Optimal returns in Indian stock market during global pandemic: A comparative study

This research is an extension of our previous work [Debnath and Srivastava (2021)]. In that paper, we designed a portfolio based on data taken from National Stock Exchange (NSE), India, during 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020 and performance of that portfolio in real-life situation was examined during 1 January 2021 to 21 May 2021 assuming investments were made according to the proposed model. We observed that our proposed portfolio was efficient enough in that period to beat the performance of most of the in-demand mutual funds. It was also conjectured that this portfolio would be sustainable post the second wave of COVID-19 in India. In the present paper, our aim is to validate this conjecture. Here, we examine the performance of this portfolio during the period 1 January 2021 to 18 October 2021 using the same previous data set. We also investigate the performance of this portfolio if it was blindly adopted without applying the stock selection methodology during 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2019. Using paired t-test between the difference of means of the performances in the year 2019 and the year 2021, we show that the performance in 2021 was significantly enhanced because of selecting the stocks applying our proposed model.