Why Retail Investing can be Dangerous
India’s stock markets are now in their longest slump in nearly 30 years which in turn has seen some $1 trillion of market capitalisation wiped out
On Episode 532 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Deepak Jayaraman, leadership coach and host of the podcast Play To Potential. We also feature an excerpt from our Weekend Edition interview with Y S Chakravarti, Managing Director and CEO at Shriram Finance.
SHOW NOTES
(00:00) Stories of the Day
(00:50) Why retail investing can be dangerous
(07:30) Gold prices hit an all time high on continued uncertainty
(09:37) Why do we get messages offering us loans even if we don’t want them?
(15:00) The China Xi Put, why China is an increasingly attractive market for investors
(17:38) How should CEOs and business leaders approach this era of tariff uncertainty
NOTE: This transcript contains the host's monologue and includes interview transcripts by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on [email protected].
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Good morning, it's Monday the 17th of March and this is Govind Raj Athiraj, headquartered in broadcasting and streaming from an increasingly warm Mumbai, India's financial capital. Our top stories and themes for the day.
Why retail investing can be dangerous?
Gold prices hit an all-time high on continued uncertainty.
Why we get messages and texts offering us loans even if we don't want them?
How should CEOs and business leaders approach this era of tariff uncertainty?
The China Xi-put, why China is an increasingly attractive market for investors.
The Perils Of Retail Investing
Indian stock markets are now in their longest slump in nearly 30 years, which in turn has seen some $1 trillion of market capitalisation wiped out. A good part of this has been driven by consistent foreign institutional investor selling, which has touched about $16.5 billion in 2025 alone, including, of course, several billion dollars in March. Some of this might be surprising, given that the decline has been slow and steady, and it's usually sudden falls and rises that catch our attention and are easier to recall.
A slow but steady decline can, however, do more damage, including to consumer confidence, a report put together by Reuters says. The slump in losses and the major blow to retail investors are denting consumer spending and threatening to further slow growth in the fifth largest economy in the world, the Reuters report says. Moreover, it's not clear right now, thanks to Trump and where this horizon or this fall is, since Indian markets are obviously grappling with two sets of problems, both internal and external, as we've talked about in the past.
While analysts are now cautiously calling out a pickup in the second quarter of next year for the domestic economy, which is roughly six months from now, no one knows what and where Trump's tariff rants will land or how they will affect companies. Now, the NEC Nifty 50 and Basie Sensex index have fallen about 14% since their September peak, while the broader indices, including the small and med cap ones, have dropped over 20%, thus entering a bear market. Back to Reuters, it quotes the story of a young investor among nearly 100 million new investors who took to trading stocks and acquitted derivatives via low-cost trading platforms, supplemented, as we've seen, by a constant drip of smart-alecky messaging and advice on social media from various stockbrokers or those who run those trading apps.
With a four-year cycle to look back to, which has obviously been good and strong, short memories and greed feeding tantalising information and stock tidbits has been the name of the game, and obviously it worked till it stopped. Now, in that Reuters report, the investor in question invested his Rs 100,000 or roughly $1,150 savings in equities in Jan 2024, doubled his money by August, which encouraged him to borrow funds for riskier options trading. When markets tumbled, he took losses and borrowed more on hopes of a rebound, trapping him in debt.
The thing with option trading is that the gains are massive but I was underprepared to face the loss, he told Reuters. He and his family have now slashed spending to a bare minimum. Reuters spoke to dozens of such retail investors in the major Indian cities who were either pausing or cutting their overall spending, including reducing investments in markets in the near term.
Another one is delaying plans to buy a house after the market downturn wiped about 14% or roughly Rs 20 lakh of his portfolio's peak value, and he was obviously hoping to cash out from the markets to make initial payments for his home. There are also the early signs of this market slump impacting auto sales, as Federation of Auto Dealers or FADA President C.S. Vigneshwar told the Core Report week before last. The other thing to remember, as a BST report points out, is that retail investors have been hit harder because their favourite bets have fallen the most compared to other stakeholders such as foreign investors and domestic institutions.
