Great articles to read on the web

if you can strain your ears & try to understand with focus …this is a remarkable collection of speech & advice :point_down:
https://youtu.be/ZuHHmVX8a00

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Indeed a great video, summarizing it below:

• Eventful last 12 months- Crazy NIFTY fall during pandemic and an even more surprising recovery, Negative Crude in US, Short squeeze in the case of GameStop etc.

• More than markets, one key learning has been “Keeping Sanity Intact”- if you panic early in the fall or buy into the frothiest stocks today, it can do damage to your financial position

• Are we in a bubble? Prediction is futile because no one in the past 12 months has been right, neither optimists nor pessimists

• Elevated P/Es - P is known , what is E?
The “E” is not trustable because FY21 is a pandemic year, Jun’20 quarter was not normal with everything in lockdown. For some industries, lockdown lasted longer like movie theatres etc.

• Even if we are in a bubble, price could go 2x, 3x, 4x and then deflate or it could deflate now

• In the 3-year period of 1st Jan’08 to 31st Dec’10,
NIFTY gave -22% return, Infosys did 46%, ITC did 14% and Sun Pharma did 32%
While Infra companies like Unitech, DLF, GMR Infra all gave returns in the range of -20% to -82%

• So, even during that time, as long as a person stayed away from frothy companies or over-leveraged companies, they were fine

• Coming to today, is there froth in the market? Clearly yes (consider Tesla, SPACs etc.)
For example, the EV space, the new tech space in the US clearly has a lot of froth

• As long as one is not participating in such frenzies and is comfortable with their portfolio companies at current price for the next few years, one should be fine

• A lot of companies in the market are not overvalued at all (gave the example of Hero MotoCorp), so it is misleading to say we are in a bubble just by looking at NIFTY P/E

• Do not forget about monetary stimulus, govt reforms, pent up demand. Also, a lot of companies are cleaning their balance sheets, a lot of other companies got out of the market like DHFL, so some cleaning is there too

• Beware of inflation, interest rates, fiscal tightening

• Commodity prices (copper, steel etc.) are going up, so beware of companies which don’t have pricing power

• Biggest lesson is humility, no one gets it right. Berkshire Hathaway sold airline shares early in the crash and since then, these have gained significantly

Q&A- Good companies with longevity of business like Asian Paints, Pidilite, Nestle are very expensive today
Answer-> If they appear expensive, then no one is forcing you to buy these.
There are still good companies today which are not very expensive. For example, in 1999, Wipro was a good company and still is today, but it was very expensive then and it wasn’t a good time to buy. Made more sense to buy it in 2007 even when the market was very high (basically look at sectors/companies with no/less froth)

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https://dspim.com/docs/default-source/market-insights/principles-first-a-note-from-the-dsp-equity-team.pdf?sfvrsn=2

Hedge funds explained :slight_smile: :

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Moerus-Worldwide-Value-Fund_Annual-Shareholder-Letter_11-30-20.pdf (922.6 KB)

Attaching Amit Wadhwaney’s Moerus Fund shareholder letter. After leaving Whitman’s Third Ave fund, Amit now runs Moerus Fund based on value investing principles. While all his bi-yearly letters can be found on the co’s website, this current one details abt thr rationale for investing in holding cos. & one of thr current position - Bajaj Holdings & Investment.

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I like it hence posting it.
E A Sundaram - You can’t beat a crowd if you are a part of it the case for contrarian investing

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good Short watch :point_down:

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Many export oriented companies (other than services) are impacted by container shortages, and the situation is NOT likely to improve in few months.

"Ocean carriers that own or lease most of the containers in use are aggressively trying to get boxes back to Asia from the U.S., according to Ken Hoexter, a transportation industry analyst at Bank of America in New York. But the current tightness in transportation markets will continue at least through the middle of the year or later, he said in an interview last week.

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Great article: https://www.askfinancials.com/pdf/media-coverage/23%20Mr%20Bharat%20Shah%20s%20article%20titled%20The%20real%20risk%20in%20equity%20Business%20Standard%2016th%20March%202014.pdf

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Fantastic read on quality investing strategies based on learnings from the world famous author - Lawrence Cunningham

This article is exclusively for prime subscribers, can you please share your take away from this article.

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This is an excellent article by Morgan. This reverberates so much with my thinking personally.

Not sure if this article was posted earlier. If so, please flag & I will remove.

