“Abraham Lincoln once posed the question: ‘If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have?’ and then answered his own query: ‘Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one,’” Buffett writes. Our broker friend Jigneshbhai was reading from Warren Buffett’s latest annual letter to his shareholders. He … Read more
“Charlie Chaplin once said ‘I remain just one thing, and one thing only — and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician’” said Jigneshbhai, my broker friend as we met for our weekend coffee. He was musing over the happenings of the past few days apparently. “But … Read more
“Artificial Intelligence is going to completely change investing” said Swami excitedly as we met for our coffee. Jigneshbhai did not react, and continued sipping his black coffee, as usual. Swami was not the one to be discouraged by that, at least immediately. So he continued with even more enthusiasm. “Machines will be reading through stock … Read more
“Where have you been?” asked my friend Swami to Jigneshbhai, as we met for our weekend coffee after a really, really long time. Indeed when I checked, it was over a year since we had last met, and some of our coffee house friends had also started asking me why we had stopped meeting. “I … Read more
Common Sense Investing: Sharing an excellent set of simple videos (less than 60 minutes) by Rick Van Ness. All that an average individual investor needs to know and follow. This is what the site http://www.financinglife.org/ says about these videos: “These short videos teach basic financial concepts to make it more likely that you’ll achieve common life … Read more
“Many years back there used to be an ad for some detergent remember where the lady of the house boomed with pride ‘ढूंढते रह जाओगे’ when her husband found no stains on his shirt. Do you remember that?” asked Jigneshbhai while sipping his coffee last weekend. Swami and I met our broker friend Jigneshbhai had … Read more
Came across an interesting conversation that the famous value investor Mohnish Pabrai had with Steve Pomeranz. He talks about what value investing is, why individual companies matter to him more than broader markets (though not advised for normal passive or ‘defensive’ investors), the importance of temperament which should be a strange mix of patience and … Read more
..and again!! That’s the title of a memo sent by the famous investor Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital to his clients recently. And it refers to how he is happiest writing when bull markets start going far, risk aversion disappears and there’s money all around inflating potential bubbles. It is quite a long memo listing … Read more
The problem with bull markets is there is nothing much to do for the intelligent investor but there is everyone wanting to do something. Like the other day, even my father and my father-in-law now wants to invest in equity mutual funds. Which is not such a bad thing actually – but the timing suggests … Read more