Archives for November 2018

Archimedes — a Greek mathematician — was born in 287 BC in the seaport city of Syracuse, Sicily. Some consider him as the greatest mathematician of all time. Although he’s known for the discovery of Archimedes Principle, his often quoted for his famous saying —

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

While Archimedes did not invent the lever, his did extensive work on the usage of levers. Archimedes designed block-and-tackle pulley systems, allowing sailors to use the principle of leverage to lift objects that would otherwise have been too heavy to move.

A lever is a simple machine that amplifies an input force to provide a greater output force, which is said to provide leverage. There isn’t a single mechanical device in the world which doesn’t use the laws of the lever.

When people realized that leverage could magnify the effect of non-physical things too the first thing they tried it on was money. In the last few decades, the world of finance has taken Archimedes’ words literally.
[Read more…] about The Dagger of Debt

Continuing the trend from the last month’s bookworm, I am revisiting the book —The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande — which we had covered in Mar 2015 issue of Value Investing Almanack.

Before we delve deeper, a word about Syntopical Reading.

Mortimer Adler, in his book How To Read A Book, writes that Syntopical Reading is the highest form of reading. In syntopical reading, you read multiple books (in parallel) on the same topic. The goal is not to understand everything discussed in the book, but rather to understand the subject and develop a deep fluency on that one chosen topic. This is all about identifying and filling in your knowledge gaps.

In this post, we’ll go into more details on the topic of checklists. The primary book would be Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and we’ll also rummage for investing related insights in Guy Spier’s book — The Education of a Value Investor.

Atul Gawande recently shot to fame when it was announced that three large US corporations — Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway — have joined hands to created a healthcare venture and appointed Gawande as the CEO.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Revisiting The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Peter Lynch is a legendary investor whose investment record remains unmatched. He managed Fidelity’s Magellan Fund and stacked up annual returns in excess of 29 percent per annum from 1977 to 1990.

The term tenbagger was coined by Lynch. One Up On Wall Street is his most famous book. His other book — Beating the Street — is equally useful and worth reading several times. In this book, Lynch talks about 21 investing principles. He calls those principles as Peter’s Principles.

This is the Part-1 of the Peter’s Principles series.
[Read more…] about Special Report: Peter’s Principles