Saturday, March 24, 2018

Are We Heading To a 1929 Situation???

Over the last few days, I have heard / read a lot of doomsday and apocalypse forecasts that we are about to witness the next 1929 like situation. The basis for this forecast is the current volatility in the market.

As of now, there are no indications that we are going to enter a 1929 like situation. The odds are one in a million. Then the next question is are we going to witness a 2008 like situation. That is definitely possible though the odds are still one in a thousand.

First of all, let us understand that the current corrective trend in stocks be it India, Europe or US, was expected. Stocks were highly overbought and a profit booking and corrective trend was but natural. This correction was overdue in November/December but took longer. History suggests that the longer the delay in correction, the harder is the impact. That is exactly what has happened as of now IMHO.

The technical structure and quantitative analysis experts were keenly anticipating this fall. For Nifty and for DJIA, I expect stability around 9725 and 23200 levels respectively. All this is assuming status quo and no Black Swan events. Black Swan events cannot be priced in!

Whilst all this is true, some of you may ask why a 2008 like situation is possible yet again. First and foremost, we must understand that the financial markets are largely driven by bonds. The bond market goes into several multiples of all stock markets and commodity markets put together. Be it 1929, 2000 or 2008, the troubles always began with the bond/fixed income markets.

For the last 8 years, we have had unparalleled easy money policy with near zero interest rates and ample liquidity. This liquidity although was meant to revive the economy, all the large banks largely used this money to prop up the stock market rather than stabilize economies of common people.
Bond prices and bond yields have a negative correlation i.e. when the interest rates are low, the bonds command a higher price and vice versa. This is where a ticking time bomb is running right now with the large banking corporations. The large banks paid higher prices for the near zero rate yield bonds and are now staring at large losses on their portfolio. Every basis point (100 basis points = 1%) increase in interest rate means millions of dollars worth of losses for bond portfolios of large banks.

This has to be accounted for on a Mark To Market basis and reported to shareholders and competent authorities. The common man perhaps does not get access to this information. Nothing on this front has been reported anywhere as of now. Cumulative quantitative easing history estimates that at least 4 trillion dollars/euros/pounds were released to the banking system. Now imagine the loss that will cascade to the stock markets and common man if 25% of this amount is booked as losses on bond prices. Hence, I am very cautious in the current bull market conditions. Given the fundamental nature of the bonds, these bonds are still valuable. In case of Lehman Brothers and all the financial institutes that followed, the bonds were junk. The bonds were issued on the basis of imaginary future payments and a perpetual 15% increase in housing prices. This time, the case is different. We are looking at bonds issued by central banks; they are real. The bonds may definitely lose some value due to changes in the yield curve but that is fine. Given the rate hike forecast, the US securities (fixed income) will at best see a 30% markdown. This will trickle to the stock and commodity markets as well.

The manifestation of these drops could be attributed to Trumponomics, Brexit or whatever - the point is that people are alert and aware of such a situation coming up.

To summarize - there is NO FINANCIAL MELTDOWN in the near future.
Possibility 1: The markets will go through the cyclical correction in the structural bull market. This is the phase we are going through right now. Till the Nifty holds 9725 and till DJIA holds 23000 (given or take a couple of %s) I will still maintain this view.

My probabilistic estimate: 95%

Possibility 2: The bond market jitters trickle into stock markets with the 25% to 30% markdowns. Then the stock market will about 40% to 50% corrections from the all time highs.

My probabilistic estimate: 4%

Possibility 3: We actually see bad turns out of things like Trumponomics, Brexit, Eurozone instability etc etc etc and a severe recession. 90% correction from all time highs

My probabilistic estimate 1% (2018 - 1929 = 89 : A Fibonacci Number!) Hence I am giving this a 1% change instead of a few basis points

So the view is largely in favor of the bull case. Anything can happen in the market - so for the common man, it is important to build some insurance in the stock portfolio by buying some protective puts. This is extremely easy in developed  markets. In India, the options market is highly manipulated and do not perform very efficiently. I will be writing a separate post on how to make best out of the Indian options market to protect your portfolio to some degree (Note that the article will be for genuine long term investors and not the short term punters who buy/sell options)

Happy Investing and enjoy the Easter festivities coming forthwith.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Modinomics V2 and Market Perspectives - Part 1

