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Peter Kaufman has done an amazing job compiling some of the world’s best lessons on investment behaviour into a masterpiece. We know it as Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which is a collection of speeches and talks by Charlie Munger.

While the entire book is one amazing journey through the mind of one the greatest investment and behavioural thinkers of our times, one part that takes the cake is where Kaufman has condensed Munger’s teachings into a checklist.

He calls this “Investing Principles Checklist”, as it contains the core principles that has made Munger the brilliant investor he is today.

These principles can further be condensed into four most basic guiding principles of life and investing – Preparation. Discipline. Patience. Decisiveness.

These principles cannot be prioritized in terms of any importance. Rather, together, they make up a sensible, thinking, and disciplined investor’s mental toolkit.

Munger’s Investing Principles Checklist
1. Risk – All investment evaluations should begin by measuring risk, especially reputational.

• Incorporate an appropriate margin of safety
• Avoid dealing with people of questionable character
• Insist upon proper compensation for risk assumed
• Always beware of inflation and interest rate exposures
• Avoid big mistakes; shun permanent capital loss

2. Independence – “Only in fairy tales are emperors told they are naked.”

• Objectivity and rationality require independence of thought
• Remember that just because other people agree or disagree with you doesn’t make you right or wrong – the only thing that matters is the correctness of your analysis and judgment
• Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean (merely average performance)

3. Preparation – “The only way to win is to work, work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights.”

• Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day
• More important than the will to win is the will to prepare
• Develop fluency in mental models from the major academic disciplines
• If you want to get smart, the question you have to keep asking is “why, why, why?”

4. Intellectual humility – Acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.

• Stay within a well-defined circle of competence
• Identify and reconcile disconfirming evidence
• Resist the craving for false precision, false certainties, etc.
• Above all, never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool
• “Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.”

5. Analytic rigor – Use of the scientific method and effective checklists minimizes errors and omissions.

• Determine value apart from price; progress apart from activity; wealth apart from size
• It is better to remember the obvious than to grasp the esoteric
• Be a business analyst, not a market, macroeconomic, or security analyst
• Consider totality of risk and effect; look always at potential second order and higher level impacts
• Think forwards and backwards – Invert, always invert

6. Allocation – Proper allocation of capital is an investor’s number one job.

• Remember that highest and best use is always measured by the next best use (opportunity cost)
• Good ideas are rare – when the odds are greatly in your favor, bet (allocate) heavily
• Don’t “fall in love” with an investment – be situation-dependent and opportunity-driven

7. Patience – Resist the natural human bias to act.

• “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world” (Einstein); never interrupt it unnecessarily
• Avoid unnecessary transactional taxes and frictional costs; never take action for its own sake
• Be alert for the arrival of luck
• Enjoy the process along with the proceeds, because the process is where you live

8. Decisiveness – When proper circumstances present themselves, act with decisiveness and conviction.

• Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful
• Opportunity doesn’t come often, so seize it when it comes
• Opportunity meeting the prepared mind; that’s the game

9. Change – Live with change and accept unremovable complexity.

• Recognize and adapt to the true nature of the world around you; don’t expect it to adapt to you
• Continually challenge and willingly amend your “best-loved ideas”
• Recognize reality even when you don’t like it – especially when you don’t like it

10. Focus – Keep things simple and remember what you set out to do.

• Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets – and can be lost in a heartbeat
• Guard against the effects of hubris (arrogance) and boredom
• Don’t overlook the obvious by drowning in minutiae (the small details)
• Be careful to exclude unneeded information or slop: “A small leak can sink a great ship”
• Face your big troubles; don’t sweep them under the rug

In the end, it comes down to Munger’s most basic guiding principles, his fundamental philosophy of life: Preparation. Discipline. Patience. Decisiveness.

Who wakes up every morning thinking, “I am going to make bad decisions today”?

No one.

Yet we all make poor decisions, more often than we want to. Surprisingly that’s not the biggest irony.

I was at my hometown recently and chanced upon a friend who works as an investment banker in Delhi. We had met almost after 15 years, and so I could notice a big contrast in his looks as compared to what it was in the early 2000s. He looked much older than his age, around 39, and so I enquired about his health.

To my utter shock, he said, “I had an angioplasty late last year, where they put a tiny tube in my blood vessel to restore blood flow through my arteries.”

In short, he meant, “I just survived a heart attack.”

“Stress is part of my job profile, you see,” he shrugged it off jokingly.

I had earlier read of a 35-year-old London-based hedge fund trader who died of a heart attack in 2013, and of the head of JP Morgan’s equity sales, aged 37, who had also died of heart failure in 2012. But my friend was, well, my friend, and thus the gravity of the situation weighed heavier this time.

“Is it worth it?” I asked my friend.

[Read more…] about Stress and Investing: A 20-Point Checklist

Two hunters are out in the jungle when suddenly one of them collapses. His pulse is gone and his eyes are glazed. The other guy yanks out his cell phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps, “My friend is dead! What should I do?”

The operator says “Calm down, sir. I can help. First, let’s make sure if he’s really dead.”

In a world where you can’t predict the direction from which disruption will strike, how do you deal with the challenge of finding and owing businesses that may not be disrupted, or avoiding the ones that may be?

In 1968, Warren Buffett accepted a seat on the board of Grinnell college’s endowment fund. Joe Rosenfield, Buffett’s friend at Grinnell, was making an initial investment of $100,000 in a small semiconductor startup. He offered Buffett to participate in the deal which he refused.

When the weather report says there’s a 40% chance of rain, and it rains, do you lose faith in its predictions?

No — you recognize that the weather is inherently uncertain and that a definitive statement of whether it will or won’t rain tomorrow is usually the wrong thing to offer.

And that’s where most new investors go wrong. They want a precise answer to the question — which stock should I buy?

Investing, like running a business, requires one to be on his toes all the time. And just like a business operation can’t be reduced to a template, the art of investing can’t be boiled down to a static step-by-step process.

Sachin Tendulkar, in his 22-year long career, never opted for a runner. He was the first batsman to score a double century in one-day cricket history. During the tail end of this special inning, it looked like he badly needed a runner but he continued to run on his own.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Titanic of cloud hosting. It provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to both individuals, companies, and governments, on a paid subscription basis. The platform is designed as a backup to the backups’ backups that prevents hosted websites – including some of the largest in the world – and applications from failing.

Yet, like the Titanic, AWS crashed in April 2011, taking with it popular websites like Reddit, Quora, FourSquare, HootSuite, and New York Times, among many others, for four days.

My friend Ravi was home for lunch on weekend. After food, as we went out for a stroll, he told me a story of a famous motivational speaker.

At a huge gathering once, the speaker proclaimed, “The best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman, who wasn’t my wife.”

The audience was in a state of shock and silence at thus revelation, especially because it was coming from someone they looked up to.

The speaker than added, “She was my mother.”

What followed then was a huge round of applause and laughter.

Ravi then told me the story of a male participant at this event who was his friend from school. This gentleman tried to trick his wife with a similar joke.

[Read more…] about Investing and the Art of Cloning

When a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, our mind tends to imagine a related question that is easier and constructs an answer for it. This processes, answering one question in place of another, is mostly involuntary and known as substitution principle. It’s better to stay mired in a genuine confusion than to bask in the comfort of a false conclusion.

Let me ask you a simple question – How happy are you these days?