Is It Time For Long-Term Equity Investors To Re-Think Strategy?

In May this year, ace investor Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway reported its biggest-ever loss at 50 billion dollars in the March 2020 quarter as the coronavirus pandemic took a toll on the Oracle of Omaha’s investment portfolio. The next day Berkshire Hathaway dumped all of its holdings in the airline sector, raising questions over decades of Buffett’s wisdom on holding stocks for the long-term. In a world that stands changed forever due to the COVID-19 pandemic, investment strategies are also changing swiftly. And India is no exception. As things stand, the Indian stock market is currently favouring short-term traders over the patient long-term investors, at least going by the performance of the broader market in the last decade. The ten-year rolling returns for Nifty50 declined from 19 per cent in the year ending July 2013 to a record low of 8 per...