Vishal Khandelwal

Investing and the Art of Cloning

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.

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.

If you are not a member, please consider joining the Mastermind Membership to access my most comprehensive value investing course, plus practical, time-tested ideas in investing, human behaviour, business analysis, and decision making, and get onto the path of becoming a better version of yourself.

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…]

Dare to Be Wrong

The Sketchbook of Wisdom: A Hand-Crafted Manual on the Pursuit of Wealth and Good Life

Buy your copy of the book Morgan Housel calls “a masterpiece.” It contains 50 timeless ideas – from Lord Krishna to Charlie Munger, Socrates to Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs to Naval Ravikant – as they apply to our lives today. Click here to buy now.

“Dare to be wrong,” Howard Marks wrote in one of his memos in 2014, very much like Charlie Munger told him, “It (investing) is not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.”

Marks wrote –

You have to give yourself a chance to fail.” That’s what Kenny “The Jet” Smith said on TV the other night during the NCAA college basketball tournament, talking about a star player who started out cold and as a result attempted too few shots in a game his team lost. It’s a great way to make the point.

Failure isn’t anyone’s goal, of course, but rather an inescapable potential consequence of trying to do really well.

[Read more…]

Philip Fisher on Four Dimensions of Investing – Part 4

This is the fourth and the final instalment of Philip Fisher’s “Four Dimensions of Investing” series. It’s recommended that you read the first three parts before reading this one.

The first three dimensions of conservative investment were essentially about the quality of the business itself. However, a great business becomes a great investment only when it’s acquired at a reasonable price. That means, without considering the price, the conservativeness of an investment process is still questionable. So, price is the fourth dimension of conservative investing.

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.

Influencers are Not the Problem

The Sketchbook of Wisdom: A Hand-Crafted Manual on the Pursuit of Wealth and Good Life

Blaming the system is soothing because it lets you off the hook. But when the system is broken, we wonder why you were relying in the system in the first place.

~ Seth Godin

This story dates to September 2008. I remember this clearly because it happened on the day Lehman went bust.

The event is more vivid for me because, when the news broke out, I was less than a mile away from Lehman’s headquarters, with a school friend.

My friend, who was working in the tech division of another investment bank in the city, met me to discuss his India investments. His portfolio had already taken a beating in the financial crisis that had started at the beginning of 2008.

[Read more…]

Answering an Easier Question

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?

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.

Philip Fisher on Four Dimensions of Investing – Part 3

This is the third leg of the “Four Dimensions of Investing” series. It’s recommended that you read the first two parts before reading this.

Philip Fisher’s investment classic Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits ranks pretty close to Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor and for many years, it has been part of the curriculum in the investment class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.

Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Investors Do

Most of us invest in the first place is to attain financial freedom so that we do not have to worry about money. But most of us become slaves of the short term stock price movements. And that creates stress. And stress is bad, very bad.

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.

[Notes] Big Mistakes by Michael Batnick

In most fields, studying the patterns of success is a standard way to learn. So when people come to financial markets they try the same approach. All new investors get busy investigating how the wealthy investors made their money in the stock market. They want to know the secret behind the winning strategies. But investing is a world of counterintuitive ways.

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.

Philip Fisher on Four Dimensions of Investing – Part 2

This is the second part of our “Philip Fisher’s Four Dimensions of Investing” series. I strongly recommend that you read the first part before reading this. If you have already read the first part, it would still help a lot if you could refresh it before moving further with this post.

Fisher is best known as the author of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, that has remained in print ever since it was first published in 1958. That’s a proof of timelessness of the book and the lessons it contains.

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.

Stocks for the Long Run

One of Warren Buffett’s all-time great investments is Coca-Cola, and it just happens to be the stock Berkshire Hathaway has held the longest. There is no other holding that better exemplifies his investing skill, patience, and temperament than this one.

Buffett first started buying shares of Coca-Cola in 1988, and seemingly paid around $2.5 per share (adjusted) for his purchase. In 2019, the company paid a dividend of $1.6 per share, thus taking Buffett’s dividend yield from the stock to 64%!

This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.