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It was sometime in early 2009 that, as I was running my screeners to find investment-worthy businesses, I came across a Delhi based packaging firm Uflex Ltd.

The company was involved in the flexible packaging business, was doing well in terms of growth, and expanding globally. What’s more, the stock was available at a single-digit P/E.

In all, it sounded like a great investment that was available cheap. Anyways, while I was busy preparing my rosy predictions for the business and the stock, I was warned by an analyst friend about some shady land dealings he had heard of about the company’s promoters. What is more, the promoters had pledged a large amount of their shareholding.

[Read more…] about Investing’s False Positives

If you think I am going to talk about some mystical way to increase your luck in stock market, then you’ll be disappointed. Being fortunate in life and in investing is largely about increasing your odds of success. And how do you increase your odds?

“Study the principles of sound investing and work hard to implement those principles,” you might say. But is that sufficient? Studying, reading and working hard are all necessarily conditions for being successful in the stock market, however they are not sufficient. You need one more thing.

Let’s turn to world’s greatest investor to give us some clue. In his 1982 letter to investors, talking about two of his managers Phil Liesche and Ben Rosner, Warren Buffett wrote –

[Read more…] about How to Be A Fortunate Investor

One of the most important parameters to judge a business’s quality is its ability to generate a return on the money it employs on fixed and working capital. It is also one of the key metrics, which when measured over years, can help you assess a management’s quality.

Return on capital employed or ROCE also indicates a business’s ability to set prices that enables it to earn adequate margins, which when better than competitors also suggests the presence of moat.

Simply defined, ROCE shows how a company uses its capital efficiently by examining the profit it earns in relation to the capital it uses during a given year.

The formula commonly used to calculate ROCE is – Profit before Interest and Tax (PBIT) divided by Capital Employed (Equity and Debt).

[Read more…] about ROCE-Growth Matrix, and Few Potential Wealth Creators