Archives for August 2015

Announcing: Safal Niveshak Meetups

In his magnificent book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill wrote –

No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind…When a group of individual brains are coordinated and function in harmony, the increased energy created through that alliance becomes available to every individual brain in the group.

In giving meaning to Mr. Hill’s idea, let me announce a new initiative from Safal Niveshak – Meetups @ Safal Niveshak – to bring the tribe members together, face-to-face, to channel the energy for a shared vision – simplifying the art of value investing and making it available to as many small investors as possible, around the country.

This idea is really simple – To meet regularly in small groups across cities in India…to learn and grow together in our investment journey.

Annual Report Review: Blue Star

In continuation of this series on reviewing annual reports, here is my review of the FY15 report of India’s leading air-conditioning and commercial refrigeration company, Blue Star.

Click here to download the PDF review (10 MB file), or read it in the panel below.

Please note that this review is just to help you dig deeper, in case you are interested to read and understand more of the reviewed company. Don’t treat this as an end to your quest for learning more about businesses and industries, and how to analyze them.

In fact, this is just the beginning. 🙂

Let me know your thoughts and questions on this review in the Comments section of this post…and also share any suggestion(s) you may have to make future reviews better and easier for your understanding.

Statutory Warning: This is NOT an investment advice to buy or sell shares. Please make your own decision, as blindly acting on anyone else’s research and opinions can be injurious to your wealth. I do not own the stock, but despite this, my analysis may be biased, and wrong. I have been wrong many times in the past. I am a registered Research Analyst as per SEBI (Research Analyst) Regulations, 2014 (Registration No. INH000000578).

Latticework of Mental Models: Tragedy Of Commons

I have never been bitten by a dog (by an unfriendly dog to be precise). However, there were few friendly ones who would chase me for fun. Well it was fun for them but as a kid I didn’t particularly enjoy that kind of sport much.

So when I moved into my current apartment community, housing nearly two thousand flats, it felt nostalgic because the campus had multiple patches of large open areas which meant it was a boon for dog owners (and heaven for their dogs).

Few years back, it wasn’t uncommon to see few fitness conscious dogs taking regular morning and evening walks (along with their disinterested owners) inside the apartment campus. But as the resident population grew, the population of pets followed suit. Pretty soon, it became a common practice for dogs to relieve themselves anywhere in the campus.

The pet owners perhaps assumed that cleaning was a responsibility of maintenance staff which resulted in a campus littered with dog poop everywhere. It was ironical that the mess was equally disturbing for all residents (including those offending dog owners) but it was quite logical, in absence of any specific laws about pet poop mis-management, for people to keep their houses clean and compromise with the common area.

I couldn’t help but marvel at Aristotle’s insight about this issue. He said –

What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.

5 Things I Learned from Jeff Bezos on Business and Investing

It was 18 years back when Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller and one of the most successful Internet companies, got listed. The company’s IPO was unique for two reasons.

One, that was a period before the dawn of Internet businesses, and thus most investors and brick-and-mortar competitors were convinced the company was a joke – an “Internet bookseller” with “no barriers to entry”. Michael Porter’s framework said it would go bust quickly.

Then, Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was extremely frank with shareholders from the word go, which is truly unique in this world where CEOs hide more than they reveal.

So, in 1997, after the IPO, Bezos wrote an honest letter to shareholders in which he explained Amazon’s philosophy, which was (and is) quite different from the philosophies of most public companies.

Why different?

Because, unlike other public companies that were (and are) obsessed with meeting and beating short-term shareholder demands, Bezos’s game plan was (and is) focused on long-term investments and value creation.