of sophisticated-sounding jargon these experts deploy to dress up what is essentially glorified guesswork. Somehow, these same analytical tools that explain a rally one month are used to justify a crash the next.

While the business of views and clicks goes on – because that’s what the business is – perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this endless parade of contradictory expertise is its effect on retail investors. Ordinary people trying to make sense of their investments are bombarded with urgent calls to action from every direction. Buy now before it's too late! No, wait – sell everything immediately! The real tragedy is that many of these small investors, lacking the luxury of treating the market as an intellectual game, end up making bad decisions based on these constantly shifting views.

So what should savers do? First, recognise what to ignore: breathless headlines about market movements, WhatsApp forwards predicting the next big thing, and most importantly, anyone claiming to know exactly where the market is headed next. These are all noise, not signals. The same goes for those endless debates about whether the Sensex will touch this milestone – it’s just entertainment and not even very good entertainment.

Instead, let’s focus on what matters: your financial goals, your investment horizon, and your risk tolerance. As I’ve always said, for investors, the first thing to understand and analyse is not investments but their own lives. Someone saving for a retirement decades away should view market volatility very differently from someone planning to use their investments for their child's education in two years. Build diversified portfolios that match your life, not whatever sector is touted as the next sure thing on social media.

Most importantly, appreciate that successful investing is boring. If your approach to investing is correct, it appears to happen for a while. Investing well is like watching a fruit tree grow in your garden. There is no particular day when anything exciting happens, yet a few years later, you get abundant produce.

It's about consistent SIPs, regular rebalancing, and staying invested through market cycles. It's about treating market declines not as disasters but as opportunities to buy quality assets at better prices. The most successful retail investors I've known aren't those who traded the most or who caught every market swing – they're the ones who had a plan and stuck to it, letting the magic of compounding work in their favour while ignoring the noise.

The real secret to successful investing might be knowing what not to know. Just as a healthy diet isn't about adding nutritious food to junk food, good investing isn't about layering quality analysis over market noise. It's about eliminating the noise first. The daily deluge of market commentary, the breathless breaking news, and the constant stream of hot tips are empty mental calories that cloud judgment rather than enhance it. The path to being a better investor lies in something other than consuming more information but in developing the wisdom to ignore most of it.

For more columns by Dhirendra Kumar, click here .

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