Four years as shareholder of ITC

ITC—in my humble opinion—is probably the most polarized stock in India. On one hand, you have the die hard fans who are waiting for its resurrection some day to prove them right. On the other hand, there are the detractors who don’t miss a single opportunity to poke fun at it. And some of those jokes are actually good. Don’t believe me, just Google ‘ITC meme’ and get ready for laughs.

When I invested in ITC I didn’t know it was butt of jokes—pun intended—on the internet. I put some money in it and forgot. Then I received my first dividend. And I started day dreaming about living off with ITC’s dividend in my retirement. But sanity prevailed and here I am still holding ITC, waiting for its resurrection but not hoping to live off its dividend.

Return

The returns are—well—nothing to talk about. Apart from few spikes here and there, the returns have largely been flat.

Profit (rather the absence of it)

In case of ITC my profits and losses have always made sure they are never too far from 0%. They will go till 10% or –10%, but never too far.

XIRR

With such dismal returns over past four years you may ask why am I still holding ITC? Well I ask the same question to 250+ mutual funds (as on Sep 2021) holding ITC.

NOTE: XIRR for initial months varies wildly and is not useful for any analysis. But once the investments complete minimum of 1 year, XIRR gives me a much better picture. So I calculate ‘XIRR (>1 year)’ which calculates XIRR only for the investments which have completed minimum of one year while ‘XIRR’ continues to calculate for all the investments irrespective of how much time has been completed. There are some periods where ‘XIRR’ and ‘XIRR (>1 year)’ calculate to the same amount as for that time all my investments had completed minimum of 1 year.