Investing

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Want to Learn Charlie Munger’s Way of Thinking?

According to Colby, men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig, but not to a lack of humour.

This, I believe also happens with creative thinking.

So people, in general, like to think that they are creative thinkers, don’t even consider otherwise and, you know what, they may be right!

Most of us can become creative thinkers. It’s just that we need a catalyst to bring forth our innate thinking powers.

Roger von Oech's Creative Whack Pack One such amazing catalyst I found out two years back, through a recommendation from Prof. Sanjay Bakshi, is Roger von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack.

This is a great tool to practice thinking like Charlie Munger does – combining various ideas from different spheres of life and joining them to create a process of thinking creatively – the latticework of mental models, as he calls it.

The pack consists of a deck of 64 cards divided in four suits. Each card gives a bite-sized story or situation and a strategy that may be adapted to the problem or concept the user is working on.

The idea is that drawing cards singly or in combination and considering the strategy can shift the user’s mind to previously unexplored, creative directions.

While this entire pack of cards has helped my thought process immensely over these past two years, here are four cards that have helped me as far as my investment thinking is concerned.

The text in quotes below is from the respective card.

Charlie Munger’s Six Secrets to Winning Big in Investing

Charlie Munger, business partner of Warren Buffett and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, recently did an interview with Jason Zweig published by the Wall Street Journal. You can read Zweig’s notes from the interview here.

Here are the six simple but big-big ideas I’ve pulled out from WSJ’s interview of Charlie Munger – these are all you need to become a smarter investor, if you can ingrain these in your investment philosophy and practice them while making your decisions.

Over to Charlie!

Safal Niveshak TribeStar: A Curious, Passionate Investor

After a long-long gap, and after profiling the ever-so-amazing R.K. Chandrasekhar and Dev Ashish in the first two issues of Safal Niveshak TribeStar, I bring to you another young investing star in the making, Nishanth Muralidhar.

Nishanth is a 32-year old IT software engineer, hailing from Kerala and currently residing in the US. He has been investing in the Indian stock market for eight years now and is a keen follower of value investing.

Over to you Nishanth!

Safal Niveshak: Please share with us your investment journey so far.

Nishanth Muralidhar: My investing journey, started at the age of 23, when I started my IT career in 2004. Right from the very first salary I received, I explored various investing options and stumbled upon equity mutual funds.

Through a series of articles in Value Research and other websites, I understood the basics of mutual funds and decided to invest in them. I picked 3 of the best funds out then – Reliance Vision, Franklin Indian Prima, and HDFC Equity. I didn’t have the faintest idea regarding asset allocation or diversification at that time; however I had read about the power of compounding.

I opened a demat account and decided to foray into direct equity investing. I started investing in stocks based on the recommendations from various stock brokers and websites. I had only a rudimentary idea of the PE ratio and knew nothing else about these stocks. I didn’t read the annual reports, balance sheets, income statements or cash flow statements.

Risk, Volatility, and Investing: 5 Big Lessons from Howard Marks’s Latest Memo

“If you were to read just five books in your life to become a sensible investor,” I often suggest people seeking my view, “…they have to be Warren Buffett’s letters, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Peter Lynch’s One Up on Wall Street, Ben Graham’s Intelligent Investor, and Howard Marks’s memos.”

Well, if you don’t know who Howard Marks is, let me tell you he is the CEO of Oaktree Capital and is one of the most famous investors who manages to keep a low profile, despite managing almost US$ 90 billion.

Marks is also the author of an amazing book – The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor. In its ultimate praise, Warren Buffett writes, “This is that rarity, a useful book”.

Apart from the investing gems he has shared through this book, Marks also writes regular memos for investors where he outlines his investment philosophy, in line with what Buffett does via his annual letters to shareholders.

Here is what Buffett has to say about Marks’s memos – “When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they’re the first thing I open and read. I always learn something…”

From whatever I have read in his memos, Marks focuses a lot on risk control and seeks to exploit market cycles. He prefers judgment to mechanical quantification, and believes in the power of checklists.

Marks’s latest memo is a masterpiece in itself. One particular reason it touches a chord with me is because it talks about a pain-point – the concept of ‘risk’ – that I feel as an investor each day, and maybe you do too.

Here are 5 big ideas I have pulled out from the memo. If you wish to learn anything and everything about investment risk, this one memo will help you do that.

In fact, reading this memo would provide you with all the big lessons that even a one-year MBA in Investment Risk won’t provide.

So, let’s get going with 5 big lessons from Howard Marks’s latest memo (the emphasis is mine).

10 Investing Gems from Peter Lynch’s One Up on Wall Street

This article was originally published in June 2012. I was re-reading Lynch’s book and thought of re-publishing these amazing lessons again.

Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street Apart from Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, there is no better book to get started for beginners than Peter Lynch’s One Up On Wall Street.

