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Market history

Bulls, Bears and Other Beasts

Santosh Nair

A tour of India's market history - Harshad Mehta, Ketan Parekh, the crashes - teaches how cycles, scams and sentiment repeat.

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Chapters

9
  1. Chapter 01The Republic of Dalal StreetBefore you can win at the market, you have to learn how the machine and the people running it actually work.Read this chapter →
  2. Chapter 02The Rise of Harshad and the Equity CultThe 1992 boom was one man moving prices with money quietly borrowed by gaming the banking system - and a public that worshipped him.Read this chapter →
  3. Chapter 03Another Bubble BurstsAfter the scam broke, the rules changed and a fresh crowd of small investors piled into the next boom just in time to lose.Read this chapter →
  4. Chapter 04A New Bull Market with a New Big BullDemat and screen-trading modernised the market, then an operator used it to pump a handful of tech stocks on the 'new economy' story.Read this chapter →
  5. Chapter 05Rumblings of Another CrashThe leveraged positions unwound in 2001, brokers defaulted, and the same script as 1992 played out again.Read this chapter →
  6. Chapter 06No Stopping the BullsThe 2003-08 bull run brought a flood of IPOs, derivatives and euphoria where nobody wanted to hear a warning.Read this chapter →
  7. Chapter 07Satyam's Big LieThe 2008 global crash cratered the Sensex, and then a top IT company revealed its profits had been faked for years.Read this chapter →
  8. Chapter 08Garibi Hatao, the SKS WayA hyped microfinance IPO wrapped a growth-at-any-cost lender in a social mission, then collapsed when reality hit.Read this chapter →
  9. Chapter 09The Long Arm of the RegulatorPromoter share-pledging, bond defaults and a commodity-exchange scam finally met a regulator that had learned to bite.Read this chapter →

This is my own plain-English understanding of the book’s ideas, in my own words with my own ₹ examples, laid out against the book’s real chapters so you can relate the two. It is not the book and reproduces none of its text - if it helps, please buy the book. Not affiliated with the author or publisher. The author is not SEBI-registered; nothing here is investment advice.