Safal Niveshak’s 2015 Annual Letter to Tribe Members

Note: The genesis of this idea lies in the annual letter that Shane Parrish of Farnam Street wrote to his readers few days back. I have shamelessly cloned the idea here because, like Shane, I find great relevance in mastering the best of what others have already figured out. 🙂

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Dear Tribe Member,

Trust you are doing great.

2015 was another tremendous year for Safal Niveshak. The tribe doubled to cross 20,000 members by the end of the year. Our Twitter count also crossed 10,000 followers. We conducted five workshops during the year, meeting 200+ tribe members in the process.

The Mastermind Value Investing Course count crossed 1,500 students. We launched a new premium newsletter – Value Investing Almanack (VIA) – in March, which is now 400 members strong, and has gotten great reviews from its subscribers, including Prof. Sanjay Bakshi. The idea to launch VIA came from the need I felt of a detailed value investing newsletter in the Indian context, which had deep insights on the subject, business analysis, and interviews with practitioners of the art. I had always missed such a product in India, and could not find a better way to get it than to create it myself. Anyways, when we opened membership in February, I expected less than 100 people to join. But the final count after ten days was an overwhelming 250+.

One big moment for Safal Niveshak came in June, when Anshul Khare formally became my partner in taking this initiative forward. Anshul had been supporting me in writing the VIA newsletter since March, but it was only in June when he finally decided to join me full-time as a partner.

In Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Warren Buffett shared this advice on the choice of a partner –

Look first for someone both smarter and wiser than you are. After locating him (or her), ask him not to flaunt his superiority so that you may enjoy acclaim for the many accomplishments that sprang from his thoughts and advice. Seek a partner who will never second-guess you nor sulk when you make expensive mistakes.

Look also for a generous soul who will put up his own money and work for peanuts. Finally, join with someone who will constantly add to the fun as you travel a long road together.

All of the above is splendid advice. In fact, it’s so splendid that I set out in 2013 to follow it slavishly. And I found Anshul in 2015 (though I knew him since 2013 when he attended my Bangalore Workshop) as he fit my bill of particulars in every way. Though I am still not sure whether I fit his bill in such good ways.

But I have asked him not to flaunt his superiority so that I may enjoy acclaim for the many accomplishments that would spring from his thoughts and advice. 😉

Now, there’s one thing I know for sure – I’ve been extremely lucky to find one of the most honest, trustworthy, and simplest humans to work with me in taking Safal Niveshak towards a better, brighter future.

Anshul is a chemical engineer from IIT-Bombay, a voracious reader, and has special interest in the areas of human behaviour and value investing. You’ve already read him through his wonderful series on Latticework of Mental Models, and his other writings at Value Investing Almanack.

By the way, another BIG moment for me personally in 2015 was when Peter Kaufman, the author of Poor Charlie’s Almanack sent me this – his book, autographed for me by Charlie Munger – for my work at Safal Niveshak…

I can now proudly claim that the greats, Peter Kaufman and Charlie Munger, know about Safal Niveshak. 😉

Journey So Far
Safal Niveshak will complete five years of existence in July 2016, and it calls for a little reflection on what has transpired during these years.

I started Safal Niveshak in 2011 with an idea to help small investors learn how not to lose money in the stock market. The journey started with the free newsletter ‘The Safal Niveshak Post’ (that remains, and would remain, free), and few readers – most being my family members and friends who signed up more out of courtesy than to show any real interest in my writings.

The list grew so gradually in the first few months that I told my wife with extreme happiness every time a new subscriber joined in. A lot of my friends advised me to advertise to get more people in, but that was not the route I wanted to go. Advertising (especially online) does bring in a lot of new audience, but also a lot of wrong kind of audience who are more interested in the freebies that they might receive in return of showing their interest than the main product that’s on offer. Plus, I believe it’s difficult to advertise “investment knowledge” as compared to “investment/trading tips.” Thirdly, as I have realized, the true beneficiary of Safal Niveshak would be a person who is seeking knowledge on his own instead of whom I am seeking to come and receive the same.

And thus, I have never advertised Safal Niveshak on any platform, except that I love to talk about it whenever I am giving a lecture to an audience that’s from outside the tribe.

Anyways, moving ahead, the big inflection point for Safal Niveshak’s readership came one year after I launched, and when Prof. Sanjay Bakshi carried his interview with me on his website. It was a multi-bagger moment for me, as the subscriber count that I had accumulated in the past one year doubled in just one day. I am sure a lot of readers coming via Prof. Bakshi’s website would have been disappointed reading Safal Niveshak (contrast effect, you see), but I have also found many good friends who tell me now, “Oh I came to know about you when Prof. Bakshi shared the interview in his site.”

Safal Niveshak has evolved beyond my imagination from the time I posted my first blog post in July 2011 and when I conducted my first workshop on April 2012. While we have launched several premium/paid content like Mastermind and VIA since then, what we write for free on Safal Niveshak remains our biggest focus area, simply because that is what impacts the lives of most people connected to this initiative.

