Potholes at Traffic Signals

Everybody must have at some time or the other faced a situation where we are stuck at a traffic signal, idly looking at the smoke coming out of the nearby truck. We keep looking ahead to notice the reason the traffic is held up. When we reach the signal, we find it was a pothole. How could the pothole hold up the entire traffic? It is very well true

Assumpions

average length of the vehicle	2.5
average speed of vehicles ( km / hr )	30
time for whch the signal is open ( seconds )	60
time for whch the signal is closed ( seconds )	180
idling losses ( average ) mL/hr	500
Road Length ( in m )	500

The above chart calculates the loss in  litres of petrol, per crossing, per period ( signal open + signal close ) assuming that there are 3 lanes. The x axis is the average speed of  vehicles, and the y axis shows the loss of oil due to "Idling"

The following link will now give you vehicle population of India. A graphical representation of the same is as follows

We see that there has been a humongous increase in 2 wheeler and small 4 wheelers in the last 2 decades. Assuming that out of this 50% vehicles get stuck at traffic signals (which is highly optimistic) the loss of oil runs into millions per year

With the following assumptions

Idling losses ( ml/Hr  )	200
Average time wasted at traffic/pothole ( hr/day )	0.5

The total cost currently would stand not less than 100 million INR. It is obviously much more but I tried to arrive at a calculated value with a conservative approach

Crime Against Women

Crime against women is on the rise, but what we read in the newspapers about violent attacks in only a tip of the iceberg. People might think molestation/rape is the foremost crime, but it is not. According to the data pulled from data.gov.in

1) DOWRY is one of the foremost reasons of crime against women and Andhra Pradesh has a huge chunk of it.  The numbers include cases registered for dowry prevention act

2) The following graph sums up all the registered cases by State. Uttar Pradesh might be sharing a low % here but we can attribute it to the low level of awareness of filing a case. I am trying to incoporate these factors but will have to get more data

3) The following graph looks at the age group of the people who commit crimes. As expected most of them lie in the 18-30 range

4) On trying to find out whether rural/urban has a part to play, it was found that the rural graph has more correlation than the urban graph

5)  I regressed the crime occurrences with the following factors
POPULATION  
GROWTH  
RURAL  
URBAN  
AREA 
DENSITY  
SEXRATIO

 The following are the results of the regression. We can see that the R Square is too less to say anything definite about the relationship of crime and the geographical boundaries. There are other factors

ALL INDIA
Age Group	R- Squared
<18 td="">	5.82%
18 to 30	16.76%
30 to 45	14.86%
45 to 60	13.97%
> 60	11.77%

NORTH STATES
Age Group	R- Squared
<18 td="">	4.55%
18 to 30	7.38%
30 to 45	5.95%
45 to 60	5.70%
> 60	3.34%

FUNDAMENTAL RATIOS

Fundamental Ratios play a very important part in finding an equity investment of your risk appetite. I collected the fundamental ratios data for all the listed companies on NSE ( and BSE )  and tried to listout few stocks that should be considered for further analysis

Criteria 1 : P/E Ratio < 10 , SALES > 800 crores

Query1
company	pe	eps	Sales ( in crores )
National Wind Power Corporation Ltd.	3.27	-0.01	975.34
Nagarjuna Fertilisers & Chemicals Ltd.(Old)	6.88	2.27	818.08
Trident Ltd.	5.14	6.33	913.26
National Steel and Agro Industries Ltd.	3.27	6.84	975.34
Monnet Ispat & Energy Ltd.	8.4	10.12	893.74
Sintex Industries Ltd.	8.92	10.77	998.14
Prakash Industries Ltd.	4.91	12.88	811.01
Uflex Ltd.	9.16	17.91	825.84
Diamond Power Infrastructure Ltd.	6.17	20.12	805.04
Escorts Ltd.	7.48	20.53	992.63
Kothari Products Ltd.	3.88	63.79	934.64
Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd.	0.25	124.21	856.02