Hello friends
The last couple of months have seen sharp moves in either direction. Here are some of my preliminary observations with Nifty vis a vis Modinomics and Nifty vis a vis global markets

Outlook vis a vis Modinomics
Let us recap to the time in 2013 when Nifty made a high of 6415, corrected downwards to 5120 and bounced back; I presume the same pattern will repeat itself. My humble opinion - buy the dips as far as equity investments are concerned. My preferred bets are

Nifty Bees, Bank Bees, Junior Bees, PSU Bank Bees
[Disclosure I have holdings in these scrips and have recommended the same to my friends and family]

You can check my previous post where I have highlighted some stocks that than beat the average market returns. All investments must be made with an SIP mode.

Expected Path: Peak in the 10700 zone followed by a correction to 9600 with interim peaks, troughs and sideways market conditions.

As far as A Group Stocks and Indices are concerned, I follow the advice of Nadeem Walayat - "Greater the downward deviation  from peaks, greater the incentive to buy

Political factors that will trigger trending moves on Nifty
Based on current outlook, it seems near certain that Modi will be back as PM again with a 300+ majority in the NDA alliance. Some of the states with impending elections will trigger short term spikes or falls in the market. From a Union Budget perspective, though the markets did not cheer the same but that is always expected when a party is going into the election phase. The budgets will be populist as the rural votes create the votebanks. My view is that as far as educated youth are concerned, they have understood the concept of JAM (JanDhan-Aadhar-Mobile) measures.
The negative response to LTCG was not expected. Mr Jaitley has this knack for not clearly speeling out the the plans and getting smooth implementation. Happened with Demonetization and deja vu for GST.

The steps towards digitizing the economy have shown good progress and the next steps seem encouraging. GST implementation and roll-outs have not been as streamlined but these are initial steps to the larger benefits.c[ So my vote is disclosed heads up!!]

To summarize, as far as stock investments are concerned, I'm in favor of "Buy The Dips" with NDA 2 as the winner.

From a global market perspective, Dow was also overbought and is now in a corrective mode. My take is that it is in the last phase of correction. Accoring to my analysis, it will form a base around 24000 levels and resume uptrends. This analysis when juxtaposed with my Modinomics analysis, comes pretty much in line with anticipated price moves.

Commodity Markets: In dollar terms, prices have come to the USD 65 dollars / barrel mark. If we analyse WTI Crude prices, the pivot point is USD 65 dollars a barrel. Though manias can take prices anywhere between 25 dollars and 100 dollars.

Gold will confirm its uptrend with 2 consectutive closes above USD 1400 per ounce for targets 1550-1600

Currency : I expect the rupee to be in the range of 63-66 vs dollar this year.

To wrap up up part 1 of this series, I sign off. The next part will be more illustrative with analytic graphs and tables to support my forecasts and better outcomes of the forecast. Stay tuned to my updates [Always free with disclosures on personal holdings]

Adios

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Outlook For Q3/Q4

So the Nifty has scaled the 10k mountain; much sooner than I had expected. My original outlook was that Nifty would cross the 10k barrier after the next national elections. So let us analyze the current major factors and the probable course of Nifty.

First of all, let us consider the banks. No matter how hard the government will make it for the bad loans from large corporates, recovery will be extremely difficult and time consuming. On the PSU banks front, there is only one way out; consolidate into 3 or 4 large banks on the "Too Big To Fail" scale. SBI has already done it and there will be more to follow soon. RBI has kept the rates at a very low level and it seems to have hit the rock bottom now. The threat of inflation is now grave. Liquidity in the market has been unprecedented.

The much awaited correction will perhaps come sooner than later but that does not warrant shorting the market. Although it may may not be correct fundamentally, the price on the ticker does not lie. Unless 8880 is not breached on the downside, it is a buy on dips market. What is the next peak for Nifty to scale? 11415 is the next peak we are looking at over the next 18 months.

Now there are no fears of a BrExit and the Germans are pretty much in control of the situation in Europe. To the extent Germans have control, the PIIGS crisis also will stay at rest. However, one needs to be very careful about selecting the stocks right now and midcaps and smallcaps are best to avoid. The way IPOs are soaring, one has every reason to be suspicious because unfortunately, a string of successful IPOs on Dalaal Street has always been a harbinger of darker days coming ahead. That being said, the levels Nifty is testing now will make the dark days seem like a little blip over the longer term. The larger trend is headed north and will continue to do so until the next election.

