How to Find Bargain Investment Ideas in Current Market?


09 September 2018

How to Find Bargain Investment Ideas in Current Market?

Greetings from Hitesh! Market is at all time high and it is becoming difficult to find bargains which can make good money at low risk. Today we are sharing a technique of finding bargain in all market situations and in all assets classes.

There are four steps to find bargains in the first place.

1.  List of potential investments.

2.  Estimates of their intrinsic value.

3.  How it compares with the prices?

4.  Understanding of the RISK involved in each and the effect of their inclusion on overall portfolio.

Unless you are ready with the above 4, your desire to find bargain will remain just a hope.

Characteristics of the potential BARGAIN investments

1.  Potential bargains will display some objective defects. Say you are buying a flat and it does not have OC. An asset class, a company or an industry may be a laggard, may have over-leveraged balance-sheets or may have some structural issues – look at JP GROUP / Power sector in India.

2.  Bargains are usually based on irrationality or incomplete understanding by so called intellectual and analytical investors. So, when these kinds of investors fail to analyse an assets fair price or fail to look beyond balance-sheet, or fail to overcome some bias, bargain is created in those assets.

3.  Media / Market / Meetings are always busy talking about Market Darlings. Those who are not popular will not have any mention in the above. Just find out which companies are not being talked about?

4.  When prices of some companies are falling like nine pins – usually investors think – why should we buy falling price companies? The unusual investors will go for the reasons of the same and they may end up buying a bargain. Remember RAKESH bought a huge qty of SPICE JET shares around Rs.15-20 some years back.

5.  Bargain assets are highly unpopular. Capital stay away from them or they sell it and go away. So, look out what people are selling as if there is no tomorrow.

Fairly priced assets should never be bought as they will end up giving average return only. Goal should be to find out under priced assets. We can find them by following methods.

1.  Little known and not fully understood companies – Porinju is following this technique.

2.  Fundamentally questionable on the surface. Say aviation sector in India.

3.  Controversial or Scary – recently there were rumours for PC Jewllers and Vakrangee.

4.  Deemed inappropriate for some portfolios.

5.  Unappreciated, unpopular and unloved sectors or companies – since last 2 years Indian Pharma sector was falling in this category.

6.  Trailing a record of poor return quarter after quarter.

7.  Recently major investors are talking about selling – say FIIs wants to move out of India due to SEBI regulations.

In short, the perception must be very much negative about some assets class, industry or company to qualify for BARGAIN hunting.



Above steps will give you enough ideas for potential bargain investments.

Once you have enough ideas – the next three steps given in the beginning will be easy to do.

What is my personal call on BARGAIN Hunting?

Bargain hunting is not a SKILL. Its an attitude. It must be applied with very long-term view of profit and maintaining healthy and mutually beneficial relationships. Those who are doing it for short term – are taken for a ride by suckers in every corner.

Being born in India or being born in Gujarati / Marwadi / Punjabi, Sindhi or Bori family gives you an upper hand in bargain hunting. The issue is they apply it to petty shopping rather than in business or investments.

Go for bigger bargain and you will be successful.

What NEXT?

Graham and Dodd talked about value investing and bargain hunting is one of the easiest places to find value. It’s also CONTRA approach as we talked yesterday. Everything is linked. The best way is to start with VALUE.

I wish you a SUPER SUNDAY.




Live With Passion…Invest With Passion. 



Hitesh Parikh.


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