Happy Days Are Here Again – Franklin D Roosevelt’s campaign song in the 1932 US Presidential Elections.

Bury the past… Rebuild, reinvent, redefine the past – Michael Connelly, The Hollow (2026)

Diwali is in the air.

It’s a happy time. And to cash in on this happy time, those in and around the business of managing other people’s money, the OPM wallahs, like every year, are putting out stock picks – stocks, they think, you should invest in now, and make good money in the days to come.

The underlying message being sold is that the worst is behind us and that stock prices can’t fall further from here. So, it’s a good time to buy Indian stocks.

But do the OPM wallahs really know? Or are they just pretending to? If they do know, they would have also known when the stock prices peaked in late September 2024, and asked the investors to be careful about investing in Indian stocks.

But very few did. The majority continued with their buy, buy, buy message. Retail investors drank the Kool-Aid, believed what was being sold, and flooded the stock market with money.

In 2024-25, equity mutual funds saw net inflows of Rs 4.2 lakh crore. In 2025-26, these inflows stood at Rs 3.5 lakh crore. Inflows into systematic investment plans (SIPs) stood at Rs 2.9 lakh crore and Rs 3.5 lakh crore, respectively. A bulk of the SIP money would have been invested in equity mutual funds.

These investors are now learning the biggest lesson in investing. As Jeremy Grantham writes with Edward Chancellor in The Making of a Permabear: “Valuation… is the true measure of investment risk.” If you buy at a high price, you take time to earn returns; that is, if you have the patience to wait it out. Most people don’t and, in the process, earn low returns or lose money.

This phenomenon hasn’t just played out with those investing in stocks. It has also played out for those who punted big time on gold and silver, when prices for these metals peaked in December 2025 and January 2026.

Between April 2019 and January 2026, a period of nearly seven years, gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs), an easy way to invest in gold, attracted total net inflows of Rs 93,174 crore.

Of this, Rs 24,040 crore, or 26%, came in January 2026. Add the Rs 11,647 crore that flowed in during December 2025, and more than 38% of the cumulative inflows were concentrated in just two months. Silver saw a similar madness.

These investors, who jumped into gold and silver at peak prices after watching a reel or receiving a forward in which a financial influencer – a lesser version of an OPM wallah – promised them a one-way ticket to the moon, must have either booked their losses already or sitting on huge ones.

Of course, there is a corollary to this first lesson. Many retail investors assumed they would ride the wave and get out right at the top. They believed what they were told and sold on WhatsApp University.

As Grantham writes with Chancellor: “The… strategy of hanging on aggressively until the very end and then trying to time your jump is very seductive.” But as a new generation is finding out it doesn’t really work. Only if life was as simple as that.

The first lesson brings us to the second: The OPM wallahs will keep coming up with different arguments to keep you buying stocks, equity mutual funds and whatever else they happen to be selling.

That’s their incentive.

In the process, if they get it wrong, they will say other things, trying to shift the blame onto someone or something else.