Wit. Wisdom. Value Investing.
Remember Ben Graham, the guy who wrote The Intelligent Investor? And who taught Warren Buffett to become Warren Buffett?
Well, if you really know who Graham was, you also know that he is associated with buying something cheap (one dollar worth at fifty cents) and then selling it when it reaches a value that reflects what it’s worth.
A very copybook, calculated approach, right? Like what a Rahul Dravid would do in cricket.
In a world dominated by men, here is a rare untold story of a woman who quietly made it big as a stock market investor.
Anne Scheiber was 51 years old when she retired from her job as a low-level auditor from the American Internal Revenue Service in 1944. She never earned a salary of more than $4,000 per year, and although she was an exemplary worker, she never received a promotion. Maybe, because she was a woman and a Jew, the lots that were discriminated against in the workforce in general in the west during that period.
As per the executor of her Will, Benjamin Clark, Scheiber, who was already investing her small savings in the stock market when she retired in 1944, started here post-retirement life with a portfolio of about $21,000. Adjusted for inflation, that was about $297,000 in today’s money. Not really a large sum to retire in the US.
[Read more…] about The Untold Story of A Self-Made Investing Millionaire
I was at my hometown recently and chanced upon a friend who works as an investment banker in Delhi. We had met almost after 15 years, and so I could notice a big contrast in his looks as compared to what it was in the early 2000s. He looked much older than his age, around 39, and so I enquired about his health.
To my utter shock, he said, “I had an angioplasty late last year, where they put a tiny tube in my blood vessel to restore blood flow through my arteries.”
In short, he meant, “I just survived a heart attack.”
“Stress is part of my job profile, you see,” he shrugged it off jokingly.
I had earlier read of a 35-year-old London-based hedge fund trader who died of a heart attack in 2013, and of the head of JP Morgan’s equity sales, aged 37, who had also died of heart failure in 2012. But my friend was, well, my friend, and thus the gravity of the situation weighed heavier this time.
“Is it worth it?” I asked my friend.
[Read more…] about Stress and Investing: A 20-Point Checklist
I have been re-reading Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. The book is about “luck disguised and perceived as non-luck (that is, skills) and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness (that is, determinism).”
It’s an enlightening read in its entirety, but here are seven key ideas I have picked up from the book.
[Read more…] about Seven Big Ideas from Fooled by Randomness
One of the best books on learning I’ve read is Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning. Josh is a champion in two distinct sports – chess and martial arts.
In his book, Josh recounts his experiences and shares his insights and approaches on how you can learn and excel, using examples from his personal life. Through stories of martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs, Josh reveals the inner workings of his everyday methods, cultivating the most powerful techniques in any field, and mastering the psychology of peak performance.
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