Blog on Value Investing | Safal Niveshak

Latticework Of Mental Models: Planning Fallacy

When I planned my first road trip from Bangalore to Goa, I calculated that the distance (about 560 km) should take little more than 9 hours. Factoring in stopovers and few unexpected events like a flat tyre or traffic, I assumed that 12-15 hours should be sufficient for the road trip. It took 15 hours.

“Good job, Anshul!” I patted myself on the back. Not a bad estimate.

Now based on this, if I had to forecast the time it would take to cover a distance of say 5,000 km, a road trip to cover major cities in India, I might be tempted to extrapolate the Bangalore-Goa trip time. I’ll probably calculate that 560 km took one day so 5,000 km should take 10 days plus 2-3 more days.

Am I being reasonable in my estimation?

What I am forgetting here is that the second road trip is not only longer but more complex and subject to many more unforeseen and unexpected events. My estimation is fraught with over-optimism bias. And I am not alone in making this kind of mistake.

There are many ways a plan can fail and most of those things are too improbable to be anticipated. The likelihood that something will go wrong especially in a big project is high. Overly optimistic forecasts of the outcome of projects are found everywhere.

In fact, how often are you able to complete everything on your to-do list at the end of the day? This shows how absurdly ambitious we’re in planning.

This bias, a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias (underestimate the time needed), is called Planning Fallacy. The term was coined by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky.

Safal Niveshak Stream – January 7, 2017

Note to Readers: In Stream, we suggest worthwhile reading material on a variety of topics, not all of which are directly related to investing. Some of the articles require you to be paid subscriber of those sites. However, it is often possible to read such articles by going to Google News and searching for the article’s title.

Some nice stuff we are reading, watching, and observing at the start of this weekend…

Life/Learning

(930 words / 4 minutes read) Meet the ‘James Bond of Philanthropy’ who has given away the last of his fortune…

Nearly five years ago, Charles F. Feeney sat in a cushy armchair in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan, grandchildren’s artwork taped to the walls, and said that by the end of 2016, he was going to hand out the last of a great fortune that he had made.

Altogether, he had contributed $8 billion to his philanthropies, which have supported higher education, public health, human rights and scientific research … His remaining personal net worth is slightly more than $2 million. That’s not quite broke, by any standard, but it is a modest amount for a man who controlled thousands of times as much wealth. He and his wife, Helga, now live in a rented apartment in San Francisco. “You can only wear one pair of pants at a time,” Mr. Feeney has said.

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – January 7, 2017

7 Acceptances (Not Resolutions) to Live By in 2017

I wish you a very happy, healthy, peaceful, and fulfilling 2017.

Life is short (it’s already almost six years since I started Safal Niveshak), so let me not waste another moment and thank you for being here for me.

As we begin 2017, let’s not start with New Year resolutions that anyways don’t last till 5th of January. Let’s start with some acceptances that you should come to terms with in 2017 and beyond.

Print what follows below – Your Note of Acceptance as an Investor – and look at it every day. It might help you deal better with the reality of the investing world.

Here it goes…

[My Note of Acceptance as an Investor]
I ACCEPT THAT…

I will act stupid and envious at times and make mistakes, how much ever intelligent I am, and whatever resolution I make to avoid all mistakes this year.
I, or anyone else, have no clue about the impact of macroeconomic or socio-political events on my investments.
I, or anyone else, cannot predict the future of markets with any degree of accuracy, however certain things look like.
I will lose a lot of money over time if I invest on tips, in bad businesses, with bad managements, and in expensive stocks.
I may create wealth from stock market in the long run only if I practice patience in owning good businesses, not when I chase multibagger returns.
Luck will play an important role in my investing, and especially when I make high returns in quick time.
However good my investment process is, the outcome at times may not be to my liking.

Finally, it’s good to admit and accept that the future is inherently unknown and unknowable, and that there is no point blaming “uncertainty” for your investment mistakes and losses. Relax, and learn to appreciate the thrill of finding out what happens next. That’s the best part of being a stock market investor.

What you can control is your own behavior – and only to a certain extent – and how you respond to whatever happens around you. For all things outside your control – including return on your investment – there is no point fearing the future.

Stay happy, healthy, and peaceful.

Happy New Year!

P.S. The idea of this post comes from here.

Safal Niveshak’s 2016 Annual Letter to Tribe Members

Dear Tribe Member,

Trust you are doing great.

Here is a brief update on what transpired during 2016. It was another tremendous year for Safal Niveshak. The tribe has crossed 26,000 members. Our Twitter count has crossed 17,500 followers. We conducted five workshops during the year, meeting 120+ tribe members in the process.

The Mastermind Value Investing Course student count increased by 30%, while our premium newsletter – Value Investing Almanack (VIA) – which is about to complete two years, gained 25% new members, and has continued to receive some inspiring reviews from its subscribers. During the year, as part of the VIA, we interviewed a few wonderful value investors including Rajeev Thakkar, Jason Zweig, Samit Vartak, Kuntal Shah, and John Huber.

The idea to launch VIA in 2015 came from the need we 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. We had always missed such a product in India, and could not find a better way to get it than to create it ourselves. The journey over the past two years of launching VIA has been inspiring for the breadth and depth of reading and learning we ourselves have done to bring our subscribers high quality content.

