Vishal Khandelwal

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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The Psychology of Investing #19: Surviving Mt. Wealth’s Death Zone

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

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.

On Mt. Everest, there’s a “Death Zone.” It is the area above 8,000 meters (26,200 feet) where oxygen levels are so low that the human body cannot survive for extended periods. Your thinking starts getting fuzzy and you begin seeing things that aren’t there, and eventually, your systems just… shut down.

In 1987, Ed Viesturs, a young, ambitious mountaineer, was standing in this zone, just three hundred feet from the summit.

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The Investing Framework You’ll Need to Survive the AI Decade

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

Around 2016, leading artificial intelligence scientist Geoffrey Hinton made a startling prediction: “People should stop training radiologists now.” His reasoning was that within five years, machines would completely revolutionise radiology, and that much of radiology application would be powered by AI. Radiologists would thus no longer be needed.

Hinton was right… and also wrong.

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