20th-anniversary letter from the Editor: 'Dear reader, thank you!'

This editorial almost entirely expresses thankfulness and gratitude towards our readers. We're here at the ripe old age of 20 entirely because of you. By normal standards and norms of the print-media industry, 'Mutual Fund Insight' had no hope of surviving even a few months, let alone flourishing for 20 years.

In 2002, Value Research was a very small company indeed, without any financial pockets at all, whether deep or shallow. Indeed, I was reminded of all this quite bluntly by many stalwarts of the print media, including some who were worried enough to make the journey to my office to warn me. They did this out of their concern for me and my then tiny business. They did not want Value Research to lose so much money on this ludicrous magazine venture.

What we've been doing
At that time - and in fact even now - it was an economically uphill task to run a viable publication in a niche area. However, the perceived difficulty of this task made me take a decision that not only helped 'Mutual Fund Insight' survive but also helped us serve a more important task - that of being a conscience keeper to the mutual fund industry. And what was this decision, you must be asking? It was something a lot of you disliked, that of making this magazine very expensive. We started at Rs 100, which really was a LOT of money to pay for a magazine in 2002. General, business and investment magazines used to be Rs 5 or 10, at most 20. Rs 100 really was too much. It made a lot of you uncomfortable, and some of you actually became angry.

However, it helped me ensure that I had the financial wherewithal to preserve our independence and our freedom from outside influence. This was the enabler for 'Mutual Fund Insight' being on your side, of not being hostage to advertisers' implicit control that the entire print and electronic media industry suffers from, even more now than at that time.

Even in the early years, we created public opinion and pressure for investor-centric regulatory issues that no one even considered acting upon. One very big example:
In 2005, 'Mutual Fund Insight' came out with a cover story with the blunt headline 'Insurance is Not Investment'. For the first time, Indian savers were being told to never, under any circumstances, put even a penny in any insurance product except term insurance. It was a shocking thing to say at that time. Now, two decades down the line, it has become the standard view of financial advisors.

Another such issue was time-stamping of mutual fund investments. It may sound prehistoric in this age of digitalisation, but under the old transaction-timing rules, many people were losing money to large, savvy investors who systematically exploited banking, cheque-clearing and fund-transaction timings. We started writing strongly on the issue, and it wasn't long before SEBI brought about stringent time-stamping rules that have eliminated the problem.

What doesn't change
In recent weeks, we have got in touch with many of our oldest continuous subscribers and chatted about their past experiences and future expectations. One response was interesting. This person has been our reader for nearly two decades, but when asked about what he wants to be done differently, he said we are repetitive. The answer had me smiling. It made me think of this page I wrote a few months into the Chinese virus period. In that article, I said the following at one point: Some of my readers say that ever since the COVID crisis started, I've been guilty of repeating the mantra 'stick to the basics' too often. They are completely wrong. I have actually been repeating this mantra for the last 25 years; COVID has nothing to do with it! I hope to keep repeating it for decades to come. And, more importantly, beyond just me writing and you reading about it, I hope that all of us will continue to practise it in our investing.

Saying the same thing month after month, year after year, even decade after decade is an integral part of what we do. The basics of investing remain the same, no matter what happens. When there are fundamentally new things to invest in (or to avoid, like crypto), we start analysing them, but the principles remain unchanged. Diversification, liquidity, asset allocation, rebalancing, goal-oriented portfolios, long-term orientation - these have remained the same and will forever do so.

However, there are real changes in how you invest, and it's just as much our job to help you with that. This has already been happening at a quickening pace, but in the years to come, the change will even come faster.

The road ahead
At Value Research, we see our role evolving as supporters of do-it-yourself (DIY) investing even more intensely through our information and analysis infrastructure.

Our recent interactions with long-time readers emphasised yet another thing that our readers and we have always known. Besides the data, the analyses, the tools and so on, our major role is psychological comfort during tough times. Like any good advisor, our constant emphasis on the basics of investing means that even if our readers are uncertain, we stand on the unchanging principles I discussed earlier - rather than exploit the 24x7 panic-and-hype cycle. That's what we have been doing for the last 20 years - and will keep doing for the next 20.

And once again, thank you all for the way you have supported 'Mutual Fund Insight'.