Vishal Khandelwal

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.

How to Succeed in Life and Investing

October 5, 2020

Success in life and investing needs a design apart from randomness and luck. I focus on the ‘design’ part in this post,taking a few leaves from the success story of Warren Buffett, how he achieved it, and a path we can follow for ourselves.

One of the best short stories that I’ve read outside children books concerns employees of a company, who saw a big board on their office’s door as they were about to enter it. The board read – “The person who was hindering your success and growth in this company passed away yesterday. We invite you to join the funeral in the room that has been prepared in the gym.”

📚 The Psychology of Money

September 30, 2020

Have you heard of Kent Evans? No?

Okay, have you heard of Bill Gates? Yes?

Let me spill the beans here. Kent Evans was Bill Gates’ first best friend, his classmate at Lakeside School in Seattle, and a co-member of a school-sanctioned computer club called the Lakeside Programmers Group.

In the documentary Inside Bill’s Brain, Bill Gates described Kent as extremely clever, carrying a briefcase with all kinds of gadgets and magazines everywhere he went.

The two self-proclaimed geeks loved scheming about what they would be doing in the future, much to the eye rolls of their classmates who were more concerned with the activities of that moment, the upcoming school dance.

Together, they would read Fortune Magazine and imagine, “If you went into the civil service, what did you make? Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors?”

Bill and Kent believed they would go on to do extraordinary things.

Just one of them did it. Bill Gates went on to start Microsoft and the rest, we know, is history.

What happened to Kent Evans?