Archives for December 2018

51 Ideas from 2018

Dear Tribe Member,

Trust 2018 treated you well. It certainly was great for Safal Niveshak. The tribe crossed 53,000 members. I conducted seven value investing workshops during the year, including two in the US. Our Mastermind Value Investing Course and premium newsletter Value Investing Almanack continue to receive inspiring reviews from subscribers.

Anyways, right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under investing, learning, and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did. [Read more…] about 51 Ideas from 2018

The Risk of Being Out of the Game

In 2014, JPMorgan Asset Management did a study and discovered that the 40 best days accounted for more than the entire S&P 500 return from 1993–2013. In other words, if someone traded only on these specific 40 days, i.e., invested his money in S&P 500 in the morning and sold in the evening then he would have the same returns as someone who stayed invested for 20 years.
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The Journey

“If all you care about is the mountaintop, the climb is going to be rough.” ~ Anon

“We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.” ~ Warren Buffett

This is going to be one of the shortest posts I’ve written. One book that I keep by my bedside for frequent reading is Ruskin Bond’s A Book of Simple Living. Here is a passage that I stumbled upon from this book last night, and which resonated perfectly well with how I practice investing and one key idea I try to teach here – the focus on process vs outcome, on the journey vs destination.

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Lecture Presentation and Notes: Surviving the Investing Game

I recently spoke at IIM Lucknow. My topic was ‘Surviving the Investing Game.’

Click here to download the presentation and notes, or read it in the panel below.

The 40th Lesson

I have a ritual of writing a note to myself on every birthday, and this is one of those for I complete forty years in my present state of existence on this Pale Blue Dot.

Life’s passing by too fast, or so it seems. I’m not usually one to make a big deal about my birthday, but as always, it has given me an opportunity to reflect.

“How in the world did that happen?” I asked my wife this morning as she woke me up from my slumber. It seems like yesterday I was twenty, just into college, and with no idea about where life was about to take me (still no idea!).

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Alexa, How Can I Get Rich?

“Alexa, how can I get rich?” he asked staring at a speaker kept at a distance.

Nothing happened for a few seconds.

“Alexa! Alexa!” he shouted.

Nothing happened even then.

“Huh!” he blurted in frustration and went back to his playful ways.

This is a small conversation I heard of a 9-year old at our Camp Millionaire workshop in Mumbai on Sunday during a small break before we play musical chairs to explain kids the concept of demand and supply.

Well, the speaker on the other side of the intended conversation was not Alexa – virtual assistant developed by Amazon – but a plain one that operated on Bluetooth. But this 9-year old mistook it for one, and thus wanted to start a conversation to a get a quick response to his question. The question, however, sounded more like a command.