NISM X Taxmann's Research Analyst – Teaches Investment Research from Real Documents—Bharti Airtel's Annual Report | Kingfisher as the Counter-Case | 15 Chapters from Economy to Valuation to Conduct

Research Analyst is a complete working manual on how investment research is actually done in India—written by practitioners, published by the National Institute of Securities Markets, and built around real companies, real filings and real charts rather than textbook abstractions. Its 15 chapters trace the full arc of the job: what an analyst owes the market, the vocabulary of equity, debt and commodity instruments, and then the analytical funnel that structures all fundamental research—economy ? industry ? company ? valuation ? recommendation — before closing with the conduct rules governing published research, technical analysis, and case studies from market history. What distinguishes it is that it teaches from real documents. The financial-analysis chapter is built around the actual consolidated annual report of Bharti Airtel for FY2018-19—balance sheet, profit and loss, cash flow statement and even the note on borrowings reproduced as exhibits, with every ratio then computed on Airtel's own numbers: an EBITDA margin of 32.2%, ROE of 2.1%, debt-to-equity of 1.52x and negative working capital of ?601.49 billion. Kingfisher Airlines stands beside it as the counter-case—five straight years of negative profit before tax and negative operating cash flow, a company borrowing to pay its interest. Elsewhere, the book prices a bond with a live Excel screenshot, reproduces a genuine Sovereign Gold Bond order book to show what illiquidity looks like on screen, and works its technical chapter from real price charts of the Nifty and of Reliance, Infosys and five other Indian stocks. It is also candid, and amended. This is not a book that hedges: it tells you a current ratio below 1 is not automatically a red flag, that a price-to-book below 1 does not make a stock a bargain, and that complicated quantitative models need not mean the valuation is precise; it only means a false impression of preciseness. Buffett, Munger, Graham and Klarman are quoted where they sharpen an argument rather than decorate it. And the regulatory material is footnoted to SEBI circulars running to February 2026, covering what has genuinely changed in the profession—including two distinct clauses on the use of Artificial Intelligence in research work. This book is intended for the following audience: Working Research Analysts and Research Associates at broking houses, AMCs, PMS and AIF managers, wealth firms, family offices and independent research boutiques—for whom the Airtel walkthrough and the research checklist function as on-the-job reference Anyone Learning to Analyse a Company from Scratch. The book assumes no specialist background and builds its vocabulary from first principles, which makes it a rare single-volume entry point into fundamental analysis Compliance, Risk and Supervisory Staff, who will find the conduct chapter doubles as a handbook—personal-trading blackouts, quiet periods, disclosure thresholds, record retention and the advertisement code, all reproduced with their exact numbers Investment Advisers, Dealers and Distributors who read and act on third-party research, and need to evaluate it critically Finance and Management Students—B.Com, BBA, M.Com, MBA (Finance)—and CA/CS/CMA/CFA/FRM candidates moving toward research roles Serious Individual Investors who would rather build their own investment case than borrow someone else's, and who want to read a balance sheet, a valuation and a research report with trained scepticism Candidates for the NISM-Series-XV Certification, for whom this is the prescribed workbook The Present Publication is the March 2026 Workbook Version developed jointly by the Certification Team of NISM and subject matter experts, Mr Manish Bansal, Mr Ramesh Varakhedkar, Mr Vijay Kanchan and reviewed by Prof. Kameshwar Rao and Mr Prakash Gaba. It is published exclusively by Taxmann, with the following noteworthy features: [A Complete Real Annual Report, Worked End to End] Bharti Airtel's FY2018-19 consolidated statements across nine exhibits, used as the computation base for every ratio taught [Real Indian Corporate Actions with Dates and Ratios] The SBI stock split from ?10 to ?1 face value (?2,700 to about ?295), and Adani Enterprises' April 2018 demerger of Adani Green Energy at a 761:1000 entitlement ratio [Named Indian Company Examples Throughout] PVR on the difficulty of defining an industry, Micromax on competitive entry, Cera Sanitaryware and Navneet Publications on the BCG matrix, Reliance on pricing power, Jet Airways on consolidation, Suzlon as a forecasting cautionary tale, ITC and L&T on sum-of-the-parts [Four Strategic Frameworks Taught with Diagrams] Porter's Five Forces, PESTLE, the BCG Matrix and SCP analysis—alongside the GICS 2023 classification structure from MSCI [A Ready-to-use 40-Item Research Checklist with Hard Screens Built In] Net profit margin above 10%, debt-to-equity below 1, interest coverage above 3, ROE and