Rules, not opinions.

If they could, their results would show it. They do not. In India, roughly 8 of every 10 large cap normal mutual funds have trailed their own benchmark over ten years, according to the SPIVA India scorecard, and many of the funds from ten years ago no longer exist at all. The market is a very good information machine. Millions of people trade every day and every piece of news is in the price within minutes. Finding a stock the whole market has mispriced is hard for anyone, and the fee for trying is charged whether or not it works.

Because last year's winners rarely stay winners. Of the funds in the top quarter over one five year period, only a small minority are still there in the next. Most drift to the middle, some fall to the bottom. A five year return tells you what a fund did. It tells you almost nothing about what it will do. I stopped reading past returns as a guide the day I read the persistence data for myself.

Yes. Stop trying to pick the winners and own all of them. An index linked mutual fund holds every company in an index at a fraction of the cost of a normal mutual fund, and it never has a bad year relative to the market because it is the market. The return comes from the growth of the companies themselves. The guessing is what you give up, and it was never earning you anything.

A single broad index fund is a good answer, not the only one. A plain index is weighted by size, so a handful of the largest companies dominate it, and it changes its members on a fixed calendar, so every fund tracking it buys and sells on the same day. What I do differently is combine several index linked funds, each built on a different public rule, into one portfolio with a fixed allocation that is rebalanced on a schedule. That combination is the Alpha on Index portfolio, and it is the only thing I build.

Academic finance has spent fifty years asking which characteristics of a stock are linked to higher returns over long periods. A few have survived every test, in every market, including India. They are published, peer reviewed and well known to every large investor in the world. The lesson I take is not any single rule. It is that a rule applied consistently across hundreds of companies beats an opinion applied to a dozen. That is the whole difference between investing and betting.

Because India is only about 2% of the world's investable stock market (free-float value). The other 96% of the world's best businesses, the companies that make the chips, the drugs, the software and the brands we use every day, are listed somewhere else. An investor who holds only India has decided, without ever deciding, to own none of them.

This is called home bias and every country has it. It feels safe because it is familiar. It is not safe. An Indian family already has its house, its job, its business and its pension in one country and one currency. Adding the savings to the same pile is concentration with a familiar face. And the government gives you nothing for it: no tax break, no bonus, no guarantee for staying all in India. The Liberalised Remittance Scheme leaves the door open every year. Most people never walk through it. Half of my own money is outside India for exactly this reason.

Most of what reaches you about markets is entertainment dressed as information. A tip from a friend, a channel that is sure about next week, a forward with a target price. None of it comes with a track record, and none of it will be there when the position goes wrong. My rule is simple. If a piece of news changes nothing about my allocation, I do not act on it. Almost nothing does.

Nothing. The urge is to sell now and buy back when things look calmer. Nobody does this reliably, and the cost of being out of the market for its few best days is severe, because those days arrive in the middle of the worst periods, when the person who sold is still waiting for calm. Falls are the price of equity returns. The families who kept their monthly investments running through 2020 are the ones who are glad today.

Today. Equity is priced every morning to deliver a positive expected return, otherwise nobody would hold it. That is as true at an all time high as after a 10% fall. A century of US data shows money invested at a record high has earned about the same over the next three years as money invested after a sharp drop. Waiting for the right moment is a way of never starting. The families who have done best with me set a monthly amount, named the goal, and let the calendar do the work.

Most investors do not need someone to pick funds for them. They need someone to stop them doing the five things that destroy returns: chasing last year's winner, selling in a fall, paying for products that do not justify their cost, holding many funds that move as one, and keeping everything in one country. Good help is a written plan with a name on it, a portfolio in your own name where every change is your decision, a cost you can see in one number, and a person who will tell you, in a bad month, to do nothing.