Anyways, in 2016, we also launched our first comprehensive e-book titled Mental Models, Investing, and You. This was just the first part of our collection of mental models notes we have written on Safal Niveshak so far (the second part releases in 2017), and received great reviews from readers. Despite our offer to people to get the e-book for free or pay as much as they wished, more than 850 people paid up, which was a much higher count than what we had expected.

Stock Talk (December 2016)

Latticework Of Mental Models: Lucretius Problem

It was a Friday on March 11, 2011 when a massive earthquake with an intensity of 9 on Richter scale hit off the coast of Japan at 2:26 pm local time. The epicenter of the quake was 70 kilometer east of the Oshika Peninsula of Tōhoku.

The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 40 meters. It took 50 minutes for the largest wave in the tsunami to arrive at the shores of Fukushima. What followed was something totally unimaginable and unexpected for those who take pride in taming the mother nature.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had six separate boiling water reactors, protected by a 10-meter-high seawall to prevent sea waves from entering the plant.

When the tsunami struck the Fukushima coastline, the gigantic waves easily overtopped the plant’s seawall. It took seconds to flood the basements of the turbine buildings and disabling the emergency diesel generators. Soon the backup generator building was also flooded. This resulted in an explosion and leakage of radioactive material to the sea water and created a huge nuclear hazard.

Why would the engineers and designers of Fukushima nuclear power plant build a wall only 10-meter high? What made them believe that the waves can’t breach the 10-meter height? [Read more…] about Latticework Of Mental Models: Lucretius Problem

Safal Niveshak Stream – December 17, 2016

Some nice stuff we are reading, listening, and observing at the start of this weekend…

Investing

(1700 words / 7 minutes read) Could one person’s speculation be another person’s investment? The case study presented in this article titled The Risk of Backing into a Speculative Position illustrates the idea that investment and speculation are linked to an investor’s intent rather than the characteristic of stock he or she is buying.

Let’s assume that the investor and the speculator purchased the exact same security at the same time and then subsequently sold at the same time. Obviously, the returns that both of them will experience are identical, but it is still useful to differentiate between investment and speculation. This is because over long periods of time, process is important and will eventually dominate results. The effect of a good process on any individual investment may not be clear but, over time, a good investment process should generate good long term results.

It is important to make a clear distinction between investing and speculating and to classify one’s activities appropriately. The possibility of major losses exists when someone who believes that he is investing is actually speculating instead. There is nothing illegal or immoral about speculating but such activities really do need to be segregated from investing in our minds to avoid trouble.

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – December 17, 2016

Latticework Of Mental Models: Chauffeur knowledge

Charlie Munger, in one of his talks, tells the story of famous scientist Max Planck –

I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving a same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine, if I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well, I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.

Well, the reason I tell that story is not to celebrate the quick wittedness of the protagonist. In this world I think we have two kinds of knowledge: One is Planck knowledge, that of the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. Then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned to prattle the talk. They may have a big head of hair. They often have fine timbre in their voices. They make a big impression. But in the end what they’ve got is chauffeur knowledge masquerading as real knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States. You’re going to have the problem in your life of getting as much responsibility as you can into the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people who have the chauffeur knowledge.

On a lighter note the chauffeur had some Planck knowledge of his own, being clever enough to turn that question around!

But in the real world, it is critical to distinguish when someone is “Max Planck,” and when he’s just the “Chauffeur.”

Building Planck knowledge takes deep commitment and large amount of time and effort. Chauffeur knowledge comes from people who have learned to put on a show. Their talks sound impressive and entertaining, they have good voice and may even ooze great charisma but their knowledge is not their own.

Investing and the Power of Serendipity

In July 2003 I was fresh out of college and was waiting to join my first job. I was excited but a little anxious too. The thought of transitioning from a laid back college life to a hectic corporate job was giving me jitters.

The life in college was quite predictable. The syllabus was fixed. If I studied the textbooks diligently and attended all the classes, I was supposed to graduate in four years with predictable grades.

But in the job, I had no clue what to expect. I didn’t know how my first boss would behave. Although there weren’t going to be any exams or pop quizzes in the job, there was no set curriculum either. It was a different flavour of uncertainty out there which I hadn’t tasted before.

So, to make the best use of my vacation before the corporate grill started, I thought of meeting someone who was successful in this field. I decided to meet the president of small scale industries association in my hometown.

“Uncle, I am about to join my first job in a chemical industry. What should I do to make the best use of my time in my job?” I asked him.

“Always keep your eyes and ears open. Opportunity can come from any direction. Be ready to grab it and work hard to capitalize on it,” he said. We spoke for about half an hour but these are the only three sentences that I still remember.

At that time, those words didn’t make much sense to me. However, after spending 10 years working in different jobs, I began to realize the importance of uncle’s advice.

Safal Niveshak Stream – December 10, 2016

Some nice stuff we are reading, watching, and observing at the start of this weekend…

Life/Learning

(740 words / 3 minutes read) Perseverance and determination are good qualities when the objective you’re working so hard to achieve is actually attainable. But there is a lot in life you just can’t change, like trying to change the world, so you must quit wasting your time trying…

It’s nice and inspirational and all to think one person could actually change the world, but some things are just bigger than all of us. You can definitely make a difference in the world around you — that’s not a problem. Just watch that you’re keeping your expectations of the impact you can actually have in check.

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – December 10, 2016