In the NSE500 universe, a mix of large, mid-cap, and small-cap stocks where retail investors have had a stake of over 20% have dropped 45% from their 52-week highs, according to Bloomberg data quoted by BST. Meanwhile, stocks with over 20% holdings by domestic institutional investors have fallen 34%, while global funds with such stakes have slipped 29%. Remember, we at the Core Report have been talking about the intrinsic value of foreign portfolio investing because while it is capital that is looking for returns and sometimes quick ones, it's usually also followed or backed by a very high-quality or usually very high-quality research. The Nifty 50 and Sensex, as we've just said, have fallen around 14% respectively from their previous week.
Since September 26 last year, the market capitalisation of stocks in which retail investors hold more than 20% has fallen about 27%. Stocks held by domestic investors, that is, domestic institutional investors and foreign portfolio investors, have fallen 15%, roughly, according to data once again compiled by Business Standard. So, if you were a small investor having invested in a stock where retail investors like you had more than 20% stake, then that would have fallen by close to 27%, whereas, obviously, stocks that were predominantly held by institutional investors or foreign portfolio investors have declined much less.
The point, obviously, being is that you've chosen to follow a trend or a path or maybe a social media tip, clearly reflecting a more retail-driven frenzy rather than an institutional-driven investing strategy. So, all this means that markets are a dangerous arena to play in with your own money. The temptation of reading a social media post by a know-it-all brokerage owner and switching to that app on the same mobile phone to buy stocks or worse derivatives is dangerous and there is no doubt about that and is now, unfortunately, unravelling.
The markets will undoubtedly do well in the long term and provide good returns, more so in an economic environment where inflation is eating up large parts of a slow-rising income. But it also calls for patience, it calls for the ability to stay away from daily diets of wisdom and instead building a long-term strategy. Yes, I realise all of this is easier said, but on the other hand, you could let someone else, like an institutional investor, do it for you and stick to that person.
Meanwhile, last week saw the market finishing slightly lower in a holiday-shortened trading week. The Nifty 50 fell about 155 points to close at 22,397 and the Sensex dropped 504 points to close at 73,829. This is for the week.
The broader markets dropped a little more. The week ahead is still riding on some good news in the form of lower inflation in India that we saw last week and lower oil prices as we've seen and are going to come to in a moment. Trump's tariffs are now a situational challenge or problem and markets, at least in India, may not react beyond this to the current news flow because, among other things, it's just tough to react.
Friday saw a relief rally on Wall Street, but the Dow still fell about 3% for its worst week since March 2023. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both dropped more than 2% and posted their fourth consecutive losing week. Big Tech shares that earlier took a beating saw a Friday, according to CNBC, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, and Amazon and Apple all rose between 5% and 3%.
Stocks bounced, as CNBC says, after a lack of new headlines out of the White House-related tariffs, easing concerns around escalating tensions for the time being, which sounds actually quite bizarre if you were to think about it. Or it could be just Trump is cooking up, taking a break, and getting ready to serve his next round of tariff threats. A decline of more than 1% on Thursday, by the way, pulled the S&P 500 on Wall Street into a correction, which is a decline of at least 10% from the record lows, which was seen just 16 days ago.
The sell-off also has dragged the small-cap Russell 2000 index into a bear market or a drawdown of 20% from its high, according to CNBC.
Gold Scores
The big news last week was gold, which broke through its crucial $3,000 barrier on Friday. Bullion has risen nearly 14% so far this year, driven in part by concerns over the impact of Trump tariffs and a resultant sell-off in stock markets, according to Reuters.
Investors are obviously moving to gold, which is a safe-haven asset, to seek protection from the economic uncertainty that we see around us. Spot gold hit an all-time high of $3,004 on Friday, before easing off to about $2,986. But as we've been reporting here, gold has been perched very close to that $3,000 mark for some time.
Gold surge has also been driven by beleaguered investors seeking the ultimate safe-haven asset, driven Trump's tumult on stock markets, a metal trader told Reuters. Another one said real-asset money managers, particularly in the West, needed a strong market and economic slowdown scare to return to gold, and that's happening. Importantly, as we've been seeing in the last year, gold has been supported by central bank demand, with key buyer China building its bullion reserves for the fourth straight month in February, according to Reuters.
An analyst said that central banks continue record-level gold acquisitions, seeking to diversify away from an increasingly volatile US dollar, and that's something to keep in mind in the context of the rupee as well. Goldman Sachs said in a note that there was an upside risk to its $3,100 N2025 base case scenario and to its $3,100-$3,300 per ounce forecast range, as US policy uncertainty may support investor demand.
