Archives for August 2019

Investor Insights: Investing Amidst Uncertainty

August 31, 2019 | Reading Time: 35 minutes | Leave a Comment |

In this special edition of InvestorInsights, we pick the brains of a few experienced value investors and money managers on how they deal with uncertainty like what is seen in the markets currently.

Safal Niveshak: Uncertainty is not a new thing for the Indian economy, companies and the markets. But people still get spooked. Even otherwise, when a lot of people know that investing is important, they are often either too scared, too intimidated, or too uncertain when such situations arise.

You have been in the markets for a long time and may have experienced multiple such periods of high uncertainty with respect to the markets, companies, and the economy. What advice do you have for new, inexperienced, or young investors on how they can deal with such situations?

StockTalk (August 2019)

August 31, 2019 | Reading Time: 9 minutes | Leave a Comment |

The Full-Stack Investor

August 30, 2019 | Reading Time: 10 minutes | Leave a Comment |

An old joke — What’s common between a software engineer and a railway station beggar? When they meet their colleagues, they ask each other, “What platform do you work on?”

I am yet to learn about the begging business but having worked in the IT industry as a software developer for more than a decade, the joke did manage to extract a brief mirth from me.

Just like any other field of work, software engineering too has its own compartments of specialization. So when a software guy enquires about his fellow engineer’s platform, it generally means he’s interested to know about his specialization — Linux or Windows? Which programming language? Application side or system side? Backend or front end? Development or 0perations? Etc.

However, in the past few years, a new specialization has emerged — the full-stack engineer. Paradoxically, this specialization is about being a generalist, i.e, an engineer who can work on multiple platforms, different programming languages, and play various roles.
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Is Your Stock Portfolio A Museum or A Warehouse?

August 28, 2019 | Reading Time: 6 minutes | 26 Comments |

Rework by Jason Fried is one of the best books I have ever read on starting up. Jason has condensed his wisdom in starting and running a business into pithy, one-page, chapters.

One of the interesting chapters from the book is about the idea of being a curator. In this, Jason writes –

You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room. That’s a warehouse. What makes a museum great is the stuff that’s not on the walls. Someone says no … There is an editing process. There’s a lot more stuff off the walls than on the walls. The best is a sub-sub-subset of all the possibilities.

Re-reading this chapter reminded me of Costco, one of the world’s largest wholesale retailers and among the very few that have shown remarkable resilience in an industry that has been subjected to increasing pressures from online retail.

Behaviouronomics: The Concorde Fallacy

August 25, 2019 | Reading Time: 10 minutes | Leave a Comment |

A few weeks back I surprised myself by doing something I thought I would never do. I sold my position in a stock that had been the largest holding in my portfolio for a long time.

I first started buying this stock almost a decade back and had never sold a single share of this company. I continued to accumulate it through its ups and downs in this period. At one point, this company constituted more than 40% of my entire stock portfolio. I don’t need to tell you that it was my high confidence stock.

So what made me exit it all of a sudden?
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