For Whom Wealth Matters
August 2, 2017 Leave a comment
In his lifetime Buffett has owned 400-500 stocks.
Most of his wealth comes from only 10 of them.
So don’t just be selective in what you choose to do in life. Expect that even then, all things won’t lead to the grandest success every time.
And that’s OK.
The few successes will more than make up for the things that didn’t quite live up to your expectations.
Just be sure you don’t make mistakes of the order that wipe away all your success.
June 11, 2011
Mr. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, combines diverse skills as a equity trader, visionary investor and incubator of new businesses through private equity.He is the first dollar billionaire from India to have made all his money by investing–primarily in stocks.Converting Rs 5000 to a billion dollars is no mean feat.Moreover since he deals exclusively in Indian stocks and often in publicly traded companies, whose shares we all have access to,it’s well worth spending time learning how to invest one’s way to wealth from him.
Firstly,Rakesh believes that the choice of asset class is important . As he says”If you bought gold in 1970 and sold it in 1980, you bought the Nikkei Index in 1980 and sold it in 1989 and then bought the NASDAQ [till before the dot-com bust], you would have made 33% compounded returns in three decades.”Personally, under the guidance of Mr Radhakrishna Damani, he made a lot of money shorting stocks at the time of the Harshad Mehta scam post 1992.As he says,”My decision to aggressively invest in the asset class of Indian equities at the right time was a very important determinant of my success.”As Rakesh believes that the mother of all bull runs is still to happen in India ,for people like us,sticking to Indian securities as an asset class might not be such a bad idea! Read more of this post
March 29, 2011 1 Comment
Here are some major features of Indian Philanthropy as enumerated by eminent Indian businesspeople.They are perspectives that were articulated in response to the Gates-Buffett ‘the Giving Pledge’
1.”India has a very old culture of giving, since the time of Buddha. The concept of philanthropy is not new to us.”—-Rahul Bajaj, chairman, Bajaj Group.
2.”Philanthropy in the first world and in the third world are two different things. In the first world people donate to build a baseball stadium. In India, we have to decide for ourselves what we want out of philanthropy. It is not for the Americans to tell us.”
“shareholders have done more charity than Gates and Buffett put together. How? By allowing Cipla to export drugs for $100 million to Africa, which could have fetched $4 billion if they were exported to the US”—-Yusuf Hamied, chairman & managing director, Cipla Read more of this post
March 6, 2011 4 Comments
This book is pretty small – just a little over 200 pages.And I love it.I am naturally a bargain hunter and love shopping in sales.I also love getting high quality goods at bargain-basement prices.So It’s small wonder that I am attracted to value investing.The danger of shopping in sales is that a person picks up things they don’t have any use for or items that are not a perfect fit just because they are cheap.Then there is a danger of buying poor quality stuff just because it seems to cost so little.The same applies to buying stocks cheap.Sometimes the whole market is beaten down and all stocks seem cheap, but if I buy stocks of companies I would not normally buy because of their poor returns to investors,just because they are cheap,I am left with the problem of selling them when the market and the stock recovers.This is a problem for me personally as I have a tendency to get married to my stocks.At other times a stock sells for low P/E multiples simply because there is something fundamentally wrong with the company. Stocking up on the shares and hoping for a turn-around is pretty foolish.But I am an optimistic type and I need to force myself to turn away from such situations.Over a period of time I have found ways to control my habits.When the markets are down,I first establish a budget and then try to make a list of likely stocks and arrange them in order of attractiveness depending on Buffett-style criteria and tell myself that I’m to invest over 80% of the budget on only the top 5 of my list.I find this stops me from stocking up on not so great businesses that I might find hard to sell later.Then I have accepted the fact that I am a speculator at heart.I no longer try to fight the urge but try to use the Dhandho Principles that come pretty naturally to me to gain out of my speculative tendencies.This is a book I recommend for all investors like me who like value investing but can’t overcome the urge to speculate.
Here is a round up chapter-wise of what is found in the book:-
Chapter 1
Pabrai starts the book by discussing the term “dhandho“which is a Gujarati word meaning “business”. Gujarat is a western coastal state in India that has served as a hotbed for trade with Asia and Africa. The Patels are a community of particularly entrepreunerial Gujaratis whose entrepreneurial ventures led to them forming a dominant part of the East African economy by the early 1970s. When Asians were thrown out of Uganda in 1972 on the basis of their race, a flurry of Patel immigrants landed in Canada, England and the United States. Read more of this post
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