Now talking about politics, we may not have to wait till May 2019 for the next election outcome. In all likelihood, we may see the elections as early as Diwali 2018. The BJP has almost crossed out all the red flags for the second term in office. Maharashtra, UP, Bihar, MP, Rajasthan are all in the kitty. The youth power is with the PM; the Rajya Sabha numbers are also working out in favor. Unless something really bad like some black swan event takes place, I see no reason why this government will not come into power again.Therefore from institutional funds' perspective, India is pretty much a safe bet compared to other BRICS nations.

Outlook for commodities; in terms of prices in USD, commodities seem to have hit the bottom and are now starting the next leg up. From a technical and wave perspective, they may just correct once more to retest the bottoms and bounce back. nymex Crude oil may retest the USD 35 - USD 40 levels and then gallop back to USD 65 levels. Gold may just test USD 1150 levels once more, shake out some of the weak hands and then climb back to USD 1550 levels.

Sectors to avoid in India right now; telecom, base metals and media. It will take at least a year more for markets to fully price in the impact of Jio and there is a lot of room for downside there. If the commodities go for retesting old lows, then base metals will be the first to join the pack down. Media space is extremely volatile right now and far too overvalued. What happened to Airtel, Idea and Vodafone in telecom space will happen sooner or later to the media stocks. Hotstar, Amazon Prime and Jio TV will soon have a similar impact on conventional media. I also expect Jio and Amazon Prime to bring some disruptions to the DTH business. The day is not far when there will be just a small black box in our homes that will power the internet and tv content for us and that too at extremely affordable prices.

To summarize, every fall in the largecaps and large banks is an opportunity to buy. Commidity stocks, telecom stocks and media stocks are best avoided till the prices rationalize. Shorting can prove dangerous and there is room for a lot of upside. Wishing all of you greetings in advance for the upcoming festivities. Unless there is some major thing to worry about, my next post for Nifty will be around Christmas with outlook for 2018.

Friday, July 28, 2017

IPL 2018-2022 "Winner's Curse" SWOT Analysis and Forecast

Well now that we know that in all likelihood, the next IPL bidding is going to turn into a winner's curse, let us look at the SWOT analysis of some of the key stakeholders bidding for the broadcasting rights

As of now, 18 bidders have been reported for the broadcasting rights

1. STAR India
2. Amazon
3. FollowOn Interactive Media
4. Sony Pictures Network
5. Times Internet
6. SuperSport International (Pty) Ltd
7. Reliance Jio Digital
8. Gulf DTH FZ LLC
9. GroupM Media
10.beIN IP
11. Econet Media
12. SKY UK
13. ESPN Digital Media
14. BTG Legal Services
15. BT PLC
16. Twitter Inc
17. Facebook Inc
18. Taj TV India

This article and the next two will discuss the SWOT analysis of these players

1. STAR India
Well they already have the digital broadcasting rights for a lot of tournaments and the company is currently a market leader when it comes to content for sports on Indian TV. Hotstar is definitely a rockstar right now when it comes to digital content and consumer delight. Let us not forget that STAR was the front-runner in the previous bidding session as well. The company rightly made a conditional bid to BCCI and BCCI decided to shelve this bid as BCCI wanted unconditional bids.

SWOT: The group has already done the IPL in digital format. The team has covered a lot of sports globally and has a lion's share as far as BCCI broadcasting rights are concerned. However, the IPL is different. STAR India / Hotstar CANNOT go solo on this. And this will be true for most players in the bidding.

Odds of Winning: 25% (solo) / 80% with Jio

2. Amazon (Probably bidding only for digital)
Amazon, has made the bold statement of its intent with the television series Inside Edge on Amazon Prime. One of the best Roman a Clef genre content on Indian TV ever so far - it was a fantastic signal to all stakeholders "We are serious about getting in and we are aware of the dirt that comes along with it!"
Although late to enter the Indian mobile tv turf, it has swept all incumbent players off charts. Amazon Prime has features like fast forward as well (compared with only rewind for Hotstar) and charges much lower 499 annually compared to 199 monthly with Hotstar. IMDB is its subsidiary. What is good about Amazon's approach is that it has a collaborative outlook with studios, directors, producers etc. There is a lot of data mining required to do when it comes to targeted advertising on digital space and Amazon is second only to Google when it comes to that.

