Setting the stage for a much-needed debate on the practice of TV channels, anchors and media professionals “recommending hot stocks” to investors, outgoing chairman of the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Meleveethil Damodaran has raised serious questions about the media’s role in “talking up” or “talking down” a stock. And has called for far more open and strict disclosure norms than the “routine” ones being currently followed.

Speaking to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s Walk the Talk (to be broadcast on Saturday at 9.30 pm), Damodaran said: “When we heard the term anchor investors first, I thought anchor investor is the guy that brings in a lot of money initially into a project around whose reputation others invest. I am beginning to believe at the end of my three-year tenure that an anchor investor is one who is an anchor and an investor put together. I am worried that (they are) those who are responsible...who take the message to a billion plus people who will hopefully, one day be interested in the market. If that message gets distorted, what happens?”

Similar concerns were underlined by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh while inaugurating the new SEBI headquarters in 2006 where he underlined the importance of “ethical conduct and effective disclosure norms.” Financial markets are more susceptible than other markets, he said, to “asymmetric” information. “Such asymmetry encourages non-transparency and created opportunities for excessive profiteering. It not only discourages more widespread participation in the markets but also enables market manipulation,” the PM had said.

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