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You are here: Home / 2017 / Archives for January 2017

Archives for January 2017

Safal Niveshak Stream – January 28, 2017

January 28, 2017 | 2 Comments

Note to Readers: In Stream, we suggest worthwhile reading material on a variety of topics, not all of which are directly related to investing. Some of the articles require you to be paid subscriber of those sites. However, it is often possible to read such articles by going to Google News and searching for the article’s title.



Some nice stuff we are reading, watching, and observing at the start of this weekend…

Life/Learning

  • Marcus Aurelius on how to motivate yourself to get out of bed in the morning and go to work…

    At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

  • One blogger who never fails to inspire me is Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. I have been reading him for the past seven years, and have also found mental stimulation in most of what he has written. Like this post that Leo wrote on what he has learned in 10 years of Zen Habits…

    It’s been a decade filled with learning for me … too many things to put into one post. But as I’ve been reflecting on it all, I have a dozen or so notes I’d like to share with you.

    Some of the things I’ve learned, starting with personal lessons and ending with lessons about my business:

    Focus on intentions rather than goals. As you might know, I experimented with giving up goals after being very focused on goals for years. It was liberating, and it turns out, you don’t just do nothing if you don’t have a goal. You get up and focus on what you care about. Read more here. Instead, I’ve found it useful to focus less on the destination (goal) and instead focus on what your intention for each activity is. If you’re going to write something … instead of worrying about what the book will be like when you’re done, focus on why you want to write in the first place. If you are doing something out of love or to help others, for example, then you are freed from it needing to turn out a certain way (a goal) and instead can let it turn out however it turns out. I’ve found this way of working and living to be freeing and less prone to anxiety or procrastination.

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – January 28, 2017

StockTalk (January 2017)

January 25, 2017 | Leave a Comment

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Women and Investing: A Conversation With My Wife

January 24, 2017 | 17 Comments

I conducted my Value Investing Workshop in Mumbai on Sunday, and it was one of the biggest gatherings I’ve ever had in this city so far. Thanks to all who attended the same, and especially to those who flew in from Goa, Delhi, and Vadodara.

Safal Niveshak's Mumbai Value Investing Workshop - Jan 2017

As I shared the photo of tribe members who attended the workshop, my friend on Twitter, Yamini Sood asked, “I wonder where are all the women?”

@safalniveshak I wonder where are all the women??? Had a similar group pic in Behav Fin workshop I attended last yr @ Flames

— Yamini Sood (@Yaminintweet) January 22, 2017


I have always congratulated the few women who attend my workshops, but never took this question more seriously – “Where are all the women when it comes to learning how to invest their money in the stock market, and also to take control of their financial lives?”

So, I posed this question to my wife – “What do you think could be the reason more women are not learning to invest well, which I indirectly understand as the lack of inclination on their part to look at the stock market as a way to invest their savings and to take control of their financial lives?”

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Safal Niveshak Stream – January 21, 2017

January 21, 2017 | Leave a Comment

Note to Readers: In Stream, we suggest worthwhile reading material on a variety of topics, not all of which are directly related to investing. Some of the articles require you to be paid subscriber of those sites. However, it is often possible to read such articles by going to Google News and searching for the article’s title.



Some nice stuff we are reading, watching, and observing at the start of this weekend…

Life/Learning

  • The American chess player and martial arts champion Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning is one of the best books I have read on, well, the art of learning and the entire process of going about doing it. This book reveals Waitzkin’s unique systems of thematic learning, idea generation, building resilience, and mastering the art of performance psychology. Here is one of the many passages from the book that have inspired me…

    If I have learned anything over my first twenty-nine years, it is that we cannot calculate our important contests, adventures, and great loves to the end. The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised. No matter how much preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, we’ll be in unfamiliar terrain. Conditions might not be calm or reasonable. It may feel as though the whole world is stacked against us. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing. I believe the key is to have prepared in a manner that allows for inspiration, to have laid the foundation for us to create under the wildest pressures we ever imagined.

  • It’s understandable that we respond to the ratcheting demands of modern life by trying to make ourselves more efficient by managing our time better. But what if all this efficiency just makes things worse?

