Archives for February 2019
Wasted Hours and Saved Years
Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford are considered among the handful of capitalists who played a defining role in building America. The early 20th century skyscrapers in the US stood on Carnegie’s steel and Ford revolutionized the automobile industry with his low-cost cars.
Carnegie became the richest man in America when he retired and sold his company to JP Morgan for a sum that was equivalent to $400 billion in today’s money. Sadly, Andrew’s billions were amassed at the cost of factory workers’ sweat and blood. Literally.
The working conditions in steel mills in the late 19th century and early 20th century were inhumane and unsafe. Some estimate that the rate of serious accidents (often leading to death) was as high as 10 percent. Twelve to fourteen hours a day and six to seven days a week was standard at that time. There was no extra pay for overtime. Not only that, the hourly wages were squeezed so the hilt to drive profitability. And any resistance from labour unions was often crushed ruthlessly with the help of private armies like Pinkertons. (Trivia: at one time Pinkertons had more armed personnel in their squad than the entire US national army.)
My Notes on Warren Buffett’s 2018 Letter to Shareholders
Warren Buffett recently released his 2018 letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.
I have prepared some notes on the letter. Click here to download my notes.
Also, I was on ET Now yesterday to share my thoughts on the letter. Here is the video of the chat (click here to watch the video, or watch below) –
Sherlock Holmes’ Thinking Blueprint, Greatest Investor You’ve Never Heard Of, And Marcus Aurelius On Mortality
Here’s something new I have initiated to share with you stuff I am reading and thinking about in recent times.
Click here to download the document.
Let me know your thoughts on the initiative, and what else you would like to see here.
How to Screen for Stock Ideas
While I am not a big fan of using readymade screeners to generate stock ideas – because you tend to substitute thinking with a lot of data – simple screeners still help me in doing the initial groundwork.
Also, while there are a few paid (and expensive) screeners available in the market – like Ace Equity, Capital Line – I find a few free screeners to be very effective when it comes to the value I can derive from using them.
In this post, I explain the few steps you can use while running once such free screener – Screener.in – to do basic analysis on companies and screen for high quality ideas. Let’s start right away.