Archives for 2026

Inert Knowledge

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 Order Now

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

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available Now

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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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The Psychology of Investing #20: The Most Powerful Force in Investing

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available Now

Click Here to Order Now

The Internet is brimming with resources that proclaim, “nearly everything you believed about investing is incorrect.” However, there are far fewer that aim to help you become a better investor by revealing that “much of what you think you know about yourself is inaccurate.” In this series of posts on the psychology of investing, I will take you through the journey of the biggest psychological flaws we suffer from that causes us to make dumb mistakes in investing. This series is part of a joint investor education initiative between Safal Niveshak and DSP Mutual Fund.

In 1961, a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram ran one of the most disturbing experiments in the history of science.

Volunteers were recruited under the pretense of studying memory and learning. Each volunteer was asked to play the role of “teacher” and administer electric shocks to a “learner” in the next room whenever he gave a wrong answer. The shocks escalated in 15-volt increments—from a mild 15 volts all the way to a lethal-looking 450 volts, labelled “Danger: Severe Shock” on the dial.

The learner was actually an actor. There were no real shocks. But the volunteers didn’t know that.

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The Investor’s Second Self

New Book Alert: The Long Game

My new book, The Long Game, is available for pre-order 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. Shipping starts end of February 2026.

Click Here to Pre-Order Now

It was October 1915, and a British explorer Ernest Shackleton was leading one of the most ambitious journeys in the history of exploration. He was trying to cross the continent of Antarctica on foot. Shackleton was inspired by Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition in 1911, and so this crossing remained, in Shackleton’s words, the “one great main object of Antarctic journeyings.”

He, along with twenty-seven crew members, started on a ship called Endurance.

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The Inner Life of a Long-Term Investor

New Book Alert: The Long Game

Click Here to Pre-Order Now

I learned something interesting today.

You know the word “school” comes from the ancient Greek skholē, which meant leisure or free time. It originally meant the unhurried space to wonder, question, and sit with difficult ideas without needing an immediate answer.

For the Greeks, it seems, skholē was the highest form of human activity, because it involved thinking freely without the pressure of any outcome. So, when Plato and his students gathered to debate philosophy under the open sky, that was skholē in action. The place where you did that became a skholē.

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The Really Long Game

New Book Alert: The Long Game

Click Here to Pre-Order Now

This story is from the 1860s. The administrators of New College, Oxford, discovered that the huge oak beams in their Great Hall were rotting. Some of these beams were two feet thick and forty feet long.

In 19th-century England, finding oaks of that size was nearly impossible. The college was staring at a collapsing roof with no obvious way to fix it.

Then someone suggested they call the college’s land agent.

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[New Book] The Long Game: Now Available for Pre-Order

I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while now, but I kept waiting for the “right moment.” I’ve realised there’s no such thing. So here it is.

I’ve written a new book. It’s called The Long Game: Timeless Lessons from Practitioners on the Craft of Long-Term Investing.

It’s a 400-page hardcover, which is not just my voice but also brings together reflections from practitioners I deeply respect—fund managers, founders, analysts, and advisors—who’ve spent decades in the markets to write about their biggest lessons and hard-won wisdom.

A few of the 30 practitioners who’ve contributed chapters include Pulak Prasad, Sankaran Naren, Manish Chokhani, Vinod Sethi, Utpal Sheth, Chris Mayer, Ian Cassel, and Barry Ritholtz.

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Letter to A Young Investor #20: You Can Invest. But How Much Can You Suffer?

Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.

“This is a masterpiece.”

—Morgan Housel, Author, Psychology of Money

“Discover the extraordinary within.”

—Manish Chokhani, Director, Enam Holdings

I am writing this series of letters on the art of investing, addressed to a young investor, with the aim to provide timeless wisdom and practical advice that helped me when I was starting out. My goal is to help young investors navigate the complexities of the financial world, avoid misinformation, and harness the power of compounding by starting early with the right principles and actions. This series is part of a joint investor education initiative between Safal Niveshak and DSP Mutual Fund.

Dear Young Investor,

I have a friend who’s a brain surgeon. He often shares stories of his patients and how he deals with the complex decisions surgery demands. And not just technical skill, but the psychological weight of holding someone’s future in your hands.

When we met last week, he told me about a fifty-two-year-old school teacher, who came in with a tumour pressing against her speech centre. Her words had started slurring. She’d forget simple nouns mid-sentence. “Table” became “that thing.” “Book” became “you know, for reading.” Without surgery, she’d lose speech entirely within months. With surgery, there was a chance, but also a 15% risk she’d wake up unable to form words at all.

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A Cure for Investment Anxiety

Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.

“This is a masterpiece.”

—Morgan Housel, Author, Psychology of Money

“Discover the extraordinary within.”

—Manish Chokhani, Director, Enam Holdings

Douglas MacArthur was the American general who commanded Allied forces in the Pacific during World War II and later ran occupied Japan. William Manchester, in his biography of MacArthur, mentioned how in 1950, when MacArthur was in Tokyo, he read exactly five newspapers every morning. What’s unusual was that these newspapers were all at least three days old. His staff thought he was losing it. Why would the Supreme Commander want stale news when fresh news arrived by the hour?

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Go, Ruin Yourself (Wait, Don’t!)

Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.

“This is a masterpiece.”

—Morgan Housel, Author, Psychology of Money

“Discover the extraordinary within.”

—Manish Chokhani, Director, Enam Holdings

Charlie Munger used to say that all he wanted to know was where he was going to die so he could simply never go there. It’s a brilliant way to look at life. If you can identify the traps that ruin most people, investing or otherwise, you just have to stay away from them to win.

In India, that trap is woven into our very skin. We are raised with a scarcity mindset. “Save every rupee, and turn off every light,” we are taught. But we are also shackled to a performance. We treat our children’s weddings like a debt we owe to society and our homes like trophies rather than shelters. We’ve been told that “safety” means doing exactly what our uncles did thirty years ago, ignoring that the world has moved on.

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