Now neither am I an economist, nor do you need to be one to make the above observation (in fact we all observe these things, all we need to do is to just try to ask why is the bank doing this. That is, read from the indicators. We surely do not need any professional help to ask questions!); however equally true is the fact that 'Nobody loves my money more than i do' and hence when it comes to investment decisions, I would like to be in total control of my money. Even if I am handing over my money to professionals.

The decision has to be mine; it's only the implementation that is being outsourced. This is a critical differentiation from the investor's point of view. We go to the market only to buy vegetables. The vegetable vendor does not decide what we should cook. He is there only to give us what we want! If we start asking the vendor what vegetable should we buy everyday he may tell us to buy only one vegetable: the one where his margins are highest!

As we love our money, he has all the right to love his money!

Take a look at Table 1 and you will realise that this has what has actually happened. Investors relied upon some external source of information rather than interpreting signals themselves and ended up being the last ones to enter when the party was over!

So the only way to make money is to be in total control of our investment decisions. Gains are ours so are the losses, fair enough?

How do we remain in control of our finances? Read, read and once that is done then read some more. Only education can bail us out!

Till now we have understood what CRR, repo, reverse repo mean, how RBI uses monetary policy to control inflation and kick start economic growth, how fixed income securities are impacted by interest rates, how long term bonds behave in rising and falling interest rate scenarios and how we can anticipate interest rate movements by looking at very basic indicators.

Going forward we will keep focusing on small pieces of debt markets and economy so that we as retail investors become more independent and our investment decisions are better informed.