Oil Prices Tick Up
Oil prices were high last week but only slightly as investors continue to weigh the prospects of a quick end to the Ukraine war that could bring back more Russian energy supplies to Western markets.
But in general, there is more oil supply on the horizon, with the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus saying that they were likely to increase output. Brent crude futures were quoting around $70.50 a barrel after falling slightly in the previous session, but that $70 range is what we've been seeing most of last week.
Resisting Temptation
Many investors have burned and are still burning their fingers by investing in stocks and derivatives and, worse, borrowing to do the same.
I've always wondered why I would get an SMS telling me I've been granted a 5 lakh or a 10 lakh rupee loan when I've not been in the market for one such loan. But in the app-induced frenzy and technology-led data mining, banks and non-banks have been consistently serving potential borrowers options to borrow more and then squeezing them, with high interest rate. This had to moderate at some point, as it is now, thanks also to the Reserve Bank of India's tightening of risk weights on consumer and unsecured loans.
On The Core Report's weekend edition, I asked Sriram Finance Managing Director and CEO Y S Chakraborty his views on this sort of expanded lending of this nature. I asked him specifically whether his company, which manages over 250,000 crores of assets under management, has ever succumbed to this temptation of lending aggressively on the retail front. And if not, why not?
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Govindraj Ethiraj: So if you look at the last four years, maybe including the post-COVID phenomenon, what are the temptations that you've given into and not given into?
Y S Chakravarti: We are working with people's money. It's not my own money or a company's own money. We are working on borrowed money, which we have borrowed from banks, from public in forms of deposit or overseas.
So no temptations here. No room for temptation. It is all cold logic.
No, like unsecured credit? No temptation. Our unsecured credit is still very limited.
Govindraj Ethiraj: It has been a temptation for many people in the last few years.
Y S Chakravarti: I think it's easy to probably some of them succumb to that temptation because it's easy to do. Maybe easy to scale up your whatever. But somehow, see again, as I said, the fundamental principle of the group itself is not to increase consumption.
So when your philosophy itself is not to increase consumption, so...
Govindraj Ethiraj: Why would you fund it? Yeah.
Y S Chakravarti: So that's one. Second, see there is a difference between private credit and a business credit. Unfortunately, most people tend to put them together.
It's not. Me borrowing a 10 lakh rupees for a holiday, a foreign holiday, versus me borrowing a 10 lakh rupees for buying a missionary for my business is totally different. Unfortunately, when you say unsecured credit, both are put in the same bracket.
It should not be. So we never got tempted into getting into this side of the business.
Govindraj Ethiraj: So in a frequent board meeting or a regular board meeting, I'm sure this comes up or has come up. And people say that, listen, yes, you know, you're a traditional company for various reasons, including culture. Here are the areas that you're sticking to and doing well, which could be drug finance or maybe even gold.
The gold too has interesting ups and downs in recent past. But why don't you look at this sector, which is unsecured consumer credit, which is going like anything. You have at least two or three players who seem to be going gangbusters.
Their stock price is going through the roof. So why aren't you doing it? So how do you respond to that at that point?
Y S Chakravarti: See, I think fortunately for us, most of the board that we have are also very conservative like us. They are also bankers. A lot of them are bankers.
Over a period of time, not just the current board, other board members earlier also, they understood the philosophy. Yeah, sometimes when you look at those numbers, you think, wow, these guys are doing a beautiful job, a great job. In fact, we tried in the sense when we started retail finance business, we didn't know where to start.
So for a couple of years, we did consumer credit, then stopped it because in fact, unfortunately, I was the one who pulled the plug on it. I didn't like the business. It was high churn.
You need a lot of, actually technology is needed, also very high churn. The third point I didn't like about the business is that the argument that I'm acquiring a customer, I'm using this business to acquire a customer, I will cross sell a lot of other products to him tomorrow is something that somehow it didn't gel with me and my board agreed with me and we pulled the plug. Though I was only the business head at that point of time, fortunately, they all agreed with me.
Do I regret it? Maybe, but because of that pulling the plug, we have actually focused our energies more on to MSME and the two-wheeler business. Now there are also questions where people say a two-wheeler is also a consumption.
But no, I totally disagree with it.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Enable you for business or work?
Y S Chakravarti: Only about 5% of the people buy it for joy rides. See for the rest of the people, it's an essential for a salaried guy for him to go to office. Okay, forget about Mumbai.
