Abstract

The Bombay Stock Exchange’s (BSE) Sensitive Index popularly known as Sensex is market weighted index of 30 financially sound and established companies. It started its journey in year 1979 with base value of 100. Equity being a volatile asset tends to deliver positive as well as negative returns.The main aim of this research paper is to check the volatility of BSE Sensex vis-à-vis to the returns variation over various periods with rolling returns performance of 1 to 40 years. The study considered the daily closing of S&P BSE Sensex and calculated the returns on a daily basis for various time frames. The study checks the highest, lowest and mean returns across each span in last 41 years with respect to the volatility in returns. We also checked the frequency of negative returns and subsequently the probability of loss in each time frame. The result of the study indicates that in shorter periods like 1, 3, 5 and 7 years the volatility is higher and variation of returns also ranges from very low negative to very high returns. It has also been observed that volatility also reduces with increasing rolled returns of holding periods. It has also been observed that if an investor invested for more than 15 years period at any day without looking at Sensexhe had not had a single instance of negative return. The returns for 25 to 40 years rolled period had a very low deviation from the mean returns and the average returns delivered are in the range of 14.5% to 15.3% which were impressive.

Key words: Performance, volatility, Sensex, Index, Daily Returns, rolling returns, long term, standard deviation