Vishal Khandelwal

Spotlight: Randomness and Investment Risk

March 30, 2021

Randomness in itself is not risky when it comes to investing in the stock market. But how you manage that randomness is what matters in the final outcome of your investment process.

Imagine you are offered to play a betting game with a regular dice. The deal is that if your chosen number turns up, you win and get back double the amount you bet. Would you play this game?

Using simple probabilities, we can see that the expected value of this wager is negative. How? The probability of each number on the dice (with six faces) is 1/6. So expected value = 2 x (⅙) – 1 x (⅚) i.e., -(1/2).

If someone agrees to play this game, he’s blindly speculating. Isn’t he? He obviously doesn’t understand probability. The outcome of a dice throw is pretty random and you can’t hope to make money from randomness. But hang on. The game is about to get little more interesting and profitable.

If you’re informed (by reliable sources) that the dice is completely loaded (unfair) and number 6 turns up on every throw, would you bet your money now? Of course. The game is no more random for you. But for a person who doesn’t have this specialized information about dice, the game is still plagued by randomness.

Which means randomness could be subjective. It is not absolute – the same event is more random to one person than to another. Notice that the extent of randomness decreases with the knowledge we obtain (the dice is loaded and favours the number 6). Which simply translates to the idea that the better we understand the business we are exposed to, professionally or through a stock purchase, the less random the environment is to us.

The dice example might look very obvious and uninsightful but if you could draw a parallel in investing, the lesson learnt can turn a losing investment strategy to a winning one. Because there is strong correlation between randomness and risk.
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The Intangibles of Assessing Management Quality

January 30, 2021

I read a column on Forbes’ website sometime back that contained a narration from one Nancy Ortberg, who was once a nurse at a hospital emergency room in California.

In her story, Nancy described something astonishing that she witnessed in the emergency room.

“It was about 10.30 pm,” she said. “The room was a mess. I was finishing up some work on the chart before going home. The doctor with whom I loved working was debriefing a new doctor, who had done a very respectable, competent job, telling him what he’d done well and what he could have done differently.

The World’s Best Investing Checklist

December 27, 2020

Peter Kaufman has done an amazing job compiling some of the world’s best lessons on investment behaviour into a masterpiece. We know it as Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which is a collection of speeches and talks by Charlie Munger.

While the entire book is one amazing journey through the mind of one the greatest investment and behavioural thinkers of our times, one part that takes the cake is where Kaufman has condensed Munger’s teachings into a checklist.

He calls this “Investing Principles Checklist”, as it contains the core principles that has made Munger the brilliant investor he is today.

When I (Almost) Dumped Ben Graham’s Intelligent Investor

November 30, 2020

It was sometime in 2005 when a close friend of mine gifted me Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, knowing that I was working as a stock analyst and aspired to become a sensible investor (aspirations are always sensible, you see).

“Is this a good book?” I asked him.

“Seek for yourself,” he told me.

I read through the first few pages of the book, and it didn’t seem to catch hold of my attention, forget captivating me to any extent.

I realized Graham was the teacher of Warren Buffett, whom I’d first read about during my MBA in 2003 (not in the class, but in the library). But the book still did not interest me.

Super Investor: Tom Russo on the Capacity to Suffer

November 9, 2020

For many world-famous value investors, their interest in the field can be traced back to Warren Buffett.

In 1982, Thomas Russo was a business student at Stanford University when he attended Warren Buffett’s talk. He was simply dazzled by the speed of Buffett’s mind and his knack for weaving profound investing lessons with stories and rib-tickling quotes. Russo was hooked for life and chose to pursue a career in value investing.

Today, Tom Russo is a pre-eminent value investor of our times who manages US$ 12 billion as a partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner. The most important idea that Russo talks about wherever he goes is Capacity to Suffer.

Capacity to suffer is closely connected with the idea of delayed gratification. Delayed gratification happens when someone resists the temptation of an immediate reward in preference for a later reward. Delayed gratification is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate gain in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later.

In the famous Marshmallow Experiment, social scientists reached the conclusion that the kids who had the temperament to patiently wait on an easily accessible marshmallow so that they could enjoy two marshmallows later, tend to fare better in life as compared to those kids who couldn’t control their urge and grabbed the one marshmallow.

You can easily replace “marshmallow” with “money” in the experiment and the context won’t change. Often, putting off pleasure ‘in the now’ is the difference between failure and success over the long term. The ability to delay gratification is one quality that consistently separates the most successful ones from the not so successful ones.