Tell me how many cities in this country has a efficient public transport system? If you do not own a two-wheeler, you cannot reach your office. One.
Two, even my two-wheeler customers, 65% are self-employed. Could be your plumber, your electrician or your milkman, your vegetable man. You know, they need it.
It is essential for their lives. So, I mean, we are also representing to the RBI and the government saying, please declare two-wheeler lending as a priority sector. It's not a luxury.
Two-wheeler is not a luxury. And unfortunately, it is also taxed at 28%, which a car is.
Govindraj Ethiraj: When you say 65% goes to self-employed, is that a metric that you're watching and adjusting for or is it incidental?
Y S Chakravarti: If you look at my last 10 years of portfolio, it stayed there. So, probably because you've always been probably away from the metros and urban.
The China Xi Put
President Xi Jinping's push for economic expansion and tech innovation is feeding optimism that Chinese stocks will continue this year's advance and widen their lead over churning US equities. According to a new Bloomberg report, which quotes Franklin Temple Institute, seeing the emergence of a cheap put that spelled Xi and then put akin or similar to the so-called Fed put a view that authorities will deploy market-friendly measures and more stimulus to achieve the about 5% economic growth target set this month. That's in China.
And the US, of course, is almost in the opposite direction because none of the measures seem, at least for now, market friendly. The MSCI China index, by the way, has risen almost 20% in 2025, while the S&P 500 has fallen about 4%. This is on course to be the biggest quarterly outperformance since 2007, says that Bloomberg report.
Xi's ambitious goal obviously comes in the context of Donald Trump's chaotic rollout of tariffs and is a shift from how and where Xi was perceived just a few months ago. This is a notable shift in investor perception about the Chinese leader, whose power grip has deterred foreign flows over the past few years. And in contrast, the belief over a Trump put is fast fading.
Remember, the markets were rising and had run up in anticipation of a Trump victory, assuming that his victory or his presidency will be very good for markets and businesses as a whole. That, of course, is yet to happen, and immediate signs of that are now not clear. While China's surge so far has been driven by tech shares, thanks to the rise of DeepSeek, the markets advanced on Friday, for example, showed that more sectors are starting to participate, according to Bloomberg.
The CSI 300 sub-index of consumer staples has jumped 5% ahead of a Monday briefing on boosting consumption. That's today. JPMorgan processed a record amount of currency conversions into Hong Kong dollars and Chinese yuan in recent weeks, suggesting inflows into local shares, says Bloomberg, and adds that the recent shift from the US to China investments could signal a rehabilitation of Chinese assets within foreign portfolios.
On the other hand, it's not just the stocks. Analysts believe, for example, the co-head of emerging markets equity at Goldman Sachs asset management told Bloomberg that the economy seems to be becoming more stable and policies towards the private sector are also more supportive. And that's something that is visible and was seen following a meeting between President Xi Jinping and leading Chinese entrepreneurs, most of whom emerged from that meeting feeling very charged up.
Of course, there is a track record problem. Bloomberg points out that despite these overtures, Xi has yet to win back global long-only funds scarred by years of crackdown in the private sector and a deleveraging campaign that set off a property crisis.
How do CEOs prepare for the world of uncertainty?
An ocean freighter from India pulled into the bustling port of Tampa Bay on the east coast of the United States on Tuesday last week, loaded with hundreds of tonnes of aluminium destined for multiple U.S. stops. Abruptly, according to a new Bloomberg report, the entire shipment was ordered to be unloaded then and there. The vessel, says Bloomberg, was carrying aluminium for window frames and semi-truck parts, was supposed to make subsequent stops in Mobile, Alabama, and Houston, but given U.S. tariffs set to commence the next day, the logistics provider's client cancelled the remaining destinations. This is one example of the kind of disruption that's been replicated across the country as President Trump's steel and aluminium tariffs, to quote one specific example, play out. U.S. Customs and Border Protection began collecting 25 percent import duty at 12 a.m. on Wednesday on all raw steel and aluminium, as well as on products. So trying to beat that tariff clock, the shipment or the shippers realised it would be cheaper to deliver the Indian aluminium via expensive flatbed trucks to other destinations than to pay duties the next day, says that Bloomberg report.
Now, you could call this an operational challenge that a smart logistics manager on the spot could take a call or may have taken that call that day. But many of the challenges posed by Trump's tariff rants and threats and actual ones are much more serious and call for more careful responses. I spoke with leadership coach Deepak Jayaraman, who works with several CEOs, on how he would advise them in these turbulent and uncertain times.