Odds of Winning: 50% (solo) / 95% with Jio / 100% with a 3 way match Sony-Amazon Prime-Jio

3. Sony
Let us not forget that this company still has the first right of refusal and the network will try very hard to keep it that way. Unfortunately, it did not win the digital rights earlier and digital as it turns out is not Sony's cup of tea. In fact most of Sony's movies also go through Jio or Amazon Prime. Last but not the least, IPL is the only major cash cow that Sony has.

Odds of Winning 50% (solo) / 95% with Jio /100% with a 3 way match Sony-Amazon Prime-Jio

4. Jio
Jio has been doling out good things with each passing day and wants to capture as much of telecom and digital space it can. It has the financial muscle to see this through. To cut the long story short, Jio has the infrastructure and network but perhaps not the capabilities when it comes to broadcasting. Mumbai Indians being one of the teams can also create a conflict of interest

Facebook, Twitter and all the others will have the same thing. According to me, Amazon Prime and Jio will have a major role to play as far as the next set of IPL broadcasting rights go. For the advertising revenues, you need more and more of reach and Jio can make that possible. Analytics will also play a major role and Amazon can make that happen. When it comes to actual backend for operations and logistics of coverage, both STAR and Sony have the capabilities though STAR has the edge over Sony.

My forecast: HOTSTAR+Jio 40%
Sony+Amazon Prime+Jio 60%

Let's watch out how this plays out.

Friday, June 16, 2017

IPL Bidding 2018-2022 "The Winner's Curse"

Well let us take a break from Nifty and the negativity around jobs. It is the cricket season and an exciting time as we are going to have bidding for the broadcasting rights for IPL 2018 to 2022.

The last time bidding was done was in 2008 when mysteriously, the lone player in the foray was Sony. Star India's bid got rejected as their bid was conditional and BCCI wanted a non-conditional bid. Well whatever happened, we know that Sony paid USD 900 million for exclusive television rights for a period of 10 years. Without taking into account inflation and exchange rate fluctuations etc, that was a bid of 5000 crores for a period of 10 years. The estimated revenue that Sony got for IPL 2017 is pegged between 1100 crores and 1300 crores. We also know that the previous investment was recovered within 3 years.

Now that the new tendering process has started, bids have been invited by the BCCI. There are about 16 to 18 players in the foray. Obviously the television channels will all be out there and thanks to the digital era, some of the interesting bidders are companies like Reliance Jio, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon

In this three part article, I will cover the merits/demerits of the bidding structure, SWOT analysis of bidders and revenue streams for bidders. First things first, I want to discuss the merits and demerits of the current bidding structure itself.

We all know that the BCCI believes in hegemony as it wields a lot of power in the places that matter. As compared to the last time that the bidding took place, the BCCI has wisely invited bids from multiple parties and hopefully there will be more transparency. What has shocked me is the minimum reserve price that BCCI has pegged for the broadcasting rights for the next five years.

Considering the scathing review BCCI got from the Lodha panel and considering how little BCCI has given back for development of the game, the current reserve prices are appalling; this is an encore of what happened with the telecom spectrum and telcos. Based on the public information available about the advertisement slots, past collection data, here is my graph of projected earnings for IPL 2018 to 2022

The workings of this graph are in the excel file here

I will be updating information and the workings  behind this graph from time to  time.

As of now, the biggest revenue source is television advertisement slots and it will continue to be for the next five years. Television advertisement inventory is sold as 10 second slots and an average IPL match has about  230 to 250 10 second slots depending on the stage of the game. A lot of hype is going on about the digital space and IPL 2017 showed an average 2 million users on hotstar for each match. Going by Google/Youtube's pay of 1 dollar / 1000 views translates to about 1 rupee per user per match in the digital space. Now that virtual reality devices have come in and soon, we will have the luxury of watching sports in 3D on our smartphones, the revenue per user can notch up much higher with subscriptions but we also need to remember that this is just the beginning. The digital revenues won't be as high as a lot of media pundits are projecting them to be.

