The Other Side of the Coin

- Vikas Arora

The practice of continuing to read news feeds online or on social media, despite the fact that the news is predominantly negative and often upsetting — is an easy pattern to fall into when the quest for information overrides everything else. Negative news also creates higher engagement rates online, which means it often makes better business sense for a news outlet to keep sharing scarier updates, while positive news is just not as newsworthy.

To counteract this trend, we wanted to write to you with the other side of the coin; positive things that are happening just as often, but being written about far more rarely.

• Ease In COVID Restrictions:

Several countries have eased restrictions for Indian travellers, sensing pent-up demand and a substantial decline in corona virus cases.

The Australian High Commission on Friday said Indian visitor visa lodgement is back at 2019 levels. The country has reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travellers – first allowing students, parents and migrants, and now all visitors. Over the past two years, the global travel and tourism sector has suffered tremendous losses. 2022 is poised for a strong recovery. It is expected to recover more than approximately 58 million jobs and generate $8.6 trillion which would boost economic recovery around the world. Source – Indian Express

Meanwhile millions of Indians celebrated Holi after almost 2 years due to a sharp dip in Covid-19 cases in the country.

• NASA reached unprecedented heights as NASA’s Perseverance Rover mission successfully converted some of Mars’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen and further working on the same. It can be a giant leap toward getting humans on Mars.

• Australia’s largest coal-fired plant set to close seven years early - coal still supplies 60% of Australia’s electricity, making it one of the highest carbon-emitting countries per capita.

But Australia’s market share of clean energy has increased to over 30%, and despite the country not actually having a coal exit plan, clean energy adoption won’t stop increasing. In 2021, Australia saw over three gigawatts of rooftop solar installed.

• Indian doctor stays back in Kyiv, says won't leave until all students evacuated at a time when people were trying their best to leave Ukraine, a 37- year-old Indian doctor from Kolkata decided not to leave the war-torn country. Dr Prithwi Raj Ghosh, who is a doctor and a student consultant in Ukraine, has decided to stay behind to evacuate Indian students.

• A businessman travels to help people at Poland-Ukraine border - A businessman named Mr. Anosh Thakkar chose an unconventional yet heart warming way to help the people during the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Leaving his home in Amsterdam, he travelled to the Poland-Ukraine border to be of necessary assistance. As he knew several senior government officials, he reached out to ensure that Indian Students get a safe passage and reach the Poland border as many buses carrying people were being shot at. Apart from arranging the logistics, we also arranged medicines and food," he told the news publication.

• School applauded for sending kids to meditation instead of detention - and the results are amazing
Robert W. Coleman Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland, established its "Mindful Moment" program in 2016, which involves children being sent to a mindful moment room when they misbehave, CNN reports. They are then given the opportunity to stretch and practice yoga and meditation - all with the aim of encouraging them to wind down and relax in the face of stressful situations. The program was created through the school's partnership with the non-profit organization, The Holistic Life Foundation. The foundation provides a staff member in the room at all times to help the children work through whatever has caused them to misbehave.
Such events leave a mark and restore the faith in positivity over negativity.
While the urge to keep ourselves informed can make us feel a compulsive need to stay updated with every stressful event that takes place in the world, it is equally important to rest, recharge, and remember that there is always another side to the coin. It will be interesting to see, once the Economy fully opens up and spending on leisure & travel grows further, then will the same interest in equity continue or not? The Musical chair is on; nobody can guess when it will stop, but definitely in the long run, positive returns prevail over such volatility.

At Ace Lansdowne our Investment Philosophy is decidedly simple wherein we endeavor to generate superior returns consistently, with the constant eye on managing and mitigating risk.
Our investment approach revolves around identifying companies with high quality management and sustainable and scalable business models in sectors that benefit from macro socio-economic trends.
Keeping in line with our investment approach we are pleased to also inform you that Ace Lansdowne India Equity Fund has generated 66.17%* absolute returns, since its inception in April 2020 and the Nifty-50 benchmarked Ace Lansdowne India Large cap fund has generated absolute returns of 12.1%* against Nifty returns of 10.41% since it’s inception in July 2021. Over the last quarter Large cap fund has outperformed the benchmark by generating an alpha of 2.6%* over Nifty returns.
(*Provisional Pre-tax returns as on 31st March, 2022)

We hope this newsletter has played a small part in brightening your day!
Wish you all a healthy , happy and satisfying new financial year. Keep Smiling.