The India Rising story hit some turbulence last week, as one of its biggest corporate success stories, the Adani Group, was hit with a report from Hindenburg Research, an investing group that specializes in targeting and shorting companies that it believes have dubious accounting and business practices. In response, people have fallen into two groups, with the Adani family and its supporters arguing that the short selling report is a hit job by a "foreign" entity to bring down not just the company, but also the country, and others noting that the report just reinforces what has troubled them about the company's meteoric rise in the last decade. I will confess that I know very little about the Adani Group, and I have nothing invested financially or emotionally in the company's fortunes. If you are looking for advice on whether you should buy or sell Adani shares, based upon my analysis, you will be disappointed. Instead, I will argue that the ingredients that led to the Adani stock price meltdown last week, which include an ambitious family group obsessed with control, a financial market where trading momentum trumps financial fundamentals and a capital market (debt and equity) where governments and regulators put their thumbs on the scale, are embedded in many Indian companies, and represent the weakest links in the India story.
The Lead In
As noted in the introductory paragraph, I start from a position of ignorance about the Adani Group, and it thus made sense to (Read more...)
