All stocks not on a high despite boom

The dizzy rise in the equity markets has resulted in the danger that many investors will make decisions that might not be prudent from the investment perspective because they feel left out as everyone earns money while their portfolio seems to be going nowhere.

This is especially true for investors investing directly in equity, where a large number of shares are showing a negative return since the beginning of this calendar year.

The ETIG examined the prices of shares to see the kind of performance that has been delivered in the last few months. The period selected for the purpose was between the beginning of January '06 and the last traded price on April 20, when the sensex hit the 12,000 point mark.

There is data available on a total of more than 2,400 companies and out of these, 1,100 actually ended up causing a loss for their investors during this time. During the same period, the sensex has gained 28%. This means that many of those investing directly in individual scrips could have lost money.

Companies, whose prices have fallen, are evident across all groups of companies on the BSE. Among the A group shares, several of the public sector banks are not returning positive figures for their investors and this has added them to the losing list.

Vijaya Bank (-14%), Oriental Bank of Commerce (-12%), Andhra Bank (-10%), Allahabad Bank(-6%), Punjab National Bank (-5%) and Bank of Baroda (-3.5%) have been joined on the negative list by some private banks like ING Vysya Bank(-12%) and Indusind bank (-9%).

The technology majors might be going great guns as far as the frontline stocks are concerned but quite a few of them are also being hit by a fall in their prices.

Visualsoft for example, is down by nearly 48% while HCL Infosys has fallen by about 37% since January. On the fertilizer front, National Fertilizer as well as RCF have witnessed a fall in terms of share price.

On the oil refining and marketing side, Bongaigaon Refinery is down 4% while the situation is only slightly better for Kochi Refineries, HPCL, IOC and BPCL, but they still ended up with negative returns for their shareholders.

In addition, a few pharma companies from the A group, like Nicholas Piramal, Novartis, Abott and Wyeth, have also ended up with negative returns.

The list gets slightly bigger when one moves to the B1 and B2 group shares, where around 160 and 260 companies respectively, have taken a hit in their prices.

This covers a wide spectrum of sectors and industries The big chunk of such companies is present in the Trade to Trade segment, where more than 350 companies find themselves ending up with a negative return for shareholders.