Stock Market Mania Takes Hold Deep in Hinterlands of India
股市狂热在印度腹地深处扎根

It was for years, a waste of time, and Parag Morey knew it. Head out into the Indian countryside, his bosses in Mumbai would tell him, and rustle up some clients who want to give the stock market a try.
这是多年的浪费时间，帕拉格·莫雷 （Parag Morey） 知道这一点。他在孟买的老板会告诉他，他会去印度乡村，并劝说一些想尝试一下股市的客户。

Morey would land in places like Indore and Sagar, small cities tucked in the heart of India’s impoverished central region, and struggle to get a single bite. To the locals used to squirreling away their spare cash in small bank accounts and gold necklaces, everything about the money man from the big city — from his sales pitch to his clothes — was foreign. “There was no place for people like us in suits and boots,” he says.
莫雷会降落在印多尔和萨加尔等地，这些小城市位于印度贫困的中部地区中心，很难吃到一口。对于习惯于将闲钱藏在小银行账户和金项链中的当地人来说，这位来自大城市的富豪的一切——从他的推销到他的衣服——都是陌生的。“像我们这样穿着西装和靴子的人没有位置，”他说。

A decade later, Morey, now the head of sales for wealth management at Emkay Global Financial Services Ltd., detects a very different vibe when he shows back up in Indore and Sagar and dozens of other small cities across India: “People want to listen.”
十年后，现任 Emkay Global Financial Services Ltd. 财富管理销售主管的 Morey 在回到印多尔和萨加尔以及印度其他几十个小城市时，发现了一种截然不同的氛围：“人们想倾听。

And invest. So much money in fact that it’s sparked a frantic rush by some of the biggest financial firms in India — and the world — to court investors in second-tier cities. Standard Chartered Plc., Barclays Plc., Axis Bank Ltd. and 360 One WAM Ltd., among others, have joined in. At Emkay, one of India’s oldest financial services companies, Morey is hiring up to 15 relationship managers to expand its reach across the country.
并投资。事实上，如此多的资金，以至于印度乃至世界一些最大的金融公司都疯狂地争先恐后地吸引二线城市的投资者。渣打银行、巴克莱银行、Axis Bank Ltd. 和 360 One WAM Ltd. 等公司也加入了这一行列。在印度历史最悠久的金融服务公司之一 Emkay，Morey 正在招聘多达 15 名客户关系经理，以扩大其在全国的业务范围。

The new hires are looking for people like Mukesh Nagar. An electrician in Kota, a city of some one million people a few hours north of Indore, Nagar began sticking a quarter of his monthly income in a stock mutual fund in 2021. “There is no better option,” Nagar said. Not even a selloff will deter him because he is confident, he said, that “the market will go up eventually.”
新员工正在寻找像 Mukesh Nagar 这样的人。Nagar 是印多尔以北几小时车程的约 100 万人口城市的一名电工，他于 2021 年开始将月收入的四分之一存入股票共同基金。“没有更好的选择，”Nagar 说。他说，即使是抛售也无法阻止他，因为他有信心“市场最终会上涨”。

That sort of chatter is the product of a four-year bull run that’s produced average annual gains in the benchmark NSE Nifty 50 index of more than 30% and turned the market here into one of the world’s most expensive. The mania that began in Mumbai and New Delhi is spreading into the hinterlands just as the country’s economic boom puts more disposable money into the pockets of everyday Indians.
这种喋喋不休是四年牛市的产物，在基准 NSE Nifty 50 指数中，平均年收益超过 30%，并使这里的市场成为世界上最昂贵的市场之一。始于孟买和新德里的狂热正在蔓延到腹地，与此同时，该国的经济繁荣使更多的可支配货币进入了普通印度人的口袋。

On average, the net wealth of adults has grown at an 8.7% annual clip in India this century, nearly double the global pace, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Outside the biggest cities, where the growth rate is even higher, much of this new wealth is pouring into mutual funds. People living beyond the 30 biggest metropolis areas hold some 12 trillion rupees ($143 billion) in mutual funds today, most of which invest in stocks, according to Association of Mutual Funds in India. That’s up more than 200% from five years ago.
根据彭博智库的数据，本世纪印度成年人的净财富平均以每年 8.7% 的速度增长，几乎是全球速度的两倍。在增长率更高的大城市之外，这些新财富的大部分正在涌入共同基金。根据印度共同基金协会（Association of Mutual Funds in India）的数据，居住在 30 个最大大都市地区的人们目前持有约 12 万亿卢比（1430 亿美元）的共同基金，其中大部分投资于股票。这比五年前增长了 200% 以上。

The frenzy is making financial regulators nervous. They’ve repeatedly warned of the risks triggered by soaring stock valuations, a wave of initial public offerings by tiny firms with fragile balance sheets and the rush by mom-and-pop investors into complex, high-risk products like equity options.
这种狂热让金融监管机构感到紧张。他们一再警告说，股票估值飙升、资产负债表脆弱的小公司首次公开募股（IPO）浪潮，以及夫妻投资者涌入股票期权等复杂、高风险的产品，都会引发风险。