With some basic assumptions, my back of the envelope suggests a revenue of about 6,000 crores for IPL2018 to 2022. Taking some more optimistic projections and title sponsors and technological disruptions, 8,000 crores is the best case scenario. Remember that we have an election coming in between and one structural bear market scenario that will play out. There will be a lot of discretionary spending taps closed for at least two seasons. This means that the winner cannot bet on pure advertising revenues. Right now, BCCI is expecting upwards of 16,000 crores and that is not a price worth paying at all. Any price above 8,000 crores for a 5 year contract is going to end up as a proverbial "Winner's Curse" The money will be made with more activities upstream and downstream

In the next two parts of this series, I will discuss the SWOT analysis of major players in the bidding ring for the IPL auction

Friday, June 2, 2017

AI/Robotics/Automation - ITEmployees Cry Foul - Part2

This is part2 of the intended 4 part story with regards to job losses in IT/ITeS segments [which is what the media is talking a lot about], the slowly worsening situation in telecom post Jio [not much is being talked about] and the impending consolidation in PSU banks [almost nobody is talking about]

Today, I came across 2 contrasting opinions. One by the almost revered guru of Indian IT, Narayan Murthy and other by a veteran who got TCS to where it is today, N Chandrashekharan. According to Narayan Murthy, the top managers in IT companies have to take cuts in their paychecks. I agree with this part. He also expects companies to do as much as they can and stem unemployment. This, may I say is a utopian dream. Since the internet dot com bust, so many economists in the developed world have proposed part-time employment options to be taken by employees so that the stress on unemployment allowance is reduced and number of unemployed people goes down.

The challenge with this is that a person who has a job would like to go the whole mile to the extent s/he can in this VUCA environment - make hay when the sun shines. What Chandrashekharan has said is that we are becoming more and more digital and that means there will be more jobs. This is exactly what a lot of experts in hi-tech industries have been saying. There is a lot of demand for skilled labour. The problem that we are facing all over the world is that there is a gross mismatch in what the industry needs and the skills that the available talent pools have. In India this is a bigger problem.

As has been rightly said, re-skilling is the order of the day. If we look at the thousands of people in the IT/ITeS sectors today, there are broadly three categories of people. Highly skilled, highly motivated and people on top of their game - these guys are simply not worried. Most of them land the dream jobs they want even before somebody decides to give them a pink slip or they are confident enough to put themselves in the sweet spot sooner than later rather than compromise with the current employer. The sad part is that this is less than 2% of the workforce. The group of people is very special. Based on current economic trends, they are drawing a good salary, have settled into a good lifestyle but their talent levels are not as high as the new rules of the technology game demand. They were aware about it in the past but when the going was good, these short-comings were ignored. That will not be the case now. The biggest challenge with these people is that they have got so used to certain habits, skillsets and attitudes that it is extremely difficult to change unless these people decide to change themselves. Unfortunately, that segment is almost 40% of the workforce. For those who do decide to eventually change will need more time to get the basics right as compared to the youth who are learning these technologies upfront without any pre-conditions. The last segment is the ones who are currently at lower levels of the organization and are simply following SOPs. I fully believe in dignity of labour and I mean no offence to this segment in my previous segment. The work they do still matter a lot and even the new technologies will need these kind of people albeit in lower proportions.

Just to digress from the topic a bit - let us consider mobile phones - a technology gadget that most people use these days. Once upon a time Motorola was considered to be the best; then came Nokia with its super seller Nokia3310, a handset that was literally a style statement. Almost everybody said that this is the best one can have until BlackBerry came along. Just when almost everyone was convinced that BlackBerry is the ultimate in mobile handsets, Apple came out with the iphone and today the latest model is iphone7 and people are waiting for the 8th version.

The only constant is change. As I mentioned in my previous post as well, today technology will help automate a lot of tasks and improve productivity. However, the industry needs skilled people who will make this technology possible. There is a fantastic movie featuring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick called "Up In The Air" It is a classic case that portrays how and why human resources still make such a difference. And for the experts who keep harping about the ability of AI being superior, it is worth watching Minority Report. The movie very nicely depicts why we cannot be 100% sure about AI

To summarize, technology disruptions will keep on taking place. As long as one has the ability to upgrade and re-skill, one should be fine. Don't be pessimistic - be optimistic as there are so many avenues that are going to open up and the fact is that we have a lot of jobs and opportunities that need people. This is going to be my next article in this series - so stay tuned. Just remember the keyword "Transferable Skills"


Saturday, May 27, 2017

AI/Robotics/Automation - ITEmployees Cry Foul - Part1

Now that I have given my medium term outlook about Nifty, I will be spending the next few posts specifically addressing the sectors that are currently under pressure. There is so much being put out in different forms of media with some common keywords - automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, job losses.

