Seven Skills for Indian Markets

indian-market-data-literacy

Reading the bhavcopy. Bhav means price, so a bhavcopy is the day's copy of prices: the file NSE publishes after every session, and the one the market and Artha both read daily prices from. What delivery percentage tells you. Why a bonus or a split hands you more shares and cuts the quoted price to match, so a series that does not know it happened shows a crash that never happened and every return built on it is wrong. The .NS and .BO suffixes, why NSE and BSE quote different prices for the same company, and what a circuit limit does to a candle.

portfolio-pnl-review

Realised against unrealised. XIRR against absolute return against CAGR, and when each is the right question. FIFO on partial sells, and cash-flow-weighted returns when money went in over time.

Prevents reading a 40 percent gain over four years as a 40 percent return.

portfolio-concentration-review

How concentrated the portfolio is, measured rather than counted. Take each holding's share of the portfolio, square it, add the squares, and invert the total. What comes back is the effective number of holdings: how many equal-sized positions the portfolio actually behaves like. Twenty names with half the money in one behave like about four. Sector concentration measured against a benchmark rather than against zero. SEBI and AMFI market-cap bands as they are actually defined. Promoter-group cross-exposure, so four companies in one house register as one bet.

Prevents believing twenty holdings means twenty bets.

portfolio-risk-metrics

Sharpe, Sortino, beta, R-squared, maximum drawdown, volatility, on India-correct inputs: 252 trading days and a risk-free rate near 6.5 percent rather than the US default a model assumes. The minimum sample below which each metric should not be quoted.

Prevents importing US defaults, and trusting metrics the sample cannot support.

mutual-fund-overlap-review

Computing overlap from published holdings. Declared scheme category against actual holdings. Direct against regular expense ratio compounded over a real holding period, expressed in rupees rather than basis points.

Prevents six funds that are one position wearing six names.

reading-indian-filings

Forensics on the India-specific disclosure set: related-party transactions and their approval trail, promoter pledge and what a pledge percentage does not mean, insider and SAST disclosures, auditor qualifications and emphasis-of-matter paragraphs, contingent liabilities, and the gap between standalone and consolidated accounts.

indian-investment-taxation

Structure rather than rates. Indian tax law sorts every rupee into one of five heads of income, and the head decides the rate, what a loss can be set off against, and which form you file. A share you held and sold is capital gains. Futures and options are business income. Bank and bond interest is income from other sources. Holding-period boundaries and where they differ by instrument, the 31 January 2018 grandfathering for equity, STT, dividend TDS, and buyback treatment. The skill asks you to confirm the assessment year before it states any rate, because the Income-tax Act, 2025 renumbers almost every section from 1 April 2026.