ROCE both above 15%, each sustained over five years [Published Rating Conventions with Numeric Thresholds] A 'buy' implying more than 10% expected return over twelve months, 'hold' between ?10% and +10%, 'sell' below ?10% [Twenty-Nine Illustrations in the Technical Chapter] Ten of them real price charts of Indian indices and stocks [Worked Numbers, Not Just Formulae] A hedge-ratio computation on MCX copper, PEG and price-to-book comparisons across paired companies, an EV-to-capital-employed exercise reverse-solved for a required return, adjusted-price arithmetic for bonuses, splits and consolidations, and CAGR and XIRR shown as spreadsheet screenshots [Seventy Questions and Sub-Questions, with Answers] Including four extended case-lets with linked sub-questions covering peer comparison, forecasting, comparable-company valuation and chart reading [Case Studies from Market History] The Barings collapse and the 2008 credit event told at length, with shorter profiles of Enron, WorldCom, Satyam, Madoff, Milken and Rajaratnam The coverage of the book is as follows: Introduction to Research Analyst Profession o The analyst as selector; sell-side, buy-side and independent roles; principles for interacting with company management, and a separate code for communicating with clients Introduction to Securities Market o Securities under Section 2(h) of the SCRA; a product-by-product glossary running from equity and debentures through masala bonds, ADRs and GDRs, FCCBs, mortgage- and asset-backed securities and REITs and InvITs; issue types from IPO to QIP; the full participant map including the commodity ecosystem; cash, forwards, futures, options and swaps; dematerialisation, Electronic Gold Receipts and T+1 settlement Terminology in Equity and Debt Markets o Six notions of value, and enterprise value worked from a balance-sheet extract. The earnings and per-share suite. On the debt side: holding period return, current yield, yield to maturity via Excel XIRR, realised yield, and both Macaulay's and Modified Duration. Eight bond types including zero-coupon, inflation-indexed and AT1 perpetuals under Basel III. Commodity terms—basis, contango, backwardation and cost of carry, worked on gold Fundamentals of Research o Investing set against trading and speculating. Insider information versus mosaic analysis, drawn sharply. The four research approaches—technical, fundamental, quantitative and behavioural—contrasted in sequence. Full commodity profiles of gold and crude oil with their price-driver matrices, including WTI's move into negative territory in April 2020 Economic Analysis o GDP and GNP, and the three methods of measuring national income. Inflation, WPI and CPI, and the transmission into interest rates and rate-sensitive sectors. FDI versus FPI. Fiscal policy, the balance of payments and the current-account-deficit chain into currency and import costs. Monetary policy through repo, CRR and SLR. The IMF BPM6 structure. And secular, cyclical and seasonal trends with quantified periodicities Industry Analysis o Classification through NIC, NAICS and GICS, and why formal classifications often fail to capture the substance of an industry. Cyclicality, market sizing, value migration in four forms, and the business life cycle. Then Porter's Five Forces, PESTLE, BCG and SCP in depth. Key drivers and KPIs for eight named industries, from airlines to banking to IT services to telecom. A full taxation section covering direct and indirect taxes and their transmission into specific sectors Company Analysis – Business and Governance o Business models, pricing power and its sustainability, three axes of competitive advantage, and SWOT framed for the outside analyst. Then the governance core: a ten-point management competency checklist and a nine-point corporate governance checklist with SEBI's thresholds; promoter holdings and a balanced treatment of share pledging; business risk; credit rating read historically as a window into how management responds to criticism; and ESG with SEBI's BRSR framework Company Analysis – Financial Analysis o The book's densest chapter, anchored to Schedule III of the Companies Act and Ind AS 1. Every balance-sheet and P&L line item explained on Airtel's real statements; analyst-built metrics for total debt and core working capital; a redrawn multi-step P&L deriving EBITDA, EBIT and adjusted PAT; the cash flow statement with the Kingfisher red flag; notes, contingent liabilities and off-balance-sheet items; how to read an audit report; the full ratio suite; three-step DuPont; forecasting through common-size expense behaviour; and closing sections on equity expansion, dividend history and insider transactions Corporate Actions o Dividends, rights issues, bonus issues, stock splits and consolidation, each with worked price adjustment. Mergers and acquisitions; demergers with real Adani transactions; schemes of arrangement and the NCLT process; loan restructuring; buy-backs with their motives and methods; delisting and relisting through reverse book building; and share swaps Valuation Principles o Price against value. Cost-based, cash-flow-based