“We are very, very worried,” Ashwani Bhatia, a member of the Securities & Exchange Board of India, said last month when asked about the boom in small-scale IPOs. Three days earlier, an Indian motorcycle dealership with just two stores and eight employees raised $1.4 million in a deal that attracted more than 400 bids from investors for every one that was accepted.
“我们非常非常担心，”印度证券交易委员会的成员阿什瓦尼·巴蒂亚上个月在被问及小规模IPO的繁荣时说。三天前，一家只有两家门店和 8 名员工的印度摩托车经销商在一笔交易中筹集了 140 万美元，每笔交易被接受，投资者就吸引了 400 多个出价。

Why Giant India Options Market Is Worrying Regulators: QuickTake
为什么印度期权市场巨头让监管机构感到担忧：QuickTake

To bankers, though, all of this just highlights how great the opportunity is. “In all our discussions and internal plans, we see smaller cities as significant growth areas,” said Nikunj Kedia, head of products at 360 One Wealth, part of the 360 One Group that manages $63 billion in assets. The Mumbai-based wealth manager is focused on rapidly beefing up what it calls its hub-and-spoke model, with offices in the biggest cities serving smaller markets, including those in the traditionally underdeveloped regions in eastern India.
然而，对银行家来说，所有这些都凸显了机会是多么巨大。“在我们所有的讨论和内部计划中，我们认为较小的城市是重要的增长领域，”360 One Wealth 的产品主管 Nikunj Kedia 说，该公司隶属于 360 One Group，管理着 630 亿美元的资产。这家总部位于孟买的财富管理公司专注于迅速加强其所谓的轴辐式模式，在大城市设有办事处，为较小的市场提供服务，包括印度东部传统上不发达地区的市场。

Ridham Desai, the top India strategist at Morgan Stanley, sees lots of parallels between what’s going on here and the 401(k) boom in the US back in the late 20th century. Desai expects the investment fever sweeping across the countryside to power Indian equity markets as much, if not more, than the launch of those retirement plans did in the US. It could last, he estimates, 20 years or more and fuel the longest bull market run in India’s history.
摩根士丹利 （Morgan Stanley） 印度首席策略师里德姆·德赛 （Ridham Desai） 认为，这里发生的事情与 20 世纪末美国的 401（k） 热潮有很多相似之处。Desai 预计，席卷农村的投资热潮将对印度股市的推动力，即使不是更大，也与美国推出这些退休计划时一样多。他估计，这可能会持续 20 年或更长时间，并助长印度历史上最长的牛市。

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This year alone, local investors — including institutional and retail — have purchased a net $51 billion of shares, undeterred by the setback that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the architect of the country’s economic revival, was dealt in June when his party lost its majority in parliament. Locals now hold a larger share of India’s $5 trillion stock market than foreigners for the first time in nearly two decades.
仅今年一年，当地投资者（包括机构投资者和散户投资者）就净购买了 510 亿美元的股票，并没有因为该国经济复兴的设计师、总理纳伦德拉·莫迪 （Narendra Modi） 在 6 月失去议会多数席位而受到挫折而气馁。在印度 5 万亿美元的股票市场中，当地人现在的份额近二十年来首次超过外国人。

“If you look at the younger Indians 20 years ago, their first investment was a bank deposit,” Radhika Gupta, chief executive officer of Edelweiss Asset Management Ltd. said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “Today, their first investment is through a monthly mutual fund plan.”

For some firms looking to sign up clients in far-flung places, there’s no reason to stray too far from Mumbai. Bankers will work the phones from there, hop on a plane from time to time and lean heavily on social media. Others are putting private bankers in the small cities themselves. Axis Bank, which recently acquired Citigroup’s consumer and wealth business in India, is hiring in 15 cities. Still, given the sheer vastness of the country, the new hires will have to make long car trips — up to six hours — to court clients outside these cities.

“We believe very strongly that they’ll grow rapidly and it’ll become a virtuous cycle,” said Arjun Chowdhry, the head of affluent banking at Axis Bank.

Some of the new investors are plunking down miniscule sums of money. This is one of the downsides for the firms making the push into this business: There are lots and lots of small accounts to manage. As much as living standards have soared across India in recent years, the average monthly wage earned by salaried employees is still just 20,039 rupees, or about $240.

Nagar, the electrician in Kota, doesn’t even make that much. His monthly income is $156. So that slice he sets aside to put in the stock market comes to less than $40.

There are plenty of bigger fish too, of course. “Finding a client with 1 billion rupee portfolio is not hard,” says Kinshuk Shrivastava, an independent advisor in Indore.

The typical wealthier client, though, tends to look more like Milind Mathur, the owner of a fifth generation jewelry business in Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. A few years ago, Mathur pulled 3.5 million rupees out of the bank, pushed it into a mutual fund and then watched his money grow almost 200%. Thrilled, he and his family recently slid more of their savings into the stock market.