Anju Makhija, poet and playwright, has been a stock market investor for a number of years. Her strategy: invest in good stocks for the long term. Sharon Prabhakar, musician and actor, has a short-term as well as a long-term portfolio. She even dabbles in the futures and options segment.
Actor Farooq Sheikh confesses that his wife is a stock market buff and most of her investment decisions have given good returns.
Yes, many women today are aggressively investing in the stock market, even while handling their kitchen and other household chores. Many women are sensing an opportunity to enter this market even as the volatility is making seasoned investors jittery.
Buoyed by this trend, film director Shona Urvashi has made a movie - Saas, Bahu Aur Sensex - which will be released on September 19. An urban comedy genre, the movie has stock markets as a backdrop in the lives of investors, which range from housewives to grandmothers.
Urvashi, an investor herself, claims to have got this idea when she discovered that a whole lot of women, who attended kitty parties, pool their money and invest in the market. Also, topics like, the Sensex and Nifty, have become points of discussion after the ‘bull run’ in the last few years.
Urvashi herself started investing in stocks when the Sensex, the benchmark index of the Bombay Stock Exchange, was hovering at the 10,000-point mark. “When I was researching for the movie, it was amazing to find out how well-versed women were about investing in stocks. They take their own time to invest, but do so only after a lot of research. In fact, they do not buy or sell on tips,” says Urvashi.
For instance, Makhija, who was inspired by her husband, plays long term and invests in fundamentally good stocks. In households like Sheikh’s, women are the money managers. “I don’t really understand the stock market business. It is my wife who is really a market buff,” admits Sheikh, who is also acting in Urvashi’s movie. For some, like Prabhakar, it is not a game, but has a goal. “I want to leave my long-term investments for my daughter,” she says.
Brokerage firms, too, are looking at this class as a good business model. “At present, over a thousand women are trading from our three women exclusive outlets,” CJ George, managing director, Geojit Financial Services, says.