While tariffs are one kind of uncertainty, they're definitely the kind that many businesses have not seen in a while or even never seen. Jayaraman, an IIT IIM graduate, has also worked with McKinsey and Egon Zehnder and is the host of a long running podcast, Play to Potential, and author of the book by the same name.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Deepak Jayaraman: So thanks for having me on your show, Govind. And while I'm no expert on the strategy in this context, but maybe if we think about what's the leadership imperative in terms of coping meaningfully in these times, I think three, four themes come to mind, Govind. One is, I think, the bar on contextual awareness, I feel, goes up, right?
I think given the number of moving pieces, just reading the situation with granularity, I think goes up. This could be done in many ways, right? Some of the leaders I work with, we get into conversations about, how are you interfacing in the ecosystem?
Are you talking to the multiple actors in the value chain? Are you getting a sense of what's going on? Because there are many moving parts.
And sometimes, you know, the way you see a situation might just be one sliver, but maybe there are different perspectives to be taken. You know, in the context of the podcast, I run Play to Potential. One of my guests was Amy Edmondson of Harvard.
And she uses an interesting term, naive realism. And she says that we run the risk sometimes of seeing situations just from one prism. But are you talking to multiple people and forming a rich understanding of what's going on?
So that's one, contextual awareness. I think the bar becomes higher. The second is just the quality of listening.
I feel sometimes, especially a lot of leaders who come from the, I may say the traditional stable, sort of come from a little bit of a command and control kind of a paradigm. But I think in these times, the way you listen becomes important. Are you listening to win?
Are you listening to learn? Right? Again, that's a distinction that I sometimes, we end up spending time with some of the coaches I work with.
And the third, I would say, is just in terms of how you take decisions. I feel, you know, test and iterate as an approach, beat sort of plan and implement, where you sort of make a plan and sort of see it through. I think we need to have a feedback loop where you say, okay, let's review this in a couple of weeks.
Let's review this in a month. Are we making the right kind of assumptions, et cetera, et cetera. I see leaders also over communicating a lot more given the uncertainty.
Sometimes, you know, when you're on the numbers, the feasibility of certain business models or certain assumptions or certain pathways might change. And I'm sure that leads to angst internally as well in terms of what does it mean in terms of jobs or sort of layoffs, et cetera. So I find leaders, effective leaders are sort of tuned into that and sort of communicate transparently with vulnerability.
And lastly, I would say, and these are also situations where, you know, sometimes when the mind gets flooded with too much information and there are too many moving parts, there's a tendency to react and not respond. And what I mean by that is sort of, you might not be nuanced in the way you come across. You might snap.
You might do something silly, you know, sort of the animal response of fight, flight or fright. But I think these are the times where you need to be a little more mindful. Are you evaluating all the options?
Are you causing enough? So I think those are a few thoughts that come to mind from a leadership perspective.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And when you talk about contextual awareness, and why would you say, or why does, for instance, the professor say that, you know, there is a naive realism? Is it because there's only that much, let's say granular focus a business leader can have?
Because I'm sure a leader would depend on teams and so on. So what is the missing link here? And how does that missing link become critical at a time like this?
Deepak Jayaraman: It's because of the missing link is the interdependency of decisions and value chain, right? Sometimes when you're part of a system, your decisions are not taken in a vacuum. You're also, you know, for example, how much inventory to build?
You know, now it's a function of who, how the people upstream are planning their capacities, how the people downstream are planning the demand, etc, etc. And if you sort of, in a way, just focus on the macro and forget the interdependencies, then there's a risk of making decisions which are suboptimal. So that's why I feel one is sort of the interdependency because of the decisions.
And I think the other is just the richness of insight. I think today we also live in a post-truth world, right? As you understand, we absorb information from one or two sources and get to an insight.
But I just feel that even getting to what's going on requires us to sort of connect with different sources of information and different people and parse for ourselves what actually is going on and what the reality is. So even, you know, from that perspective, I think it's become a lot more relevant.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Is there an illustration that comes to mind of situation that someone has been in? Again, without maybe getting very specific.
Deepak Jayaraman: I see one of the leaders I work with, he works with a private equity invested company, right? There's an investor who's at the verge of stepping away and there's a new investor who's coming in. It's not quite the same situation, the tariff situation, but I'm just giving you a sense of.