We see that MTNL has very strong fundamentals. IF we look at the stock price over the last 10 years

Click here for Image

This stock was unperturbed by even the 2008 Financial crisis. Such a stock is indeed very handy to have in your portfolio. Besides it also gave a 10% dividend

Another stock to look out for is Escorts Limited. This is a company based on agricultural machinery. With agriculture certain to get a big push from the government, it will be a good buy. One thing to note from its graph ( in fact all the graphs of its peers ) is that these stocks did not get affected much in the 2008 crisis. However, post 2008, people started putting in a lot of money on these stocks, leading  to a bubble. These stocks are a very good buy at times of a crisis

Click here for Escorts Chart

Click here for Jain Irrigation Chart 

Now if we go to the other side of the spectrum, we see companies with good P/E ratios but very low EPS too. These are extremely stable stocks with little volatility over a large period of time. A take a look at “National Steel and Agro Industries” reveals that the stock price graph over the last 10 years will reveal that it has stayed put at the 20 price mark. However the stable performance translates to huge dividends . National Steel and Agro gave a dividend of 150%

Criteria 2 : P/E Ratio > 700

Query1
company	P/E	EPS	SALES	Dividend %
Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd.	994.16	0.08	1	25
Futuristic Offshore Services & Chemical Ltd.	930.11	-0.13	2	30
Future Retail Ltd.	930.11	0.12	2	30
Visagar Polytex Ltd.	917.31	0.6	18.59	10
20 Microns Ltd.	793.61	0.04	81.32	10

A very high P/E will immediately tell you about a company that is new or expanding its business in another domain. This will often have lower dividends

• Visagar went on NSE on Jun 2013
• 20 Microns in 2009

(All the data has been taken from money.rediff.com and google finance )

Search for the Counter Cyclical

Statistics is very fascinating but it is only recently in the past year or so, I began to realize its power. As humans, we cannot be sure of anything ( unless it is thrown at our face) and statistics can help us get that extra boost of probability

In 2008 the market collapsed and almost every stock was dealing in RED. But were there any stocks that braved the downfall ? If there are any they would be a certain hedge on your portfolio.

As a simple exercise, I collected data from over 500 companies listed on NSE for the past 7-8 years and ran some simple correlations between the price trend and the index ( CNX 500 in this case )

There is a stock PETRONET.NS that in fact had a correlation -0.3 with the Index at that time. PETRONET does business in LNG. There can be a lot of reasons for this.One can say It belongs to the Energy/Petroleum sector. But when I checked  the stocks of other oil companies ( RELIANCE,ONGC etc) they did not have the same trend. Almost all of them suffered a fall

( The graph taking the plunge in 2008 is the CNX 500  vs PETRONET)

However, I played around and found another GAS company ( IGL -> IndraPrastha Gas )
This shows that although it trailed the Index during the 2008 downturn, it has always remained counter cyclical to the index post 2010

( The graph taking the plunge in 2008 is the CNX 500  vs INDRAPRASTHA Gas)
There might be hidden trends in the stock movement of the GAS companies. There can be many reasons
1) Does not India rely on imports for LNG
2) LNG is a necessity ( upturn or downturn )

We need to ascertain this trend for GAS companies. More updates coming

CAT vs BITSAT

Some important statistics

1) BITSAT online exam was started 4 years back. CAT online exam has started just now
2) The BITSAT exam spanned for more than 50 days with 3 batches a day. The CAT exam was "supposed" to span over 10 days, with 2 exams everyday.
3) The no of students taking BITSAT is around 2 lakhs, CAT is taken by 2.5 lakhs
4) BITSAT is managed by the BITS Pilani, Institute themselves. CAT paid a huge amount of fees to PROMETRIC.
5) BITSAT continues successfully for 4 years. CAT failed on "First day, First Show", continuing the same on the second day too.
If anybody wants to add more point ( pro BITS) then please comment.

The Red List

The Red List of Species

This is it ...