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Here is your latest Saturday newsletter, where I share the latest updates from the site, an idea worth thinking about, few stories you shouldn’t miss, and a question for you. Let’s get started.
Safal Niveshak Updates
Just in case you missed, here are a couple of recent posts on the site –
- 30 Big Ideas from Seth Klarman’s Margin of Safety (Special Report) (Corrected and with new download links)
- The Best Books: Recommended Reading List
- Regret Missing the Rally in Stocks? Now What?
Imagine!
Here’s a note from Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk –
Visual thinking is a great way to understand complex or potentially confusing information, and also a way to organize your thoughts and improve your ability to think and communicate.
Imagine someone talking to you, and starting with the word – “Imagine…”
You are completely hooked, isn’t it?
Consider this excerpt from Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, where his father helps him visualize about dinosaurs –
We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy my father used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, ‘This thing is twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across,’ you see, and so he’d stop and say, ‘let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.’ Everything we’d read would be translated as best as we could into some reality and so I learned to do that – everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating.
Then consider how Warren Buffett visually convinced me why gold was a bad investment…
I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side… Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion dollars – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States… For $7 trillion dollars… you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money… And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67-foot cube of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.
I’ve tried my hands at visual thinking this way –
You may want to check out my Wall of Ideas for more such examples of visual thinking.
Now, visual thinking is not a new lesson that I would attribute to Elon Musk. But imagine the kind of businesses he is building, to save the world, which he had originally visualized when he was under ten years of age.
When it comes to investing, you can avoid yourself a lot of pain by just visualizing your life after you’ve lost a lot of money trading and speculating in the stock market. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that would get you into such a situation. That’s also the concept of inversion.
I personally used visual thinking when I was deciding about quitting my job to start Safal Niveshak to help small investors become better at their investment decision making. Of course, when I had started planning my future after a job, the first visual was that of – not being successful in my future work, getting over my savings, and having to return to a job.
But another visual I saw was of helping people, enjoying the freedom of doing things my way, and spending a lot of time with my family. And I thank my stars that this was more powerful than the visual of losing everything.
A Few Stories You Shouldn’t Miss
- We Begin Our Lives as Growth Stocks, But End Our Lives As Value Stocks (Of Dollars And Data)
- The Bargain Hunter’s Dilemma (Barry Ritholtz)
- What I Read, and Why (Jason Zweig)
- Why I’m Losing Hope in India (Andy Mukherjee)
- Last Refuge of License Raj (Anand Sridharan)
- Here’s How to Give Thanks—Not Once a Year—but Every Day (Ryan Holiday)
- Happiness Won’t Save You (NY Times)
Meditations
History may not repeat itself, but some of its lessons are inescapable. One is that in the world of high and confident finance little is ever really new. The controlling fact is not the tendency to brilliant invention; the controlling fact is the shortness of the public memory, especially when it contends with a euphoric desire to forget.
~ John Kenneth Gailbraith
On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not “this moment?”
This one moment – Now – is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it’s always Now.
Since there is no escape from the Now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it?
~ Eckhart Tolle
A Question for You
When you get better at what you do, you can make a bigger impact and solve bigger problems. That gives you more satisfaction. And also more income.
Ask yourself this question – How can I get better at what I do?
That’s about it from me for today.
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Stay safe.
Regards,
Vishal
Value Investing Almanack (VIA) Special Offer: VIA, our premium newsletter that subscribers call “the best resource on Value Investing in India,” which was closed for new subscriptions for the past few months, is now accepting new members, and at a very special 55% discount, or Rs 9,000 off the base price! Click here to join now.