March has more crises than days

Summary: Drones over oil refineries. Brent at $119. Sensex down 3.26 per cent. Rs 10 lakh crore gone in a session. And yet the panic you watched at 9:15 on Thursday wasn't your emergency. Here's whose it actually was.

Consider what March 2026 has already delivered. India won the T20 World Cup on the 8th, beating New Zealand by 96 runs in Ahmedabad. By the 19th, Iranian drones were hitting Saudi Aramco’s SAMREF refinery at Yanbu. Between those 11 days: a war that shut the Strait of Hormuz, Brent crude briefly touching $119 a barrel, Qatar’s largest gas facility damaged, the US Federal Reserve holding rates at 3.75 per cent and signalling no cuts, HDFC Bank’s chairman resigning over “values and ethics,” and an AI disruption cycle that has fund managers debating which IT companies survive the next five years. All of this is layered on top of Holi, Eid, and Ugadi. A month that began with Bumrah’s four wickets in a World Cup final now has drones over oil refineries. March has more crises than days.

On Thursday, March 19, the Sensex fell 3.26 per cent. Roughly Rs 10 lakh crore in market capitalisation has been wiped out in a single session. Every one of the 30 Sensex stocks closed in the red. All 16 sectoral indices fell. The India VIX surged 23 per cent. If you had been watching your phone throughout the day, you would have felt that your financial life was under assault from every direction at once.

The feeling is understandable. But the feeling is not the fact. And the market you were watching is not the market you own.

This is a pattern I have written about before. It played out on March 2, when the Sensex was indicated to fall 2,700 points in pre-market and ended the day with a fraction of that decline. It played out during the pandemic. It plays out on every geopolitical shock. The pre-market carnage looks terrifying. The closing price looks far less dramatic. And yet we never learn the lesson hidden in the gap between the two.

The lesson is this: leveraged investors produce leveraged prices.

When you borrow money to buy stocks or take a position in the futures and options market, you are investing with capital that charges you daily rent and can be forcibly returned if prices move against you. Time is not your ally. It is a ticking clock. When Brent crude spikes to $119 at 2 am and Iranian drones hit a Saudi refinery, a leveraged trader cannot wait for the morning’s full picture. They must act immediately, because every hour of delay could mean a margin call. Their panic is not irrational. Given their financial structure, it is the only logical response.

This is the market you are watching at 9:15 in the morning. It is the market of people who have borrowed to be there, whose investment horizon is measured in hours, and for whom an oil shock or a bank chairman’s resignation is a genuine emergency. SEBI’s research shows that 89 per cent of individual derivatives traders lose money. The leverage driving those losses is the same leverage driving the opening-hour carnage. When you watch the Sensex fall 2,500 points and feel your stomach drop, you are experiencing the emotional consequences of someone else’s financial structure. Not yours.

The recovery that follows through the day is not the market “calming down.” It is the real market reasserting itself over the borrowed-money market. As leveraged positions are closed, the people who own actual businesses through their mutual funds and SIPs gradually set the price again. They are under no pressure to sell. No one is lending them money that must be returned by evening.

I want to be clear. March 2026 is not an ordinary month. Oil above $110 is a serious problem for India, which imports 85 per cent of its crude. If these prices persist, inflation will rise, the current account deficit will widen and earnings in oil-sensitive sectors will take a hit. The war is real. The supply disruption is real. None of this is a false alarm.

But there is a difference between a real problem and your emergency. A real problem adjusts valuations over weeks and months as facts become clearer. Your emergency, the kind that requires you to act at 9:15 on a Thursday morning, exists only if you have borrowed money to be in the market.

March has thrown everything it has. A World Cup, a war, oil, drones, AI, a governance scandal, a hawkish Fed. The month is not over yet. But the morning panic belongs to borrowed-money investors. You need not borrow their emergency.

Also read: Panic and sudden meltdowns