and relative approaches. DCF through the Dividend Discount Model with Gordon growth, FCFE and FCFF, with CAPM, WACC and terminal value. Then relative valuation in depth—dividend yield, P/E, PEG, EV/EBITDA and EV/EBIT, EV/Sales, price-to-book, EV/Capital Employed, net asset value, and sector-specific multiples, including price-to-embedded value for life insurers. A sceptical paragraph on new-age valuations. And a closing nine-point checklist of practical considerations Fundamental Analysis of Commodities o Supply and demand drivers. The dollar index and how it transmits into commodity prices, import costs and exporter revenues. The international benchmarks—CBOT, COMEX, NYMEX and LME—and why domestic prices track them. Crop and weather reports, inventory and consumption trends, government policy and geopolitics. And hedging, with a worked hedge-ratio calculation and a frank list of its costs Fundamentals of Risk and Return o Simple, annualised and compounded returns, with CAGR and XIRR each worked through. Ten named risks sorted into systematic and unsystematic. Measuring risk through standard deviation, beta, modified duration, delta and Value at Risk. Sensitivity and scenario analysis, and the margin of safety. Three risk-adjusted return measures—Jensen's Alpha, Sharpe and Treynor—with the distinction of when each applies. Eight behavioural biases. And a closing section of investment wisdom from seven of the great value investors Qualities of a Good Research Report o What makes a report good, and the five reasons reports fail. Fact-based against view-based sections and their sources. Rating conventions. The checklist approach, grounded in Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto and its distinction between errors of ignorance and errors of ineptitude. And the 40-item sample checklist itself Legal and Regulatory Environment o The regulatory architecture, from the Ministry of Finance through SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, PFRDA and IBBI. Six statutes and regulations in substance—including the insider trading regulations with their expanded list of price-sensitive information, the fraudulent-practices regulations, and the Research Analyst Regulations across registration, qualification and conduct. The eight-clause Code of Conduct. Then conflicts of interest and disclosure in depth: personal-trading blackouts, quiet periods around public offerings, compensation insulation from investment banking, ownership and compensation disclosure, AI-use disclosure, record maintenance, grievance redressal and segregation of research from distribution. Plus exchange surveillance, the advertisement code, the Investor Charter and the cyber resilience framework Technical Analysis o Five core assumptions and a comparison against fundamental analysis. Six chart types, including Renko and Heikin-Ashi. The six tenets of Dow Theory. Primary, secondary and tertiary trends. Eight candlestick reversal patterns and four consolidation patterns, each with formation and confirmation rules. Support and resistance across six types, with order blocks, liquidity pools and VWAP. Trendlines and channels. And six indicators taught with practitioner specificity—a 13/21/34-period EMA set drawn from the Fibonacci series, MACD as the 26 EMA minus the 12 EMA with a 9 EMA signal line, RSI with regime-adjusted thresholds, ADX, Relative Strength Comparatives and On-Balance Volume Annexures o The Investor Charter with its fifteen investor rights and its do's and don'ts; the prescribed complaint-disclosure formats; and the case studies from market history The book follows a progressive, analyst-centric structure: Every Chapter Uses the Same Template — It opens with a boxed Learning Objectives panel and closes with a shaded Sample Questions box in which the correct answer is printed in bold within the options—self-check without flipping to a key at the back The Sequence Follows the Order Research Actually Gets Done — Profession and market context, then research philosophy, then the top-down funnel of economy, industry and company, then corporate events and valuation, then commodities and risk, then the written output and the rules that govern it, and finally technical analysis as a complementary discipline Exhibits Appear Where They Earn Their Place — The financial-analysis chapter is entirely tabular—nine exhibits and no charts. The industry chapter is the visually supported frameworks chapter. The company-governance chapter is unbroken checklist-driven prose with no figures at all. The technical chapter carries 29 illustrations Depth Escalates with Importance — Early chapters close with one to three short questions; the chapters on financial analysis, valuation and technical analysis carry extended case-lets with four and six linked sub-questions built on full financial summaries and real charts Footnotes Point Outward — Thirty-two numbered footnotes run through the book, and those in the later chapters carry full SEBI circular URLs with dates—so a reader can go straight to the source rather than take the summary on trust Read more