For the common man, Robotics and Automation imply that tasks that can be performed by a machine with minimal human intervention. It is not as if robotics and automation came just yesterday. Automation started right from the time we had the industrial revolution! Two simple examples; imagine what happens when a Godrej storewell cupboard is being made (this is a common example I use in my lectures) We need sheet metal cut into different sizes according to where they will fit in the structure of the cupboard. Once upon a time, the entire cutting process was done by human beings. The challenge was that the productivity levels varied a lot and the quality levels varied a lot. Today we have a machine that cuts the sheet metal. Human intervention is needed to basically tell the machine - cut the sheet metal of this size. Another human intervention is to make sure that the supply of sheet metal is in place and once the cutting is done, take out the cut pieces. Advantage: What perhaps would take 100 human beings 100 hours to produce is now done by 1 machine in less than 10 hours. The variation in quality is extremely limited. Today there are millions of tasks in manufacturing and services where machines can easily replace human beings and perform a lot of tasks with minimal human intervention. Similarly in a financial services environment, a lot of accounts reconciliation can be automatically done by the system at the click of a button.

Anybody who says that automation is bad because we need to keep the jobs is akin to saying don't deploy machines to make the road or for that matter don't give the workers shovels. We need to keep the jobs so let them use spoons and ladles to build that road - lifetime employment. Is that what we really want? Yes I agree that there are some sensitive aspects where even if we have the option of an automation process, we perhaps should not allow automation because of security issues. A common example of this is drones for package deliveries. We know that it is in fact a fantastic innovation that looks great on television. My concern is that what do we do if some idiot misuses the technology and ships a bomb?? Air Traffic Controllers all over the world are already stressed with the tasks of managing airplanes and choppers. Imagine the scene when they have dots all over their screens because of these drones. Unless these security concerns are adequately addressed, perhaps we are better off keeping this innovation in the laboratory.

Artificial Intelligence is exactly what it says - the computer uses some sort of a program to perform analysis. We need to understand a key thing here - the system becomes intelligent only after some human being tells the computer what to look for and how to do the analysis. This is precisely the reason why the IT/ITeS industry in India is negatively impacted and job losses have begun. A lot of work that was earlier done by IT/ITeS employees by people are now being automatically done by the very computers and programs that have been created!

We need to understand one thing very clearly - India has grown significantly because of IT/ITeS companies but India has not contributed significantly to innovation in this very segment. All that India [and in turn the industry and people] has done is worked on the price advantage. Even for the basic computing tasks, if it costs USD 6000 / month in US [Monthly CTC for 1 employee] it costs USD 2000 / month in India. That is the reason why companies started laying off people in countries where salaries are high and gave those jobs to Indians. How many kinds of software innovations have been created by Indians in India? Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc etc etc were not India's contributions. Once that program was released, what Indians did well was fixing bugs and glitches. Now there are superior technologies that don't need so many people to fix these things.

We need to realize that automation is going to happen in many areas of manufacturing and services forever. What is important is that to get these automation techniques working, you need to be extremely smart and talented. The basic problem with a vast majority of Indians is that "smartness" and "talent" are rarely found. Yes thanks to an education legacy that the British left behind, we have a lot of English speaking graduates and post graduates but degrees do not imply "smartness"

So whether we like it or not, automation will continue and an employee is not smart enough to create and manage automation, s/he will eventually lose the job. Another question that then comes up is why do companies don't take initiatives to re-skill people. Human Psychology has shown that the greater the degree to which a person is used to think and do things a particular way, the greater is the challenge to make the person change. The old patterns and attitudes tend to be so deep-rooted that the unlearning process itself is a big challenge. And when you have so many young people joining the workforce - with fertile minds that can be easily trained, companies will take the easier option.

A lot of people complain that they are getting fired because they are not young enough, that is a wrong judgement. People are not getting fired because they are old but because they are not good enough for the new challenges. The people who stayed ahead of the curve and were talented enough are still being rewarded. And let us not forget that when the IT boom started, these very employees grew at the expense of employees elsewhere.

To be continued