Auto sales trends, demonetisation and impact on manufacturing sector; all this and more on Moneycontrol Pro

Finally, some great news! India’s fastest-growing financial subscriptions service, Moneycontrol Pro, is available both on the website and mobile apps. Moneycontrol Pro offers curated markets data, independent equity analysis, insights into investment styles and exclusive trading recommendations. In sum, all the information you need for wealth creation. Demonetisation did not hit jobs in the organised manufacturing sector The Annual Survey of Industries is, in its own words, ‘the most important source of industrial statistics of the registered organized manufacturing sector of the economy and extends to the entire country.’ It’s important because it goes beyond the corporate data and gives us a look at the numbers for the entire formal manufacturing sector. The data for 2017-18 has just been released. One of the key findings the numbers throw up is that demonetisation didn’t lead to retrenchment in the organised manufacturing sector and the growth rate surprisingly went up a bit that year. Read more. Retail and wholesale auto sales growth trends are diverging. What does it mean? The automobile industry has been making headlines nearly every week due to a sharp slide in sales. The corporate tax cuts of last week have introduced a new twist, with expectations that companies will make use of their higher net profit margins to lower prices. A few companies have announced some price cuts. All hopes are that there will be revival in sales during the festival season when Indians splash out on everything from clothes to cars. But our analysis shows that retail sales (sales from dealers to customers) is holding up much better than the widely-reported wholesale sales (from automakers to dealers). What does it mean? Read more. [caption id=“attachment_6847201” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image[/caption] BSE 500 long-term returns show it is all about bottom-up stock picking A long-term analysis of prices of the BSE 500 stocks throws interesting insights into the lessons, myths and fallacies of long-term investing. Our in-house research team analysed the price data of 500 listed stocks from BSE-500 for the 10 years till September 2019. The first rather uncanny finding is that only a handful of stocks have generated positive yearly returns in all the past ten years. Only 5 out of the 500 stocks, i.e. 1 percent of the universe have generated a positive stock return every year in all the past ten years. Click here for more insights from this study. Balaji Amines: What should investors do? Balaji Amines is a chemical maker which has suffered in recent times owing to poor demand from the agrochemical industry. Its stock has been among the worst impacted in the last six months on account of scores of profit warnings from the global chemical majors such as BASF and ADAMA. Further, its other end-market, active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) has also been seeing subdued growth. In addition, sourcing of methanol, a key raw material, had raised a few concerns due to the sanctions on Iran. The company’s Q1 results reflected some of these headwinds. But our in-house research team believes the stock has priced these near term concerns and is primed for gains. Read more. Picks from our technical analysts Adani Enterprises: The share price is in a strong trend as we see the long term moving average above the short term moving average. Click here for a futures trading strategy. IndusInd Bank: Shares of this private sector bank are trending up, but likely to remain below 1640. Click here for a profitable options trading strategy.