Almanack

Whether you hate numbers or love them, there’s no denying that being in the business of investing you can’t afford being numbers shy. Of course, successful investing doesn’t require you to be a mathematician but having an intuitive feel for numbers goes a long way in making the process of finding great businesses fun and intellectually stimulating.

If you’re reading this I won’t hesitate to make the assumption that you’re a knowledge worker, i.e., someone who gets paid not for the physical labour but for their knowledge and cognitive abilities to turn that know-how into something valuable and useful. And one skill that knowledge workers need the most is the ability to learn quickly and efficiently.

This means you should always be on the lookout to find the best strategies about meta-learning — learning how to learn.

Barbara Oakley teaches an online course Learning How to Learn and it wouldn’t be an overstatement if I say that this course has been the most popular online course in the world for many years.

[Read more…] about Bookworm: A Mind for Numbers

Randall Monroe has an incredible mind. Even if his name doesn’t ring a bell, I am sure you’ve seen his work. He’s the creator of XKCD comic strip. Monroe, a physicist, was working for NASA before he became a full time cartoonist.

Monroe had a significant fan following among nerds because of the XKCD but he shot into fame when his book The Things Explainer caught the attention of Bill Gates. Monroe’s genius is revealed in his book where he takes up the challenge to explain complicated things using a vocabulary of only one thousand simple words.
[Read more…] about Let Your Curiosity Take You Places

Chetan Phalke is the founding partner at Alpha Invesco, an investment advisory firm based in Pune. Chetan is actively involved in the financial markets for the last 13+ years. He prefers to look at undervalued investment opportunities that offer a reasonable risk-adjusted return over a period of time. Chetan received his masters in Economics from Fergusson College, Pune.

[Read more…] about Investor Insights: Chetan Phalke

The first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. Steve Jobs, dawning his showman hat, unveiled Mac’s revolutionary device with much hype and media coverage. The first iPhone had a touch screen, wifi and Bluetooth connectivity, a music player, a camera, an on-screen keyboard, and a browser to surf the Internet. In the first week, 300000 iPhones were sold.

Fast forward 12 years. Apple recently came out with the iPhone 11 Pro Max which is the 16th version since the first iPhone.
[Read more…] about Behaviouronomics: Neomania

A few years back, I wrote an essay on the mental model of Redundancy. In that article, I mentioned how Bill Gates reasoned using Redundancy that saving lives in Africa will contain the country’s population growth over the longer term. One reader pointed out that Gates’ insight originally came from another guy named Hans Rosling.

A little bit of research revealed that Hans Rosling had a decisive impact on how Bill Gates thought about his philanthropy work in African countries. No wonder, when Rosling’s book came out, Gates was among the first to publish a review. He wrote —

Hans, the brilliant global-health lecturer who died last year, gives you a breakthrough way of understanding basic truths about the world—how life is getting better, and where the world still needs to improve. And he weaves in unforgettable anecdotes from his life. It’s a fitting final word from a brilliant man, and one of the best books I’ve ever read.

[Read more…] about Bookworm: Factfulness by Hans Rosling

This is the seventh and the last post of the multi-part series based on Peter Bevelin’s book — All I Want to Know is Where I’m Going to Die, So I’ll Never Go There.

My favourite author Nassim Taleb is not very generous when it comes to praising other authors but when he does, you can be sure that Taleb means it and not doing it out of politeness. And this is what Taleb says about Bevelin —

Peter Bevelin is one of the wisest people on the planet.

[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Seven

Jaideep has been part of the Indian equity markets for more than two decades. He has worked in Fund Management, Equity Research, and Dealing. He is managing portfolios at Janak Merchant Securities Pvt. Ltd., a company promoted by his family, for the past 14 years. Jaideep is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and is also a CFA Charter holder.

Disclaimer: Stocks/Examples quoted below should not be construed as recommendations.

[Read more…] about Investor Insights: Jaideep Merchant

The company WeWork has been in the recent news for a lot of reasons — many of them not so comforting for the company’s private investors. Those who haven’t heard of WeWork or don’t know much about it, here’s a primer on Wework’s business model.

In one line, WeWork leases out large office spaces, upgrades them, makes them look cool and upscale, and rents them out on per seat basis to either individuals or other companies. In case you’ve heard of the term coworking spaces, WeWork is that.
[Read more…] about Of Good Stories and Bad Businesses

Warren Buffett in his 2012 annual letter to investors, recommended William Thorndike’s book The Outsiders. Buffett called it an outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation. The eight terrific CEOs that featured in the book have generated exceptional results across a wide variety of industries and market conditions. We had written about Outsiders in April 2016 as part of VIA bookworm series.

Saurabh Mukherjea’s book is the answer to The Outsiders. Mukherjea writes —

The book [The Outsiders] changed the way I perceived and analysed companies which have been successful over long periods of time (we are talking decades here). What Thorndike helped me grasp was that the truly great companies take the surplus cash flows created by their sustainable competitive advantages and then either return those to shareholders or reinvest those in their core franchise, or — and this is the litmus test of greatness — reinvest those successfully in new activities or markets. It is in those latter set of investments outside the core franchise that a great company assures its future regardless of how economic circumstances and customers’ tastes pan out. Without that insight from The Outsiders, there would be no The Unusual Billionaires.

[Read more…] about Bookworm: The Unusual Billionaires