Do you want to know when it is a bull run?

…You offer your broker a car each morning so he doesn’t need to take the Mumbai local to get to the terminal by 9.19 am. 

…The pink papers are the first to disappear from your lap when you fall asleep on an IndigGo flight. 

…Every third executive works through the day with the Moneycontrol site minimised on his computer screen.

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…The excitement in otherwise pin-drop offices is not about Kolkata Knight Riders’s victory but PTC India Financial hitting another circuit. 

…Old-timers get nostalgic about V P Singh’s 1985 Budget and Manmohan Singh’s game-changing 1991 Budget but conclude ‘this one is different.’ 

…Karvy says the Sensex will hit 100,000 by 2020 and people say ‘that late?’ 

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…You use the wisened ‘book your profit’ line in evening conversation and people arch their eyebrows with that elevator look as if your clothes didn’t fit. 

…Even Ridham Desai (managing director of Morgan Stanley) says it would be better for investors not to get too cheeky about buying on declines because ‘you are not going to be able to catch these declines as smartly as you think you can.’ 

…The most self-confessed wretched are not those who didn’t buy the right stock but those who complain they didn’t buy enough. 

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…You feel so wasted on Saturdays and Sundays you re-read the weekday stock quotations. 

…The favourite national fantasy is not (plug in your preferred weakness) but salivating with the thought of ‘If I had bought 50,000 shares of Lanco Infratel at Rs 7…’ 

… Half the country is talking to you but craning their neck towards the CNBC channel.

…The real work of the day begins only after 3:30 pm. 

…An entire country that was struggling to fund the confidence to price stocks on retrospective earnings has started using that seductive ‘based on FY17 earnings…’

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…Conservative companies, which used words like ‘accruals’ even as recent as mid-May now pepper every third line with qualified institutional placement.

…A broker calls a company not to ask ‘Will the next quarter be good?’ but ‘Any block of shares available?’

…Gurus recommend we short gold, disinvest surplus real estate and laugh at eight per cent tax-free paper

…The best ear-raiser at a party is ‘just yesterday, I was speaking to a fund manager in Singapore.’

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…You need to get to your broker’s office at 8:45 to get the chair closest to the terminal. 

…You do things you probably have not done in six years, like offering to take the family on a three-day Phuket trip. 

…You go to the Mercedes showroom to ask about the price of the M Class with a diplomatic ‘just asking, you know…’ 

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…When you are full of which stock will quadruple in how much time resulting in exactly what annualised return, but no clue why. 

…If you bring up even a whispered reference to ‘The Black Swan’ by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, someone is going to soon discuss your parentage. 

The author is an equity commentator who tracks investors more than stocks, companies and earnings.