Investing

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How to Survive the Wrong Turns in Life and Markets

A couple of quick announcements before I begin today’s post.

1. My latest book, The Long Game, is now available for ordering: 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.

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How to Survive the Wrong Turns in Life and Markets

It’s been a few years, but I still remember that day with unusual clarity.

A phone call came in the morning. A cousin of mine had met with an accident. I assumed he was in the hospital, down with a few injuries. That’s how the mind protects itself, by assuming the best.

But the next statement in the call took my breath away.

He didn’t make it.

He was just in his thirties. Riding to work on a regular weekday morning. Same road and same routine. But that day he took a wrong turn. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Maybe he thought he didn’t need to. It wasn’t a long ride. It never is, until it is.

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Why Are You Really Here?

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

Here’s something interesting I’ve noticed over the two decades of being an investor.

When markets are going up, everyone is a long-term investor. Very patient and philosophical. “I am here for the journey, not the destination.”

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Your Money Worry Is Not About Money

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A friend recently shared the 2025 India country report from Deloitte’s annual survey of young workers across 44 countries. A couple of data points stopped me. According to the report, 55% of Indian Gen Zs and 62% of Indian millennials say they live paycheque to paycheque. Both figures are higher than the global average of around 52%. And if that wasn’t sobering enough, 20% of Indian Gen Zs say they struggle to pay all their living expenses each month.

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The Noise You Mistake for Thinking

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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.

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What I Mean When I Say ‘Long Term’

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

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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.

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The Gilded Cage

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

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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.

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A One-Page Framework to Analyse Any Stock

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

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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.

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The Market is a Great Guru: Vinod Sethi on The Long Game

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

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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.

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Why Value Investing Works (And Why It Has to Stop Working First)

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

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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.

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The Wrong Thing to Fear

New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available

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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.

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