<b>T N Ninan:</b> Finding winners in the market

It goes without saying that the best performers are in the private sector

With stock market indices at or near their all-time highs, it is instructive to take a look at how shares have done as an investment since the peak of January 2008 — when the markets were riding a wave of optimism just before the great financial crisis that swept everything before it in the succeeding months. The Sensex has moved up by about 40 per cent over these nine years, less than what a fixed deposit in a bank would have yielded! In the same period, gold has gone up from Rs 11,000 for 10 g to more than Rs