The One Percent Almanack

Wit and Wisdom on Investing, Business, and Life

The Full-Stack Investor

An old joke — What’s common between a software engineer and a railway station beggar? When they meet their colleagues, they ask each other, “What platform do you work on?”

I am yet to learn about the begging business but having worked in the IT industry as a software developer for more than a decade, the joke did manage to extract a brief mirth from me.

Just like any other field of work, software engineering too has its own compartments of specialization. So when a software guy enquires about his fellow engineer’s platform, it generally means he’s interested to know about his specialization — Linux or Windows? Which programming language? Application side or system side? Backend or front end? Development or 0perations? Etc.

However, in the past few years, a new specialization has emerged — the full-stack engineer. Paradoxically, this specialization is about being a generalist, i.e, an engineer who can work on multiple platforms, different programming languages, and play various roles.
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Behaviouronomics: The Concorde Fallacy

A few weeks back I surprised myself by doing something I thought I would never do. I sold my position in a stock that had been the largest holding in my portfolio for a long time.

I first started buying this stock almost a decade back and had never sold a single share of this company. I continued to accumulate it through its ups and downs in this period. At one point, this company constituted more than 40% of my entire stock portfolio. I don’t need to tell you that it was my high confidence stock.

So what made me exit it all of a sudden?
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Bookworm: You Are Not So Smart

It was ten years back when I was first introduced to the field of human behaviour and psychological biases. Having read a couple of dozen books on this topic, it has now become hard to find a volume with information which is not familiar to me. However, what continues to amaze (and entertain) me are the examples and case studies of people (including my own adventures often pointed out by others) that confirm the statement — We are not rational beings. We are rationalizing beings.

This aspect of human irrationality — that it can’t be overcome and keeps us mired in a behaviour similar to a kid with her hand stuck in the cookie jar because she refuses to open the fist — is what makes this subject so much fun. Once you’ve learnt enough about the broad spectrum of cognitive errors, it affords you a lifetime of entertainment content, provided you pause and watch your own actions and the way people around you make decisions.
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Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Five

This post is the fifth edition of the multi-part series based on Peter Bevelin’s excellent book — All I Want to Know is Where I’m Going to Die, So I’ll Never Go There. Here are the links to the previous parts —

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

For a long-time Charlie Munger’s insights have remained a secret known only to a small group of value investors and hardcore disciples of Warren and Charlie. Although, there’s no hush-hush about Munger’s teachings, it hasn’t reached the wider audience it deserves to reach. The book Poor Charlie’s Almanack came out in 2005 and since then it has gained more popularity in India and China than the US. But that’s changing now. The rest of the world is beginning to notice the wisdom in Charlie’s teachings.
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Investor Insights: R.K. Chandrashekar

Mr. R.K. Chandrasekhar (RKC to his friends), is not your typical money manager or professional investor, but one amongst us retail investors whom I first met in 2011. Our bond has grown stronger since then, especially with RKC opening up his investment life in front of the Safal Niveshak tribe over the years, via his comments and feedback on my posts.

RKC started investing when I was born, so it’s quite a lot of years that he has been there, seen that. As a formal introduction, he is 67 years old and is an MS (O.R) from Case Western Reserve University and BSc (Mathematics) from Loyola College, Chennai. He is now retired from work after winding down his placement business in 2013.

In this interview, RKC talks about his long investment experience, his evolution as an investor, key lessons learned, his investment process, and how he tries to minimize decision making mistakes.

Disclaimer: Stocks/Examples quoted below should not be construed as recommendations.

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