India's two Ambani brothers could buy 100 percent of every company listed on Pakistan's Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) and still be left with $30 billion to spare. This was one of many comparative conclusions about the two countries by Farrukh Saleem, a Pakistani writer focused, with a twinge of envy, on the giant next door.

The four richest Indians, he writes, could buy up all goods and services produced over a year by 169 million Pakistanis and still be left with $60 billion to spare. That the four richest Indians are wealthier than the 40 richest Chinese is another conclusion.

As the U.S. Stock Exchange was bottom-fishing, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries became a $100 billion company (dwarfing the entire KSE, which is capitalized at $65 billion). Mr. Saleem's blend of admiring envy lists the baubles Neeta Ambani received from her husband for her 44th birthday last fall: a $60 million jet with a custom-fitted master bedroom with bathroom, a sky bar, entertainment cabins, game consoles and so forth. And Mukesh, now building, for $1 billion, the planet's most expensive new home - Residence Antillia (after a mythical, phantom island somewhere in the Atlantic) - isn't even India's richest man.

At 500 feet tall, Mr. Saleem gushes, the Ambanis' new family home will be a 30-story Mumbai skyscraper (first seven floors for parking and auto maintenance, the eighth for theater, health club and swimming pool, two floors for Ambani family guests, followed by four floors for the Ambani family, with superb views of the Arabian Sea. To top it all, not one, but three helipads. The new Ambani home will be staffed by 600 employees.

Mr. Saleem then marvels at India's penetration of America's domestic scene. Imagine, he says, 12 percent of all American scientists are of Indian origin, 38 percent of doctors, 36 percent of NASA scientists, 34 percent of Microsoft employees, 28 percent of IBM's payroll. And there's much more to come, he says.

Sabeer Bhatia created and founded Hotmail; Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems; Vinod Dham fathered the Intel Pentium processor that runs 90 percent of all computers; Rajiv Gupta co-invented Hewlett Packard's E-speak project; Indians run an average of four out of 10 Silicon Valley start-ups; six Indian women have won Miss Universe/Miss World titles over the past 10 years; and Bollywood produces 800 movies a year.

David Fuller's view There is good news and bad news for India in this article. Starting with the former, the penultimate paragraph above, albeit applicable to the USA, is a reminder of why investors should not judge India's stock market solely on the basis of poverty and urban squalor. Given even slowly improving governance, which India has, brainpower counts more than anything else in terms of economic potential. With its large population, India probably has more brainpower than any other country in the world. Its people are also ambitious because they have had so little financial security.

The bad news concerns Mukesh Ambani's conspicuous consumption. It shows that he is running the company for himself rather than shareholders, and does not have his eye fully on the business. Reliance Industries has the biggest weighting in the Sensex Index at nearly 13.5% but it is an underperformer. Unfortunately, it is also the biggest holding in the JPMorgan Indian Investment Trust (JII LN) at 11.9%, just ahead of Infosys Technologies, which has a 10.23% weighing in the main Index. Infosys is the vastly superior performer in the current bull run. JII remains my largest personal equity investment.


My personal portfolio: Siemens AG long equity trade increased - With an in-the-money stop on my earlier purchase of Siemens (weekly & daily), I used what I suspect is no more than a post-breakout consolidation to increase my long trade by 50% today. I paid €71.33 for another June contract, including spread-bet dealing costs. These are expensive at currently €0.52 on a June trade but I like the absence of UK CGT.