Investing

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

It was 6 AM and I was the only person at the temple.

Well, not exactly. There was a monk somewhere, because I could hear the soft sound of a broom against a stone floor. It seemed irregular and unhurried. I also heard a few birds in the pine trees nearby. There was the smell of something burning, incense maybe. But for all practical purposes, I was alone.

I had walked there from my hotel before the crowd would start coming in. The town of Kanazawa was still asleep. The streets were narrow. I passed a man arranging flowers outside a shop that wasn’t open yet. He didn’t look up, and I didn’t stop.

I reached the temple, found an unlocked gate, and went in.

I sat on a stone step and did nothing.

[Read more…] about The Noise You Mistake for Thinking

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

I have been writing about long term investing for over fifteen years now. And for all these years, I’ve been writing some version of the same sentence.

“Think long-term.”

“Own businesses for the long-term.”

“The long-term takes care of itself.”

I have written it in newsletters, said it on stage, and most of all, reminded it to myself.

I still believe it.

But, over these years, I’ve also realised that I’ve been using it the way temple priests use mantras. The sound of it has done a lot of work that the meaning of it never quite did. And readers who have followed me for a while deserve to know what I actually mean when I use those two words (wishing myself good morning, fifteen years later!), because the gap between how the phrase sounds and what it asks of you is wider than I usually let on.

So here is what I mean.

[Read more…] about What I Mean When I Say ‘Long Term’

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

There is an old story about a man who catches a bird and puts it in a beautiful cage. He takes such good care of the bird, that after some time the bird stops trying to escape. After some more time the bird forgets it is in a cage. And then, one day, the man leaves the door open by mistake, and the bird does not fly out.

I used to think this story was about the bird. Maybe you also started imagining it in an open cage and wondering why it would not fly out.

But this is not really about the bird.

[Read more…] about The Gilded Cage

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

A young man at a workshop asked me a few months ago, “Vishal, I read the annual reports and listen to the conference calls. I follow the smart people on Twitter. I think I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do. But when I actually want to decide whether to buy a stock, I freeze. I do not know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

I told him what I wish someone had told me when I started, which is that the problem is rarely too little information. It is almost always too much, with no way to sort it.

[Read more…] about A One-Page Framework to Analyse Any Stock

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

When I was a boy, my grandmother kept a small plant on her windowsill. I don’t remember what plant it was, but I remember she watered it every morning, the same way, at roughly the same time. I remember asking her once why she didn’t just water it a lot once a week and get over with it. She looked at me like I had said something strange, and said, “Son, that’s not how it works.”

I think about that a lot.

Some things have their own pace, and you don’t get to negotiate with them.

[Read more…] about The Market is a Great Guru: Vinod Sethi on The Long Game

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

I call myself a “value investor” (if there’s something like that) and have been doing this for the past 23 years. But over these years, there have been multiple periods, sometimes lasting two or three years, when value investing simply stopped working for me.

And I’ll tell you what those stretches feel like.

Your portfolio has gone nowhere for two years. The index is doing fine. The stocks you carefully analysed and bought at a discount to intrinsic value are sitting there, doing nothing. And the voice in your head starts telling you the thing you most fear hearing: maybe this whole approach was a mistake.

[Read more…] about Why Value Investing Works (And Why It Has to Stop Working First)

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

It was 28^th July 2024. My flight from Bengaluru was running late, which meant we would land in Mumbai well after dark, in the middle of the monsoon, which is the worst combination of things a flight into Mumbai can be.

I knew this before I boarded. I have flown this route many times. I know what a Mumbai monsoon landing feels like, and I know the statistics on commercial aviation, and I know that turbulence has killed almost no one in the modern era of flying. I am, by any reasonable measure, an informed passenger and understand a bit about how a commercial aircraft is designed to handle forces several times greater than anything it will ever actually encounter in the air.

None of it helped.

[Read more…] about The Wrong Thing to Fear

I recently had a conversation with Sonia Shenoy on her podcast, and we ended up covering a lot of ground—from financial freedom to the fear of not reaching there, understanding market cycles, risk vs uncertainty, the real meaning of ‘time’, quitting your corporate job, and what it really means to play your own game.

We also talked about the ideas behind my new book, The Long Game.

Sonia is a patient listener, and that helped me talk, perhaps a lot more than I usually do.

I hope you enjoy it.

Watch the full conversation here.

---

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 get your copy.

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

Making money in stocks when everyone around you is making money isn’t really an achievement. All boats rise when the tide is high. The real test is what you do when the tide goes out. And more specifically, how you do it and with what degree of inner stillness.

Now, whatever philosophers and teachers may teach, most of us aren’t built for equanimity. We feel the ecstasy when things are going up, and we feel the misery when they’re going down. That’s just human.

[Read more…] about Risk Is Never in the Market

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 get your copy.

Click Here to Order Now

---

Prashant Jain retired from HDFC Mutual Fund in August 2022, after nearly 30 years of managing some of India’s largest equity funds.

When he left, he wrote a farewell note called Saar, which means ‘essence’. It was a detailed log of the most important lessons he had learned in his long career as one of India’s best public money managers. I have linked it at the end of this article.

Among all the lessons he shared, one of the most insightful came from a table buried inside the note, which was like a full scorecard of his career.

[Read more…] about On Surviving: Three Ideas From 30 Years of Investing