Vishal Khandelwal

Bookworm: Revisiting Sapiens

April 12, 2019

Bruce Lee once said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

If I had to reframe Bruce Lee’s quote in the context of reading books, I would say, “I fear not the man who has read many books, but I fear the man who has read one good book many times.”

A good book gets better at the second reading, writes Nassim Taleb, “a great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.”

Books-read is just a vanity metric, claims Naval Ravikant, a silicon valley entrepreneur, “if you read one book a year that changes your life, that’s all it takes.”

So to follow the advice of Bruce Lee, Nassim Taleb, and Naval Ravikant, we are going to review a book which we’ve discussed in the past — Sapiens. The author — Yuval Noah Harari — a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has produced a breathtaking piece of work. I had shared a few ideas from this book in Nov 2016 issue of Value Investing Almanack. In this post, let me discuss a few more insights from Yuval Harari’s masterpiece.
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Investor Insights: Ashish Kila

March 31, 2019

Ashish Kila is a Director at Perfect Group, a well-diversified conglomerate providing services in the sectors of financial supermarkets (NBFC), tax consultancy and audit services. He holds BFIA and Chartered Accountancy (All India Rank – 48) qualifications and has done his MBA from MDI Gurgaon. Prior to joining Perfect Group, Ashish worked in research roles at Morgan Stanley India, Religare Securities, and Goldman Sachs. During his stint with these leading investment banks, Ashish has done extensive research on listed Indian companies across various industries.

In this interview, Ashish shares his evolution as an investor, the key lessons learned, his investment process, and how he tries to minimize decision making mistakes.

Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part One

March 31, 2019

Learning the anti-patterns is a more robust form of knowledge acquisition than focusing on success patterns. Anti patterns are those patterns which consistently lead to undesired outcomes and thus need to be avoided.

Charlie Munger took this idea and packaged it into a witty phrase — All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there. That short sentence epitomizes Munger’s remarkable ability to eliminate folly, simplify things and boil down issues to their essence and get right to the point.

Inspired by Munger’s super quote, Peter Bevelin wrote a book with the same title. The book is a curated collection of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett’s quotes from their speeches, interviews, and annual meetings. It’s an extraordinary manual to learn how to make better decisions in life, investing, and business.
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Here’s to Continued Luck

March 27, 2019

According to an estimate, 2.5 crores people were born in our country in the year 1981. I was one of them. Of those 2.5 crore infants, about half (45%) were born to parents living under the poverty line. Fortunately, I wasn’t one of them. And that’s perhaps the greatest fortune I’ve had in my entire life. That one event — being born to financially sound, kind, educated, and loving parents — contributed about 95% to the outcome that today I am not among those who don’t know where their next meal will come from.

Warren Buffett calls it winning the ovarian lottery. He writes —

I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different.

Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one this is born in the United States?” It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, “I did it all myself,” and think of themselves as Horatio Alger – believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery.

My streak of luck didn’t end with my ovarian lottery.
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Behaviouronomics: The Backfire Effect

March 17, 2019

Let me ask you a simple question. What’s the shape of the earth?

You might say, “Round.” To sound little more accurate, some of you might say, “Earth is like a solid sphere.” Those who are mathematically inclined would probably point out that the earth is a spheroid that bulges at the equator and is somewhat squashed at the poles.

What if I told you that there’s a large group of people who (still) believe that the earth is a flat circular disc with a large dome covering it from all sides and the sun and the moon are man-made lights hung on a huge pole standing at the center of the circular disc?

Yes, in the 21st century there exists a real flat earth society. And these people aren’t crazy. They’re a thriving community and perhaps growing. Google it.

Of course, the flat earth model doesn’t explain everything but it’s interesting to observe a flat-earther’s response when you ask him to explain why certain observations don’t fit his theory. Instead of re-evaluating the validity of his beliefs, he’d take the refuge of a conspiracy theory. And like all conspiracy theories, everything can be reasoned by flat-earthers using circular logic.