    Given that the average lifespan consists of only about 4,000 weeks, a certain amount of anxiety about using them well is presumably inevitable: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make infinitely ambitious plans, yet almost no time at all to put them into practice. The problem of how to manage time, accordingly, goes back at least to the first century AD, when the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote On The Shortness of Life. “This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily, and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,” he said, chiding his fellow citizens for wasting their days on pointless busyness, and “baking their bodies in the sun”.

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – January 21, 2017

InvestorInsights: Jatin Khemani

January 20, 2017 | Leave a Comment

Jatin Khemani is Founder & CEO at Stalwart Advisors, a SEBI Registered Investment Adviser. He has seven years of experience in investment analysis and portfolio management. In his last stint with a Delhi-based brokerage house he was solely responsible for the research activities of the organisation right from picking new ideas to tracking the existing portfolio thereby assisting the directors in managing the proprietary book. He is a CFA (US) Charter holder, earned his MBA in Finance from Christ University, Bangalore and graduation in Commerce from Delhi University. Thanks to his admiration for Peter Lynch & Philip Fisher, Jatin has over the years become proficient in scuttlebutt, a primary research method to find out truth about a company or an industry. On weekends, he teaches finance to MBA students and is an active volunteer with The Art of Living since 2006, where he leads state level fund-raising campaigns.

Safal Niveshak (SN): Could you tell us a little about your background, how you got interested in value investing?

Jatin Khemani (JK): I had a decent exposure to how businesses operate since a very young age. My family used to run a manufacturing setup which I often visited, and later on I studied commerce in high school and graduation. But my perception towards equity markets was bad then. I had seen my father trade and lose money. The lesson that got passed on to me was that individuals do not stand a chance in this market, which is manipulated by ‘operators’, dominated by institutional investors, and its nothing less than gambling.

However, that completely changed during my MBA days, when I met my mentor Mr. SG Raja Sekharan. He was a very senior IT professional who had left his fancy job as soon as he became financially independent and started following his passion of teaching and helping others get financially independent. He could do that by smartly investing in real estate as well as great businesses like HDFC Bank, Asian Paints, Pidilite etc. and holding on to them for years, and in some cases decades.

The nirvana moment for me was when I read ‘One Up On Wall Street’ by Peter Lynch and later on was introduced to the writings of legends like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Philip Fisher. That’s when I decided to pursue investing as a career and enrolled myself for CFA (USA), which I eventually cleared in the first attempt and was awarded the charter. I worked two jobs, first at an independent investment research firm, and second as an analyst and later head of research at a Delhi-based brokerage house.

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28 Big Ideas on Investing, Business, Life, Behaviour, and Thinking (Special E-Book)

January 19, 2017 | 8 Comments

28 Big Ideas on Investing, Business, Life, Behaviour, and Thinking (Special E-Book)The world around us is changing pretty fast. Modern computers are becoming cheaper, faster and more intelligent than ever, which means they are ready to replace a large part of human workforce.

The day is not far when your work and skills will be threatened by artificial intelligence. To stay relevant, you need to ensure that you remain valuable to the society in a way which can’t be substituted by a robot.

And your only chance to remain valuable is by being a constant learner…a learning machine, as Charlie Munger says. In fact, he has been saying this for years –

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

The question is where do you start? There is so much to learn all around, and so little time.

Start with our latest special e-book – 28 Big Ideas on Investing, Business, Life, Behaviour, and Thinking.

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Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

January 15, 2017 | Leave a Comment

Derek Sivers was a full-time musician in 1998 making a comfortable living. One day he decided to sell his music CDs online and found that there was no way for a small time musician to sell online. So he learnt to program and built a website to sell his CDs. Very soon his friends started requesting him to list their CDs on the website. That’s how CD Baby was born and 10 years later it was doing $100 million in sales. In 2008 Sivers sold CDBaby.com and gave away the proceeds ($22 million) to a charitable trust.

Sivers never wanted to start a business and when he was running CD Baby, he intentionally wanted to restrict the growth so that he could run it the way he wanted. Ironically, those self-imposed constraints became the trigger for CD Baby’s growth.

[Read more…] about Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

BookWorm: Anything You Want

January 15, 2017 | Leave a Comment

Business and life lessons from a musician who accidentally became an entrepreneur when he found himself running a multi-million dollars business.

