Sumit Kakkar And Niraj Bhatt

Over the past few months, the Indian investor has shown a marked preference for putting his money in bank fixed deposits, rather than in the stock market. There have been two good reasons for that -- one, the quality of primary issues hitting the market in recent times has been so poor that few investors feel confident about subscribing to any of these IPOs. The second, and more important reason though, is that with the secondary market in doldrums, investors have little expectations of reaping any gains when any of the new issues are listed.

In fact, the market sentiment has reached such an ebb that even blue chips like the public sector Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited have postponed their issues until conditions improve. But will the primary market sentiment improve any time soon?

 

The acid test for that could be the five public sector bank issues