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Wit and Wisdom on Investing, Business, and Life

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InvestorInsights: Raunak Onkar

July 20, 2017

Raunak Onkar began his career in the stock market, nine years ago, as an intern at PPFAS Ltd with their institutional sell-side business and later joined the Research Team as an Equity Analyst. Eventually, as PPFAS became a pure investment management firm, he moved on to the buy side. He grew under the guidance and inspiration of his mentor, the late Mr. Parag Parikh, and the CIO of PPFAS Mutual Fund, Mr. Rajeev Thakkar. Raunak is currently the Head of the Research team at PPFAS Mutual Fund.

Safal Niveshak (SN): Tell us a little about your background, how you got interested in investing and writing, and how you have evolved in these fields over the years?

Raunak Onkar (RO): I come from a small suburb in Mumbai and spent a good chunk of my childhood reading books, both fiction and non-fiction. I guess writing emerged as a natural extension from there. I’ve been writing mostly for myself since I was in school.

Later I got interested in computers and technology, and wished to formally train myself in that area. I completed the BSc IT course from the University of Mumbai. Midway, during the journey, I also started to enjoy reading about businesses, entrepreneurs and economics in general. Investing was never the primary focus.

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BookWorm: The Black Swan

July 15, 2017

We live in a world that we don’t fully understand. And with this incomplete knowledge, when we build complex things and hope that everything will work out the way we planned, it makes us more vulnerable to the impact of the improbable.

Someone once told me – Most books should have been blog posts and most articles should have been a 140-character tweet. Totally agree. I have read more than my fair share of such terrible books and bloated blogs. There are way too many mediocre and awful books out there. And when it comes to business books, most books aren’t even books – they are ego trips for the businessmen and a resume building gimmick for their ghost-writers.

But among every dozen business books that I have picked up, there have been few great ones two. They are truly worth their weight in gold. They changed my life. Even for Warren Buffett, the greatest investment wasn’t a stock or business but a book written by Benjamin Graham. As Buffett put it, “of all the investments I ever made…[it] was the best.”

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Behaviouronomics: The Outside View

July 10, 2017

The inside view is the one that all of us adopt to assess the odds of our success in our undertakings. It’s almost always too optimistic. The outside view is a counterintuitive way to think and can often create a very valuable reality check for decision makers.

On 19 July, 2007 a group of twenty people assembled for a two-day master class with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who is the co-creator of the field of behavioral economics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.

Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, came out in 2011. So, at the time of this event, Daniel Kahneman was still relatively unknown to people outside the academic world.

The event was titled“A Short Course In Thinking About Thinking.” Fortunately, Edge.org has made available a sampling from the event consisting of streaming video of the first 10-15 minutes of each session. What made this gathering even more remarkable was the list of attendees who got together to learn from the Nobel laureate. These were the leading American business/Internet/culture innovators.