Investing Behaviour

How I’m Investing My Own Money Through the Crisis

A stock I bought as recently as mid-February 2020 is down 60% from my original purchase price. I bought more of the stock after it fell 20% from my first purchase, more after it fell 20% from the second purchase, and more after it fell 40% from the third purchase. My total investment in the stock is around 3% of overall stock portfolio, and it is down 55% from the total invested amount.

My total equity investment – stocks and funds – is down around 25% in the last one month.

My total financial net worth is down 15%.

So, what saved the day for me as far as my total financial net worth is concerned? Cash in hand, that I started building up from the end of 2019, in search for investment opportunities that were not to be found anywhere. Plus some income that came in over the past few weeks.

Shaken by Stock Market Carnage? Forget Everything

All I am reading and hearing all around is this.

Volatility is your friend. Stick to the long term. Don’t touch your portfolio. Keep some cash. Invest that in a staggered manner. Recheck your asset allocation. Shuffle your stock portfolio. Don’t borrow to invest. Don’t speculate. Quickly search for new stock ideas. Stop watching news.

Well, let’s cut it all.

How to Select Stocks and Survive this Stock Market Crisis

1. Pull out your watchlist already created using this stock selection framework…

My Talk at Value Investing Summit 2020, Kuala Lumpur

I recently spoke at the Value Investing Summit 2020 in Kuala Lumpur, on the subject of ‘financial freedom.’

Click here to watch the video of my talk, or watch below.

There are intermittent audio issues due to a problem with the microphone. But I know you are wise enough to not complain about the same and instead able to connect those dots looking at my slides and your own wisdom. 🙂

Thanks for your time!

Long Term Investing in the Age of Small Attention Spans

My 8-year-old son Chaitanya, like most kids his age, paid little attention as I showed him how to make a paper elephant for what seemed like the hundredth time. I said, “Fold the paper into half, then fold here, and then here.”

As I was talking, he kept looking at everything except at what I was doing. He fidgeted and played with his pencil. I kept pulling his attention back to what we were doing and my constant refrain was, “Pay attention!”

Ultimately, I lost my patience, and moved on to reading a book.

It’s not that Chaitanya is uninterested all the time. He is completely focused when he reads his favorite books, or when he is playing with his Lego blocks. But at other times, asking him to focus is an exercise in frustration.

Now if you think kids with their terribly short attention spans are tough to deal with, consider this. In 2000, the average human attention span was 12 seconds i.e., we could focus on any one particular thing just for 12 seconds before being distracted or allowing our minds to wander. If you think that was terribly low, please note that this number has now fallen to just eight.

When I look back to that time when I lost my patience on Chaitanya and moved onto reading a book, I realize that I was onto a second book in the next five minutes.

How to Win At Investing (And At Anything in Life)

I wrote yesterday about five ways to destroy wealth in the stock market.

As an antidote, and especially as you may be sailing through the vicissitudes of ecstasy (after seeing your stocks surge yesterday) and, at the same time, misery (for not buying more stocks before yesterday), today I share with you one way to win at the game of investing, or at anything in life.

That way, my dear friend, is of equanimity, which is calmness and composure, especially in a difficult situation.

Indian scriptures define it better as samabhaav, which means “sameness of things” or samatvam, which means “evenness of mind.”

5 Ways to Destroy Your Wealth

It’s common if you are wealthy to worry about losing your fortune due to forces beyond your control. Like market meltdowns or economic stagnation.

But what many of us don’t realize is that our own behavior may be the root of significant losses.

Stock Market Crisis: Your Big Questions…Answered

Here is my attempt to answers a few key questions I have received from Safal Niveshak readers on the current turmoil in the stock market.

You won’t find perfect answers below, but this is just my attempt to help you get over your fears, which may otherwise lead you to act in haste, which can cause some damage to your process of long term wealth creation.

Let’s start right here.

1. Why is the market crashing?
It hasn’t crashed…so far! The BSE-Sensex is down just 6% from its peak this year. BSE-Smallcap is down 14%. BSE-Midcap is down 11%. This isn’t a crash!

If you think it is, you maybe be suffering from ‘denominator blindness’, which is the tendency to focus on the absolute number then the percentage decline. Or you just seem to have been spoilt by rising markets over the past few years and were not investing in 2008 when the last real crash happened. That was painful for people who experienced it with their money (and not just their eyes and ears). We have not seen anything like that since then.

The Risks of Speculating During Rising Markets

It was sometime during late 1999 through early 2000, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, the legendary George Soros and his hedge-fund team were working on how to prepare for the inevitable sell-off in technology stocks.

The man in charge of Soros’ high profile technology funds was Stanley Druckenmiller – one of the best-performing hedge fund managers of all time, till date – and he was busy warning his team that the sell-off could be near and could be brutal.

As the markets soared further in March 2000, Druckenmiller was quoted as saying, “I don’t like this market. I think we should probably lighten up.” Soros himself would regularly warn his team that tech stocks were a bubble set to burst.

Despite this, when the sell-off finally did begin in mid-March 2000, Soros Fund Management wasn’t ready for it. His funds were still loaded with high-tech and biotech stocks. Just in five days, starting 15th March, Soros’s flagship Quantum Fund saw what had been a 2% year-to-date gain turn into an 11% loss. By the end of April, the Quantum Fund was down 22% since the start of the year, and the smaller Quota Fund was down 32%.

Post that, in April 2000, Soros said at a conference, “Maybe I don’t understand the market. Maybe the music has stopped, but people are still dancing.”

My Talk at Value Investing Summit, Kuala Lumpur

I recently spoke at the Value Investing Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My topic was ‘The Path of Successful Investing.’

Click here to download the presentation.

Click here to watch the video of my talk, or watch below.

P.S. In the talk, I quoted Peter Bernstein’s book Against the Gods as containing the story of the hedge fund LTCM. It was a mistake! The book that chronicles the story of LTCM is Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed.

Statutory Warning: Nothing in my talk should be construed as investment advice to buy or sell shares. Please make your own decision, as blindly acting on anyone else’s research and opinions can be injurious to your wealth. My analysis may be biased, and wrong. I have been wrong many times in the past. I am a registered Research Analyst as per SEBI (Research Analyst) Regulations, 2014 (Registration No. INH000000578).