Archives for December 2021

Here is the latest issue of The Journal of Investing Wisdom, where I share insightful stuff on investing I am reading and thinking about. Let’s get started.

A Thought

The luckiest part of my investing career is that I’ve been old enough to have invested through multiple bad markets and still young enough to take advantage of the lessons learned.

What I have realized by investing through the crisis periods is that one of the best ways to learn how crises unfold is to learn from the past and not be complacent to the possibility of them occurring in some form or other.

I remember attending a company’s analyst meet in around 2006. It was held in a three-star hotel in a crowded part of Mumbai. Before the meeting began, the company’s safety officer briefed us about the emergency exits and nearest hospitals.

Now, what were the chances of an emergency happening? Probably miniscule. But the loss, if it happened, would be significant.

That lesson applies to investing too. When you multiply the probability of loss into the magnitude of loss, it becomes meaningful. That is the reason why airlines do a safety demonstration before every flight, and surgeons go through their checklists before every surgery.

As an investor, that should be your standard operating procedure too. You should be mentally ready to see your investments go down by 50% rapidly and be prepared to act rationally when that happens.

Investing is largely a game of luck, and relying on luck tends to make us fragile. So it pays to listen to Nassim Taleb who argues that “it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.”

That is a wonderful, even if a bitter, lesson to take especially when you are basking in the glory of your short term success in the stock market. But that’s a lesson worth taking.

[Read more…] about Spoiler Alert: It’s Luck, Stupid!

Here is the latest issue of The Journal of Investing Wisdom, where I share insightful stuff on investing I am reading and thinking about. Let’s get started.

A Thought

The one year period between Feb. 2015 and Feb. 2016 was a particularly bad one for the markets. The broader markets fell around 20% during this period, and there were multitude of stocks that cracked 30-40%. Howard Marks, the legendary investor and Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, described the situation in the stock market in his Feb. 2016 memo to clients thus –

My buddy Sandy was an airline pilot. When asked to describe his job, he always answers, “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” The same can be true for investment managers, for whom the last few weeks have been an example of the latter. We’ve seen bad news and prices cascading downward. Investors who thought stocks were priced right 20% ago and oil $70 ago now wonder if they aren’t risky at their new reduced prices.

In the rest of the memo, he went on to explain why Mr. Market – representative of the stock prices – has nothing valuable to offer to investors through his daily mood swings –

Especially during downdrafts, many investors impute intelligence to the market and look to it to tell them what’s going on and what to do about it. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. As Ben Graham pointed out, the day-to-day market isn’t a fundamental analyst; it’s a barometer of investor sentiment. You just can’t take it too seriously. Market participants have limited insight into what’s really happening in terms of fundamentals, and any intelligence that could be behind their buys and sells is obscured by their emotional swings. It would be wrong to interpret the recent worldwide drop as meaning the market “knows” tough times lay ahead.

Predicting the subsequent movement of stock prices, like I have mentioned umpteen times in my posts, or the next mood swing of Mr. Market, whether he will be in the best of his spirits or worst – is a loser’s game.

Focusing on where the earnings and cash flows of the underlying businesses you own, or want to own, are going to go long term is what you must focus on.

Your behaviour and expectations are under your control, and so is the amount of risk you wish to take and the time you have in hand. Stock prices and future returns aren’t under your control and thus you must leave them at what they do best, that is, fluctuate.

“If owning stocks is a long-term project for you,” warns psychologist Daniel Kahneman, “following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.”

[Read more…] about What We Control, and What We Don’t

Here is the latest issue of The Journal of Investing Wisdom, where I share insightful stuff on investing I am reading and thinking about. Let’s get started.

A Thought

Mohnish Pabrai, the famed investor whom I interviewed in the fourth episode of The One Percent Show, has a lot of lessons to share that he learned from the charity lunch with Warren Buffett he won in 2007. One of the best insights for me, which Warren shared with Mohnish, was about the story of Rick Guerin, who was Warren’s and Charlie Munger’s partner in the 1970s.

Warren had even praised Rick Guerin in his 1984 essay titled “The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville,” in which he outlined famous value investors and their performances. Warren included in the essay the following table which summarized the performance of Rick’s fund Pacific Partners –

But then, Rick pretty much disappeared off the map, and today not many people know of him as must as they know of Warren and Charlie.

So, when Mohnish asked Warren during the lunch, “Whatever happened to Rick Guerin?” the latter replied something on these lines –

Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. But we were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry. And so actually what happened was that in the 1973-74 downturn, Rick was levered with margin loans. And the stock market went down almost 70% in those two years, and so he got margin calls, and he sold his Berkshire stock to me. I bought Rick’s Berkshire stock at under $40 apiece, and so Rick was forced to sell shares at … $40 apiece because he was levered.

Warren then gave Mohnish this invaluable advice –

If you’re an even slightly above average investor who spend less than they earn, over a life time you cannot help but get rich, if you are patient.

No one else has ever taught about the dangers of leverage and impatience the way Warren taught Mohnish in that one lunch outing.

Rick’s is just one of the many forgotten stories in the stock market, which could have had much better endings but for greed and impatience.

Look around you, open your inbox, or browse through you Twitter, YouTube feeds, and you will hear stories of people in a hurry, trying to get rich in the stock market or otherwise, with seemingly little effort (and then teaching the world how to get rich fast). The fact is that we now live in a society that promotes immediate gratification.

However, the lesson from the likes of Warren, Rick, and even Mohnish is that to do really well as an investor, you just need these four attributes – be slightly above average, spend less than you earn, invest your savings well, and be patient with your investments.

Then, as Warren says, over a lifetime, you cannot help but get rich.

P.S. Except for the investing mistake that cost him dearly, Rick was admired by Warren and Charlie. Read Charlie’s thoughts about Rick in the latter’s obituary. Another lesson here – you won’t be remembered for your investing successes or failures as much as you would be remembered for the person you were. Another reason to stop taking investing so seriously, and spending a much greater time being that good person who will leave the world a better place than he/she found.

[Read more…] about To Get Rich, Don’t Be a Rick