So he has two people in the organisation who come from the previous stable. Now the new crop has some hypothesis about what the value creation levers are. Now he needs to straddle both these worlds till the transaction is consummated and he needs to sort of keep the troops motivated in terms of what lies ahead.
So I noticed that he's very deliberate about talking to the analysts about what are the assumptions they're making about the pricing of the stock. He's sort of spending some time in the market trying to understand what the drivers of demand are and he's actively spending time with the exiting investor and the incoming investor. So I think the point I'm making is on a going concern basis, he may not do this to this level of intensity, but every business often goes through these pockets where the number of variables and the uncertainty around you changes, whether it's tariffs or whether it's even other factors which lead to these uncertainties.
In those times, I just feel the leaders need to be that much more tuning into what's going on and making sense through multiple sources.
Govindraj Ethiraj: And that is what will help them, if at all, respond more efficiently or effectively is what you're saying.
Deepak Jayaraman: I think so. And I think even as I say, listening from within the organisation, one is sort of talking to the various players and people across the value chains, but I noticed that in these times, even very often leaders think that organisation is leverage for the decisions they make. But in these times, I think if you can sort of use the organisation for listening to what's happening in the market, in the various places, what's happening procurement perspective, what's happening from a demand perspective, what's happening from a tech perspective, given AI and everything else.
So I just find that effective leaders, especially during these times, sort of really up the bar on how they listen, whether it's internally or even externally.
Govindraj Ethiraj: It's an interesting point. When you say listening to win versus listening to learn, what's the distinction there? I mean, though it sounds logical though, I'd like to hear yours.
Deepak Jayaraman: It's a little more pronounced, I think in emerging markets like India, where I feel if we look at how we have to progress, I think it's Darwinian, where early years, whether it's school or college, you often need to be the person ahead of the pack for you to, you need to sort of be the first person with the answer to have the ticket to the next level. But I find that over time, what happens is, and that works I feel, when you're growing within a function, if I take a typical organisation, when you're growing, let's say in a finance function, you start as an analyst, blah, blah, blah, and all the way to the CFO, very often you notice that you're the smartest person in the room. But when you move from a CXO to a CEO, whether it's a head of marketing to CEO or CFO to CEO, you're often leading people or working with people who are smarter than you often, very often.
And number two, who are operating in domains where you don't have any clue. So in those situations, if you come across as a, I know it all, then it's like an absolute derailer. So I just find that it's a combination of how we end up getting wired just because of dowing in situations in terms of just moving ahead.
But strangely enough, I find that the canvas flips, especially in the transition from a CXO to a CEO, and people that do too much of it either lead to, you know, the other term Amy Edmondson uses is psychological safety, right? She says, if you think you have all the answers over time, you either face silence or noise. People begin to posture to you or they stop speaking to you.
So that's another challenge that leaders have to grapple with.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. You talked about overcommunication internally and keep people in the loop. I think the terms you used is candour, vulnerability, and authenticity.
So the interesting thing here is that, and these are, I mean, this is not a unique situation, but here in some ways, the entire risk, sort of the entire portfolio of risk is exposed to everyone. This is not something that is creeping up, which only let's say the leadership knows, and they have to figure out do preventive management or preventive communication. This everyone knows because everyone can read the news and so on.
So how do you communicate differently at times like this? Or how do you manage differently at times like this?
Deepak Jayaraman: My view there, Govind, is I think there's a lot of information out there. I don't think that many people in your organisation might be distilling the so what from it. You know, they hear a lot of information, a lot of news, but what does it mean in terms of the profitability of your business model?
In terms of sustainability, in terms of margins, in terms of EBITDA, in terms of valuation? I think sometimes, you see, as CEOs, you also have that unique vantage point where you have that point of view. The organisation sometimes has the data, but doesn't have the insight.
So I think sometimes you need to sort of, in a way, make sense for them and sort of, in a way, land it for them to say, this might mean that maybe this BU, the sustainability of this BU is at risk, and we'll know in six months. The team members, while they might get the drift, they might not have that so what very clearly defined for them. So I think just making it clear in terms of how it impacts their life in a very tangible way could impact their life.
And managing expectations, I think is part of the thing here.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Deepak, thank you so much for joining me.
Deepak Jayaraman: Thank you, Govind, for having me.
