I recently did an interview with Niveshak (not related to Safal Niveshak), the monthly magazine released by the Finance Club of Indian Institute of Management, Shillong.
Here I present that interview verbatim for the benefit of tribe members.
1. We are aware that you are an avid blogger and some of us are regular readers of Safal Niveshak blog. If we ask you to tell our readers about the 3-5 most vital investing lessons what would they be?
Thanks for reading Safal Niveshak! It’s good that you have a word limit to this interview, because the lessons I have learned as an investor over the years would have run into several pages.
But if I were to list down just 3 of them, they would be –
- Have extreme patience
- on process, and outcome will take care of itself
- that you will make (a lot of) mistakes
Talking about patience, it’s important for investors to understand that ‘t’ or time is the most important variable in the compounding formula, even more important than ‘i’ or rate of return. So, the more patience you have to sit on your investments (assuming they are good investments), the greater is the amount of wealth you can create. In fact, patience – the art of sitting quiet – is the most important skill an investor can have, even more important than knowing what stocks to pick.