Market Mayhem
Ten years, three assets, one decision a year. Beat a plain fixed deposit if you can.
You start with ₹1,00,000 and split it however you like across a fixed deposit, gold and equity. Then a year of markets happens to you — a bull run, an election nobody can call, a credit crunch, an inflation shock, or a year where nothing happens at all. You get one line of gossip beforehand, which narrows down what is coming without telling you how big it will be. Then you do it again, nine more times.
The deposit never loses and never runs. Gold does nothing for years and then earns its entire keep in the one year equity falls by a third. Equity delivers both the best year in the deck and the worst. Nobody explains that to you; ten years of watching it is a better argument than a paragraph would be.
At the end your corpus is measured against two lines that matter more than the number itself: what the same money would have done sitting in deposits the whole time, and what it needed to be worth just to keep up with inflation. Ending up richer than you started is not the achievement — a deposit manages that every year without asking you to decide anything.
The lesson most players take away is not the one they expect. It is rarely "hold more equity". It is that the allocation which wins over ten years is almost never the one that would have won any single year, and that the years which decide the outcome are the ones where the right move felt obviously wrong at the time. That is a difficult thing to be told and a straightforward thing to watch happen.
How the three assets behave
- Fixed deposit — never falls, never runs; the benchmark your final corpus is measured against
- Gold — flat for long stretches, then earns its entire keep in the year equity falls hardest
- Equity — holds both the best and the worst year in the deck, and you cannot have one without exposure to the other
- Each year opens with one line of gossip, which narrows what is coming without saying how large it will be
Related
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