Derek Sivers was a full-time musician in 1998 making a comfortable living. One day he decided to sell his music CDs online and found that there was no way for a small-time musician to sell online. So, he learnt to program and built a website to sell his CDs. Very soon his friends started requesting him to list their CDs on the website. That’s how CD Baby was born and 10 years later it was doing $100 million in sales. In 2008 Sivers sold CDBaby.com and gave away the proceeds ($22 million) to a charitable trust.

Sivers never wanted to start a business and when he was running CD Baby, he intentionally wanted to restrict the growth so that he could run it the way he wanted. Ironically, those self-imposed constraints became the trigger for CD Baby’s growth.

Selling my friends’ CDs was starting to take up a lot of my time. I realized I had accidentally started a business. But I didn’t want to start a business! I was already living my dream life as a full-time musician. I didn’t want anything to distract me from that. So, I thought that by taking an unrealistically utopian approach, I could keep the business from growing too much. Instead of trying to make it big, I was going to make it small. It was the opposite of ambition, so I had to think in a way that was the opposite of ambitious.

“The key point is that I wasn’t trying to make a big business. I was just daydreaming about how one little thing would look in a perfect world. When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia. When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too.

Sivers is the best example of what they call ‘an accidental entrepreneur’ and  Anything You Want is the account of his entrepreneurial journey and the lessons he learnt. I found that a lot of these lessons can be extended for investing success too.

So here are my favourite ideas from the book.

If It’s Not a Hit, Switch

Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
[Read more…] about BookWorm: Anything You Want

Safal Niveshak Stream – January 14, 2017

January 14, 2017 | 4 Comments

Note to Readers: In Stream, we suggest worthwhile reading material on a variety of topics, not all of which are directly related to investing. Some of the articles require you to be paid subscriber of those sites. However, it is often possible to read such articles by going to Google News and searching for the article’s title.



Some nice stuff we are reading, watching, and observing at the start of this weekend…

Life/Learning

  • At times it’s scary to think how time is flying. And then there are posts like these that tell you that you may not learn some of the most important lessons till it’s too late in life, like these three…

    1. Time passes much more quickly than you realize.

    2. If you don’t take care of your body early then it won’t take care of you later. Your world becomes smaller each day as you lose mobility, continence and sight.

    3. People are far more important than any other thing in your life. No hobby, interest, book, work is going to be as important to you as the people you spend time with as you get older.

  • Does anyone know anything any more? The ease with which one can look up facts on a phone at any time is one of the wonders of the modern age. But are we becoming too reliant on it? A new study indicates, at least, that there might be a snowball effect to such reliance. The more we depend on Google for information recall, it suggests, the more we will do so in the future. In short, Google may be rewiring our minds, and the debate we are now having about the effect of constant internet access on memory and creativity has precedents thousands of years old.

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – January 14, 2017

Value Investor Interview: Kuntal Shah

January 11, 2017 | 7 Comments

Note: This interview was originally published in the November 2016 issue of our premium newsletter – Value Investing Almanack (VIA). To read more such interviews and other deep thoughts on value investing, business analysis and behavioral finance, click here to subscribe to VIA.



Kuntal Shah - Value Investing AlmanackKuntal Shah is the founder of Oaklane Capital Management LLP and has an opportunistic inclination towards a value-oriented and risk-controlled approach to investments. He has been an extremely successful investor over the past two decades and his success has come from exploiting the inefficiencies inherent in the markets.

Kuntal has an in-depth understanding of value investing with a focus on risk identification and mitigation, emerging trends, and opportunities in key growth sectors in India, taxation and accounting. He also loves to teach on these subjects and in the past has lectured at UTI Institute of Capital Markets, IIM (Ahmedabad), IIT (Mumbai), Symbiosis, FLAME and Chartered Accountants Institute. Kuntal is an Electronics Engineer from Pune University.

Safal Niveshak (SN): Could you tell us a little about your background, and how you got interested in value investing?

Kuntal Shah (KS): I was brought up in a middle-class family in Mumbai. I am an engineer by qualification. Early life was a constant struggle to make ends meet for our family of five siblings given our father’s limited earnings. I was lucky to be brought up in an environment where there was no compromise on education and was fortunate to be inculcated with middle class working ethos, frugality and conservatism of living within one’s means without recourse to borrowing to prepone consumption.

[Read more…] about Value Investor Interview: Kuntal Shah

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