Most personal finance books are boring. Most of them have nothing new as such. Of course, there are the legendary books on investing that make great reading. They are generally written by gurus who have a past investing record, or by academics or a combination. Or they are written by journalists or writers following the lives of these ‘gurus’ … Read more
Peter Drucker, the management guru, said, “This is by far the best book on investment policy and management.” The more I read books on investing, the more I get convinced that investing is much simpler than most people think or are told. Simple, but not easy as Buffett had once said. Most of what one … Read more
Seth Klarman is the founder and president of The Baupost Group, a Boston-based private investment partnership. He wrote a book named ‘Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor’ which is an investment classic, but has been out of print since 1991. If you google for this book, you will find a … Read more
I read a book titled “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking” over the weekend. It is about the unconscious, intuitive power of our mind in making decisions in a flash. Something that can work both ways – good and bad – depending on the situation; and how to harness its power, as well as … Read more
A couple of days back I was reading “Dilbert and The Way of the Weasels”. While this is a funny book, a small section has some amazing insight quietly embedded. In that book, the author claims, perhaps jokingly, that everything that a person really needs to know about personal finance and investing can be summarized … Read more
“What is here is found elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere.” – Mahabharata With these words from the epic, Gurcharan Das starts the prelude to his book “The Difficulty of Being Good”, which I had the opportunity to read over the past few days. An output from what he terms as his ‘academic holiday’, … Read more
Another weekend another book. This time it was about irrationality and actually how it helps being irrational – The Upside of Irrationality! We are an irrational species, and that was amply demonstrated through a set of experiments that the author conducted over time. Irrationality One of our irrationalities has to do with lack of acceptance … Read more
I recently finished reading ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese essayist, writer, philosopher. I had read his ‘Fooled by Randomness’ a few years back, and the essential message of this book is, more or less, similar. The basic premise of both the books is this: The … Read more
Dec 10, 2011 “Sehwag already held the record for the highest Test score of 319 by an Indian.” Jigneshbhai read from the Sports page of his newspaper. He looked up to us and further informed us “Now he also holds the record for the highest ODI score of 219 by an Indian and by any … Read more