Almanack

How much weightage would you give to the advice dispensed by an entrepreneur who is known to have successfully built a multi-million dollar business?

If you understand the role of skill and luck in the field of human endeavours, you’d question me back, “First tell me, if that entrepreneur was successful because of his skills or was it just luck?”

Fair enough. So here’s another piece of information for you. That entrepreneur has built multiple successful businesses so the odds are high that his success is the result of his knowledge, skill, and experience than pure luck. So tell me, would you take his advice seriously?

At this point, you might be a little suspicious of the way I am framing my questions. I know you’re suspecting that I want to make you say yes and then reveal the reasons why you’re wrong.
[Read more…] about Behaviouronomics: The Shoe Button Complex

This post is the sixth episode 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.

So why are we talking about ideas on what doesn’t work rather than ideas on what works? Isn’t it a negative approach to talk about what doesn’t work? I’ll let Nassim Taleb explain why this works. In his book Antifragile, Taleb writes —

The greatest — and most robust — contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong — subtractive epistemology…we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right…negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition — given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily…disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.

Charlie Munger, while wearing his curmudgeon hat, declared, “All I want to know is where I am going to die, so I’ll never go there.” And that’s his way of driving home Taleb’s point about focusing on the negative knowledge.

Bevelin’s book is dedicated to Charlie Munger’s philosophy. Here are a few more insights from the book on what doesn’t work.
[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Six

In this special edition of InvestorInsights, we pick the brains of a few experienced value investors and money managers on how they deal with uncertainty like what is seen in the markets currently.

Safal Niveshak: Uncertainty is not a new thing for the Indian economy, companies and the markets. But people still get spooked. Even otherwise, when a lot of people know that investing is important, they are often either too scared, too intimidated, or too uncertain when such situations arise.

 You have been in the markets for a long time and may have experienced multiple such periods of high uncertainty with respect to the markets, companies, and the economy. What advice do you have for new, inexperienced, or young investors on how they can deal with such situations?

[Read more…] about Investor Insights: Investing Amidst Uncertainty

[Read more…] about StockTalk (August 2019)

An old joke — What’s common between a software engineer and a railway station beggar? When they meet their colleagues, they ask each other, “What platform do you work on?”

I am yet to learn about the begging business but having worked in the IT industry as a software developer for more than a decade, the joke did manage to extract a brief mirth from me.

Just like any other field of work, software engineering too has its own compartments of specialization. So when a software guy enquires about his fellow engineer’s platform, it generally means he’s interested to know about his specialization — Linux or Windows? Which programming language? Application side or system side? Backend or front end? Development or 0perations? Etc.

However, in the past few years, a new specialization has emerged — the full-stack engineer. Paradoxically, this specialization is about being a generalist, i.e, an engineer who can work on multiple platforms, different programming languages, and play various roles.
[Read more…] about The Full-Stack Investor

A few weeks back I surprised myself by doing something I thought I would never do. I sold my position in a stock that had been the largest holding in my portfolio for a long time.

I first started buying this stock almost a decade back and had never sold a single share of this company. I continued to accumulate it through its ups and downs in this period. At one point, this company constituted more than 40% of my entire stock portfolio. I don’t need to tell you that it was my high confidence stock.

So what made me exit it all of a sudden?
[Read more…] about Behaviouronomics: The Concorde Fallacy

It was ten years back when I was first introduced to the field of human behaviour and psychological biases. Having read a couple of dozen books on this topic, it has now become hard to find a volume with information which is not familiar to me. However, what continues to amaze (and entertain) me are the examples and case studies of people (including my own adventures often pointed out by others) that confirm the statement — We are not rational beings. We are rationalizing beings.

This aspect of human irrationality — that it can’t be overcome and keeps us mired in a behaviour similar to a kid with her hand stuck in the cookie jar because she refuses to open the fist — is what makes this subject so much fun. Once you’ve learnt enough about the broad spectrum of cognitive errors, it affords you a lifetime of entertainment content, provided you pause and watch your own actions and the way people around you make decisions.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: You Are Not So Smart

This post is the fifth edition of the multi-part series based on Peter Bevelin’s excellent book — All I Want to Know is Where I’m Going to Die, So I’ll Never Go There. Here are the links to the previous parts —

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

For a long-time Charlie Munger’s insights have remained a secret known only to a small group of value investors and hardcore disciples of Warren and Charlie. Although, there’s no hush-hush about Munger’s teachings, it hasn’t reached the wider audience it deserves to reach. The book Poor Charlie’s Almanack came out in 2005 and since then it has gained more popularity in India and China than the US. But that’s changing now. The rest of the world is beginning to notice the wisdom in Charlie’s teachings.
[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Five

[Read more…] about StockTalk (July 2019)

Mr. R.K. Chandrasekhar (RKC to his friends), is not your typical money manager or professional investor, but one amongst us retail investors whom I first met in 2011. Our bond has grown stronger since then, especially with RKC opening up his investment life in front of the Safal Niveshak tribe over the years, via his comments and feedback on my posts.

In this interview, RKC talks about his long investment experience, his evolution as an investor, key lessons learned, his investment process, and how he tries to minimize decision making mistakes.

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

[Read more…] about Investor Insights: R.K. Chandrashekar