New Delhi, July 17 -- When markets and portfolios rise as relentlessly as they have lately, the first feeling is not gratitude. It is dread. It is the curse of investors who have seen cycles before: you cannot enjoy the climb. Every new high looks like a future correction in disguise. Every rally whispers a reckoning to come. The mind wanders in that silence.

You begin to question your own thesis-at times to justify new price levels, at others to support an urge to lock in gains. Long-term holds feel brittle; short-term trades seduce. You read Benjamin Graham on the vanishing margin of safety; then read George Soros on reflexivity. For every conviction you hold, you can find the ghost of a great thinker to support it. And another to take...