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By Nik Ogbulie
The biggest Investment festival is about to take place in Nigeria. The festival involves about 35 banks with over 250 million target investors. The volume of investment needed is about 25 times bigger than what was available sixteen years ago, when the Nigerian economy witnessed the first largest call to be part of the growth for its fledgling financial sector.
It’s obvious that the environment is calm and investors are no more depending on the usual frenzy as none is being seen, though. The call to invest into the new capitalisation project is only available on the kleg-tubes and pages of newspapers, which do not create the usual hub for critical and open discussion. In the previous development, 20 years ago , people’s decisions to plug into the project were largely influenced by open publicity and group considerations. The reason was0 that many depended more on the open-source to know what is going on and what decision to take. Today, many activities are conducted virtually al a COVID-19 indication. With the gatherings, whether on a roadshow or door-to-door marketing, many Nigerians have the benefit of adequate and detailed information of the investment in such a way that they have its full understanding.
The issue now remains that banks have resorted to the use of various indices as contents to attract investors. Most of the time these indicators are not verifiable as they have willingly been produced to woo unsuspecting investors, given the situation where the regulatory authorities do not care to offer adequate market information to investors through several available media channels.
As a matter of fact, data of various degrees have been parried or fiddled by banks, brokers, Issueing Houses to make their product or service look good. The authenticity of such data has become very questionable, at this point so that inventos should not be deceived with flimsy data such as current profit, current market share,, share price or size. Investors who are informed would want to look at the return on investment(ROI) as the proper index to measure the utility of the investment and its capacity to offer serious profit over time.
It is obvious that a good number of the target investors, especially the not-too-informed, would be looking at the ensuering grandstanding sand not the ROI content which they cannot otherwise measure because it is under lock-and-key by owners and consultants. However, owners are believed to have been fiddling a lot with ROIs with questionable descripancies observed in most of the cases. This is not the case with banks that are known to have established corporate governance standards or clear transparency guidelines in the market.
Investors could be better placed if the avail themselves of records in the industry so that they cam benefit from good decisions than being led by the nose by some gregarious by-standers and restive market operators who would not mind the consequenc3s of any decision of any broker, the exchange or the bank.
The reason why investors must be protected through adequate knowledge information is because a good market is like a good wine: It has no bush!!
Most of the desirous investors I have spoken with for the purpose of this ongoing market rally do not consider the ROI as a factor to deal with while looking at bank ABC. What they are really craving to exhumed is the real size. They do not understand that size means nothing when the market dots last, showing little or no valued revenue to show.
So , banks and consultants must roll-out the unseen contents in every investment to avoid taking advantage of the less privileged in expanding their own frontiers.
I told a friend to put much of his budgeted investment into the shares of bank A, but he responded that bank B has been on very high profit margin. You can see what I mean? Yes, that is one of the positive indicators of good management, but, what is the ROI? This is the Koko!!
Let the real investor real education begin. Banks and the capital market operator already know this but they are afraid that many would.
