Archives for 2026

The Gilded Cage

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

My new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Click here to get your copy.

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There is an old story about a man who catches a bird and puts it in a beautiful cage. He takes such good care of the bird, that after some time the bird stops trying to escape. After some more time the bird forgets it is in a cage. And then, one day, the man leaves the door open by mistake, and the bird does not fly out.

I used to think this story was about the bird. Maybe you also started imagining it in an open cage and wondering why it would not fly out.

But this is not really about the bird.

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A One-Page Framework to Analyse Any Stock

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A young man at a workshop asked me a few months ago, “Vishal, I read the annual reports and listen to the conference calls. I follow the smart people on Twitter. I think I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do. But when I actually want to decide whether to buy a stock, I freeze. I do not know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

I told him what I wish someone had told me when I started, which is that the problem is rarely too little information. It is almost always too much, with no way to sort it.

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The Market is a Great Guru: Vinod Sethi on The Long Game

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When I was a boy, my grandmother kept a small plant on her windowsill. I don’t remember what plant it was, but I remember she watered it every morning, the same way, at roughly the same time. I remember asking her once why she didn’t just water it a lot once a week and get over with it. She looked at me like I had said something strange, and said, “Son, that’s not how it works.”

I think about that a lot.

Some things have their own pace, and you don’t get to negotiate with them.

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Why Value Investing Works (And Why It Has to Stop Working First)

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

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I call myself a “value investor” (if there’s something like that) and have been doing this for the past 23 years. But over these years, there have been multiple periods, sometimes lasting two or three years, when value investing simply stopped working for me.

And I’ll tell you what those stretches feel like.

Your portfolio has gone nowhere for two years. The index is doing fine. The stocks you carefully analysed and bought at a discount to intrinsic value are sitting there, doing nothing. And the voice in your head starts telling you the thing you most fear hearing: maybe this whole approach was a mistake.

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The Wrong Thing to Fear

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It was 28^th July 2024. My flight from Bengaluru was running late, which meant we would land in Mumbai well after dark, in the middle of the monsoon, which is the worst combination of things a flight into Mumbai can be.

I knew this before I boarded. I have flown this route many times. I know what a Mumbai monsoon landing feels like, and I know the statistics on commercial aviation, and I know that turbulence has killed almost no one in the modern era of flying. I am, by any reasonable measure, an informed passenger and understand a bit about how a commercial aircraft is designed to handle forces several times greater than anything it will ever actually encounter in the air.

None of it helped.

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My Conversation with Sonia Shenoy on Fear, Time, and Playing Your Own Game

I recently had a conversation with Sonia Shenoy on her podcast, and we ended up covering a lot of ground—from financial freedom to the fear of not reaching there, understanding market cycles, risk vs uncertainty, the real meaning of ‘time’, quitting your corporate job, and what it really means to play your own game.

We also talked about the ideas behind my new book, The Long Game.

Sonia is a patient listener, and that helped me talk, perhaps a lot more than I usually do.

I hope you enjoy it.

Watch the full conversation here.

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Risk Is Never in the Market

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Making money in stocks when everyone around you is making money isn’t really an achievement. All boats rise when the tide is high. The real test is what you do when the tide goes out. And more specifically, how you do it and with what degree of inner stillness.

Now, whatever philosophers and teachers may teach, most of us aren’t built for equanimity. We feel the ecstasy when things are going up, and we feel the misery when they’re going down. That’s just human.

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On Surviving: Three Ideas From 30 Years of Investing

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Prashant Jain retired from HDFC Mutual Fund in August 2022, after nearly 30 years of managing some of India’s largest equity funds.

When he left, he wrote a farewell note called Saar, which means ‘essence’. It was a detailed log of the most important lessons he had learned in his long career as one of India’s best public money managers. I have linked it at the end of this article.

Among all the lessons he shared, one of the most insightful came from a table buried inside the note, which was like a full scorecard of his career.

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Inert Knowledge

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A few weeks ago, on a holiday morning, I did something I knew I shouldn’t do the moment I did it.

I took the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. At the start of a long holiday.

Now, in my defence, I had a plan. I would leave early and beat the traffic before it had a chance to materialise. This is the same plan, I should mention, that approximately four lakh other people on that road had also independently arrived at.

I had even warned a friend the previous evening not to drive on it. He thanked me for the advice. I then proceeded to not take it myself.

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The Long Game Is Simple, But Not Easy

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For centuries in Indian villages, the highest form of charity a person could offer was not gold, not land, not even money. It was a cow, and the act was called Gau-daan or the gift of a cow.

Think about why. A healthy cow is not a one-time gift. It is a small, living business. It produces milk daily, some of which is for the household while the remaining is to sell. Its offspring are assets, too. A male calf helps plough the fields, while a female calf grows up to produce more milk. Even its dung has practical value as fuel. In other words, the cow generates a stream of returns across its entire lifetime.

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