Archives for April 2026

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.

Click Here to Order Now

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.

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.

Click Here to Order Now

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.

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.

Click Here to Order Now

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.

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.

Click Here to Order Now

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.

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.

Click Here to Order Now

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.