Blog on Value Investing | Safal Niveshak

The Wrong Thing to Fear

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My new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Click here to get your copy.

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It was 28^th July 2024. My flight from Bengaluru was running late, which meant we would land in Mumbai well after dark, in the middle of the monsoon, which is the worst combination of things a flight into Mumbai can be.

I knew this before I boarded. I have flown this route many times. I know what a Mumbai monsoon landing feels like, and I know the statistics on commercial aviation, and I know that turbulence has killed almost no one in the modern era of flying. I am, by any reasonable measure, an informed passenger and understand a bit about how a commercial aircraft is designed to handle forces several times greater than anything it will ever actually encounter in the air.

None of it helped.

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My Conversation with Sonia Shenoy on Fear, Time, and Playing Your Own Game

I recently had a conversation with Sonia Shenoy on her podcast, and we ended up covering a lot of ground—from financial freedom to the fear of not reaching there, understanding market cycles, risk vs uncertainty, the real meaning of ‘time’, quitting your corporate job, and what it really means to play your own game.

We also talked about the ideas behind my new book, The Long Game.

Sonia is a patient listener, and that helped me talk, perhaps a lot more than I usually do.

I hope you enjoy it.

Watch the full conversation here.

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Risk Is Never in the Market

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Making money in stocks when everyone around you is making money isn’t really an achievement. All boats rise when the tide is high. The real test is what you do when the tide goes out. And more specifically, how you do it and with what degree of inner stillness.

Now, whatever philosophers and teachers may teach, most of us aren’t built for equanimity. We feel the ecstasy when things are going up, and we feel the misery when they’re going down. That’s just human.

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On Surviving: Three Ideas From 30 Years of Investing

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Prashant Jain retired from HDFC Mutual Fund in August 2022, after nearly 30 years of managing some of India’s largest equity funds.

When he left, he wrote a farewell note called Saar, which means ‘essence’. It was a detailed log of the most important lessons he had learned in his long career as one of India’s best public money managers. I have linked it at the end of this article.

Among all the lessons he shared, one of the most insightful came from a table buried inside the note, which was like a full scorecard of his career.

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Inert Knowledge

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A few weeks ago, on a holiday morning, I did something I knew I shouldn’t do the moment I did it.

I took the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. At the start of a long holiday.

Now, in my defence, I had a plan. I would leave early and beat the traffic before it had a chance to materialise. This is the same plan, I should mention, that approximately four lakh other people on that road had also independently arrived at.

I had even warned a friend the previous evening not to drive on it. He thanked me for the advice. I then proceeded to not take it myself.

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The Long Game Is Simple, But Not Easy

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For centuries in Indian villages, the highest form of charity a person could offer was not gold, not land, not even money. It was a cow, and the act was called Gau-daan or the gift of a cow.

Think about why. A healthy cow is not a one-time gift. It is a small, living business. It produces milk daily, some of which is for the household while the remaining is to sell. Its offspring are assets, too. A male calf helps plough the fields, while a female calf grows up to produce more milk. Even its dung has practical value as fuel. In other words, the cow generates a stream of returns across its entire lifetime.

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The Psychology of Investing #20: The Most Powerful Force in Investing

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The Internet is brimming with resources that proclaim, “nearly everything you believed about investing is incorrect.” However, there are far fewer that aim to help you become a better investor by revealing that “much of what you think you know about yourself is inaccurate.” In this series of posts on the psychology of investing, I will take you through the journey of the biggest psychological flaws we suffer from that causes us to make dumb mistakes in investing. This series is part of a joint investor education initiative between Safal Niveshak and DSP Mutual Fund.

In 1961, a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram ran one of the most disturbing experiments in the history of science.

Volunteers were recruited under the pretense of studying memory and learning. Each volunteer was asked to play the role of “teacher” and administer electric shocks to a “learner” in the next room whenever he gave a wrong answer. The shocks escalated in 15-volt increments—from a mild 15 volts all the way to a lethal-looking 450 volts, labelled “Danger: Severe Shock” on the dial.

The learner was actually an actor. There were no real shocks. But the volunteers didn’t know that.

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The Investor’s Second Self

New Book Alert: The Long Game

My new book, The Long Game, is available for pre-order now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Shipping starts end of February 2026.

Click Here to Pre-Order Now

It was October 1915, and a British explorer Ernest Shackleton was leading one of the most ambitious journeys in the history of exploration. He was trying to cross the continent of Antarctica on foot. Shackleton was inspired by Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition in 1911, and so this crossing remained, in Shackleton’s words, the “one great main object of Antarctic journeyings.”

He, along with twenty-seven crew members, started on a ship called Endurance.

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The Inner Life of a Long-Term Investor

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I learned something interesting today.

You know the word “school” comes from the ancient Greek skholē, which meant leisure or free time. It originally meant the unhurried space to wonder, question, and sit with difficult ideas without needing an immediate answer.

For the Greeks, it seems, skholē was the highest form of human activity, because it involved thinking freely without the pressure of any outcome. So, when Plato and his students gathered to debate philosophy under the open sky, that was skholē in action. The place where you did that became a skholē.

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The Really Long Game

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This story is from the 1860s. The administrators of New College, Oxford, discovered that the huge oak beams in their Great Hall were rotting. Some of these beams were two feet thick and forty feet long.

In 19th-century England, finding oaks of that size was nearly impossible. The college was staring at a collapsing roof with no obvious way to fix it.

Then someone suggested they call the college’s land agent.

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