The easy-going and simplistic stock picking style discussed in this book brought Lynch great success in his profession as a fund manager at the US mutual fund company, Fidelity.

The best part about this book is that it’s low on number crunching but high on anecdotal stories. Moreover, readers are given a clear picture on how to get off to a good start in the stock market.

One Up On Wall Street offers insight into the mind of one of the greatest money managers of all times.

Lynch helps you discover that he is a normal guy (like you and me) who thinks rationally, believes in doing his own independent research on companies, asks plenty of questions, and gets caught off guard by the market at times, just like anyone else.

Anyone thinking about buying individual stocks must read this book before they ever make their first stock purchase.

When NOT to Sell a Great Business You Own

Consider this. If you want to multiply your money 100x in 25 years, you want your investment to return 20% every year.

In other words, Rs 1 growing at 20% per annum will turn to Rs 100 after 25 years, excluding all dividends.

But if you sell this stock after 20 years (instead of holding for 5 more years), you will get just Rs 40. The remaining Rs 60 would come only between the 21st and 25th years.

Even if you earn 15% return per annum, your Rs 1 would turn to around Rs 35 in 25 years. But 50% of these returns would come only between the 21st and 25th years.

Follow @safalniveshak on Twitter

Did you know there’s a Safal Niveshak page on Twitter where I share varied content on all days, even when I do not post on the website?

You see, it’s easy for me to share the varied thoughts I get during a normal day in 140 characters than in 500 words. And thus, I am more active there than you see me on the Safal Niveshak website (which though is still the most important platform for me to perform)

Anyways, here’s what you’ll get when you follow me i.e., @safalniveshak on Twitter –

Fresh Safal Niveshak content
Classic Safal Niveshak articles
Curated ideas on investing from across the web
My random thoughts on investing and life
Key lessons from the world’s best investors

For example, here are a few things I have tweeted recently –

If you wish to receive thoughts like these on a regular basis, I invite you to get on board and follow @safalniveshak on Twitter.

When I Had Plenty of Money, But Not Much Wealth

Most of what we think we know about people with a lot of money – the enviable lifestyle of the rich and famous – comes from television, movies and novels. A lot of it is inaccurate.

Apart from the happiness that is showcased, financially well-to-do people have their own set of concerns – uncertainty over their relationships, anxiety about their children, fear of isolation and, of course, fear of losing their financial wealth.

In fact, I have known plenty of such “poor rich” people over the last few years, who have lots of money and assets…but not much else.

They are financially wealthy but emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally and even socially, bankrupt.

Imagine your own life. If you own one big house (or even five) but you live in an unhealthy, stressed, over-worked, sleep-deprived, over-medicated body that’s going to die twenty or thirty years too soon (as many do), are you really wealthy?

So maybe health equals wealth.

Or if you’re a millionaire but you live in an unhealthy marriage with a spouse you haven’t spoken (heartily) to for a year and kids who never see you invest time into their lives, are you really rich or do you just have lots of money?

Confessions of a Stock Market Analyst

Note: This article was originally written in June 2012. I am re-publishing it given that I have received quite a few emails in the recent past with people asking me what made me quit my “great” job in the stock market that promised a “bright” future.

Confessions of a Stock Market Analyst I’ve received several emails from readers of Safal Niveshak asking why I left my “lucrative” job as a stock market analyst.

“It must be a well-paying job! So why in the world did you leave it?” asked one of them a few days back.

I’ve shared my reasons to leave my job with them in private, but thought there was a need to confess in the open – to the entire Safal Niveshak tribe.

After all, even you might be wondering what really hit me to have left the “safety” of a job that promised a “bright” future.

So here is a confession from an (ex) stock market analyst on “why in the world” he left a well-paying job to start a mission that some have called “a journey into the unknown”.

Can You Sum Up Your Investing Philosophy in 10 Words?

Life is short, and thus brevity is beautiful.

Allen Saunders understood this when he defined life in just about than ten words – “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”

When Mahatma Gandhi was asked how an individual can change the world, he said in ten words – “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Our own Benjamin Graham distilled the secret of sound investment into just three words – “Margin of safety.”

I remembered these quotes from Saunders, Gandhi, and Graham when my daughter challenged me to summarize “truth” in no more than 10 words.

I replied, “Be exactly who you say you are.”

Anyways, this gave me an idea for this post. This is also what led me to this post from Jason Zweig where he asked his readers to sum up their investing philosophies in less than 10 words.

50% of the "early bird seats" for my Kolkata Value #Investing Workshop are gone! Register now if you wish to attend – https://t.co/dVRV8D4bmd

— Vishal Khandelwal (@safalniveshak) August 1, 2014

So, today, I put forth this challenge to you – Sum up your investing philosophy in 10 words or less, and share in the Comments section of this post.