What To Expect From Penny Stocks
December 11, 2012 Leave a comment
Act On Your Knowledge
July 21, 2012 9 Comments
The diagram on the left is from http://wamyentrepreneur.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/route-to-possession_part-two/
It drives home a very important point:If you would be wealthy knowledge is important, but acting on your knowledge is more important.You make money in proportion to the amount of Right Action you have done rather than Right Information/Knowledge/Thoughts you have.As the author puts it ” Knowledge is not possession, this is to say that to know does not imply automatic acquiring; it merely opens our eyes to possibilities and like belief, it must be acted upon for it to yield fruits…”
A person who picks a good stock at random and a person who does so using a fundamental analysis of the company are at the same situation.They have arrived at the right prospect.Now the important thing is who buys how much and hangs on to it.The only advantage the person who can do the analysis has over the other is that he can find other opportunities.But in life just one right decision and one right action can make a person wealthy (and the reverse is also true.)
An action bias is fundamental to becoming wealthy.Knowledge,experience and patience just help fine tune one’s ability to accumulate wealth.
Rakesh Jhunjhunwala – A Wizard of Dalal Street
January 4, 2012 Leave a comment
Here is an excerpt from CNBCs the Wizards of Dalal Street:It’s pretty interesting hearing Rakesh narrate the story of his early years in the stock market and his progress since then.With the market in the doldrums maybe it’s now time for us too to seize the moment and do our personal versions of a Jhunjhunwala.So watch,learn and be encouraged:
9 Ways To Make Money On The Stock Market
March 7, 2011 6 Comments
Here are 9 ways listed by Whitney Tilson to pick diamonds in the stock market:
1. Out-of-favour blue chips. Even the world’s greatest companies encounter problems or otherwise fall out of favor. Correctly differentiating between those suffering temporary rather than permanent issues is the key to success here. As long as the positive fundamentals of the company’s business remain intact, and new management is willing and capable of bringing the company on track buying out of favour blue chips can be very profitable.
2. Distressed industries. Buying a good company in a distressed industry is often a great way to make money.
3. Turnarounds. Turning around a broken business is difficult and often takes much longer than expected — but when it occurs, a stock can rise many-fold.
4. Overlooked small caps. Among the thousands of publicly traded stocks that analysts don’t cover are fine businesses that are cheap because either no one is paying attention to them or their stocks are thinly traded. Read more of this post
The Dhandho Investor
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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