A vast majority of content on Safal Niveshak will remain free forever, and you should only expect an improvement in the variety and quality of the same as we move forward. As far as premium content is concerned, apart from keeping mine and Anshul’s homes running, it helps us keep the website free of any external advertising revenue and also helps us constantly upgrade and improve the free areas of the site. So our incentives are 100% aligned to the work we do on Safal Niveshak, and nothing else.

Eye on the Long Term
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said this in an interview in 2011 (emphasis mine) –

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough.

What a wonderful and sustainable moat this is – long-term thinking. Whether you are an entrepreneur or an investor, by thinking and acting long-term, you can create a wonderful proposition for the society at large (as an entrepreneur), and great wealth for yourself (as an investor).

This is exactly our thought process as we work towards building Safal Niveshak into a greater cause going forward. There are several ways in this business to make a lot of money in the short term – and we see a lot of people already doing that. But our horizons are pretty long and, more than that, we take our integrity and your long-term interests very seriously.

As a business philosophy, Anshul and I live and breathe what Charlie Munger so often says – “Tell me where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”

Best Posts of 2015
Here is a list of our best posts from 2015, based on the number of reads and comments –

• Microcap Investing, the Ian Cassel Way
• Why Good People Do Bad Things: A Conversation With My Daughter
• My Most Powerful Tool for Thinking and Decision Making
• Lecture on Value Investing at Goa Institute of Management
• The Tale of Two Fathers
• How to Find Great Businesses, the Peter Lynch Way
• A Guide to Reading for Investors
• My Email Exchange with Prof. Sanjay Bakshi on Valuations

Goals for 2016
Well, if I were to listen to Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, we should be working in a system and not goals. And thus there are no specific goals or targets we have for Safal Niveshak to achieve in 2016. Just that here are a few systemic things that Anshul and I will focus on in the next few months, which include –

• Improving the quality of content on Safal Niveshak – both free posts and premium ones (Mastermind and VIA);
• Increasing the breadth of content by getting deeper into annual report analysis, financial statement analysis, and industry analysis; and
• Improving the breadth of content delivery by adding audio and video content.

We welcome your suggestions in the Comments section of this post on what you would like us to do as far as content on Safal Niveshak is concerned.

Our Wish for You
In 2016, we wish that you get back to the basics, both in your life and investments.

As far as knowledge is concerned, Charlie Munger says – “The more basic knowledge you have, the less new knowledge you have to get.”

Edward Burger wrote this in his book Five Elements of Effective Thinking –

Don’t face complex issues head-on; first understand simple ideas deeply. Clear the clutter and expose what is really important. Be brutally honest about what you know and don’t know. Then see what’s missing, identify the gaps, and fill them in. Let go of bias, prejudice, and preconceived notions. There are degrees to understanding (it’s not just a yes-or-no proposition) and you can heighten yours. Rock-solid understanding is the foundation for success.

Again, as Charlie says – “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”

So keep learning and start (or re-start) with the basics. Aim for a broad-based multidisciplinary learning of the world’s most profound yet basic ideas (building the latticework of mental models, as Charlie Munger asks us to do), that have lasted for ages and would continue to do so.

Talking about life, getting back to basics is so important in this world mired in complexities. And the best way you can get back to the basics is to first slow down. Rushing is rarely worth it. Your life is too short to be wasted in the fast lane. Life is better enjoyed at a leisurely pace. I can vouch for that.

“Life is long,” wrote the Roman philosopher Seneca, “…if you know how to use it.”

In his brilliant treatise written 2,000 years ago, Seneca wrote –

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

So, while there’s a huge mass of time ahead of us, it passes much faster than we think. Our kids grow up fast. We get gray hairs before we’re done getting our bearings on life. It’s so ironical that it often takes us a lifetime to learn to live in the moment…to just ‘be’ in the moment.

We seem to think that we’ll live forever. We spend time and money as though we’ll always be here. We buy stuff as though it matters and is worth the debt and stress of attachment.

We put off “living happily ever after” for another year, because we assume we have another year. We don’t tell the ones we love how much we love them often enough because we assume there’s always tomorrow.

But then, Seneca wrote –

No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.

Stop being so busy, I must request you here. You won’t get this life again. Try to spend some time with yourself and your loved ones.

So in 2016, try to do less, be more. That’s a great process to be happy, and that’s the only way you can live wide.

Finally, as you progress towards 2016, here is a beautiful poem I read sometime back that should help you slow down and get back to the basics…

Slow Dance
by David L. Weatherford

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain
Slapping the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun fading into the night?

You better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?

When you ask: How are you?
Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done,
Do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?

You better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Ever told your child,
We’ll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a friendship die

Cause you never had time
To call and say, “Hi?”

You better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere,
You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
It’s like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life is not a race,
So take it slower.

Hear the music
Before your song is over.

Anshul and I are lucky fellows to have you as tribe members.

With respect,
Vishal

PS: Best Books We Read in 2015 – Here is a list of the best books we read in 2015. This is apart from the usual supertexts we re-read during the year – stuff like Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and Warren Buffett’s letters.

• The Miracle Of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis
• Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
• The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
• Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? by Fred Schwed Jr.
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel
• The Success Equation by Michael Mauboussin
• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

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