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Here are the key takeaways from the article:

  • The goal of every investor should be to be both smart and wise to avoid big mistakes

  • It is essential for investors to have a quality-focused long-term investment strategy if they want to achieve success in the investment world. It is very challenging to follow such a strategy, as it involves resisting the temptations to respond to short-term attractive opportunities

  • Three things that indicate the true quality of a business: strong and predictable cash generation, sustainably high returns on capital and attractive growth opportunities

  • The best thing to do after making or observing a mistake is to acknowledge it and absorb the relevant lessons to avoid repeating it

Common mistakes:

  1. Cunningham says investors can make mistakes if they give more importance to and follow a top-down approach over bottom-up analysis. This is often the case when large macroeconomic factors start affecting stock prices, leading to investors questioning their exposure to factors such as trade, inflation or currency values.

“Although these macroeconomic trends warrant close attention, as they bear on given companies and industries. However, when top-down factors trump bottom-up analysis, it often leads to choosing companies and industries for the wrong reasons," he says.

  1. Being over-optimistic: He says investors often fall in the trap of believing companies, which assure investors that good times are around the corner. Investors must be able to identify when a structurally challenged moment arrives in the industry/individual business

  2. Overconfidence: Investors should stay alert to the risks of venturing into unfamiliar zones, which can help recognize and respond to surprise events or disruptions rationally

"Straying beyond the boundaries of one’s knowledge and experience increases the risk of making an error. For instance, any investment in a stock that depends on the outcome of external factors beyond a company’s control is on shaky ground,”

  1. Debt: debt-oriented mistakes are most likely during periods of economic expansion as amid prosperity, even mediocre companies appear to perform exceptionally well

“Debt can be seductive because even those wary of excessive leverage can be deceived into stressing its upside more than its downside”

  1. Retaining a stock: Investors often make mistakes as they get complacent and fail to recognise when a ‘once-great company’ is falling out of favour. No firm is invincible, investors should devote considerable effort to monitor and notice signs of deterioration to prevent further damage to a portfolio.

“investors must detect the gradual decay of a company and resist complacency and denial even if it had given great returns in the past. The overall deterioration of a business generally begins with small things not going according to the plan, like growth not materialising, unexplained pressure on margins, more discussion of competitive pressures or gradual increases in capital expenditure”.

  1. Failing to spot accounting irregularities: Cunningham says investors should study the financial reports of a company carefully to spot whether all the financial parameters will remain healthy in the future.

“As accounting is the language of business, every investor must be conversant in it. Beyond assessing the fundamentals of asset turnover and margins to evaluate business quality, financial reports often contain innumerable subtle clues about the sustainability and predictability of earnings growth, cash flows and return on capital.”

  1. Falling for the 'Endowment Effect: over-appreciation of things already owned compared with other opportunities. Quality investing is particularly susceptible to the endowment effect because the considerable upfront and extensive research increases the effect as the investor’s sense of ownership confines not just the stock, but also their analysis and judgment. Longer a stock is owned, the more the emotional connect with it

    How to reduce making mistakes:

  • Have complete knowledge about a company
  • Prepare checklists
  • Perform inertia analysis: Investors should compare the hypothetical performance of an unchanged portfolio with actual performance to check how much value trading decisions add.

“The exercise is an acute reminder that doing nothing can be a positive action and weighs every decision against this,"

  • Analyse past mistakes
  • Mitigate behavioural biases (can be part of the checklist)
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Another interesting video by SOIC Applying Peter Lynch's way of thinking to Indian Stocks with examples - YouTube
Listing my key takeaways below:

• California Gold Rush- When people left their jobs in mid 1800s to come to California and mine for gold
• What happened then was that, very "different" profile of people benefited from that, people who ran grocery stores, clothing stores, equipment stores (because demand for these increased as more people came to the state). That's also when Levi's started
• Gave examples of 3 US businesses:
	○ Verisign- which owns ".com" and ".net" domains and all the websites with these domains have to pay a 3-4 USD fee every year
	○ Youtube 
	○ Chr Hansen- maker of enzymes (supplies to companies like Nestle)
• Interesting trends in Indian context:
	○ Amines Industry (Alkyl Amines, Balaji Amines)- Diversified use case of Amines
	○ CRAMS (Syngene, Suven, Divi's, Laurus, P I)- Less risky business compared to developing molecules
	○ Equipment providers (Gmm Pfaudler, HLE Glascoat)- Benefitting from the huge capex in chem/pharma industries (These earn ~10% from the capex)These companies have >=30%  ROCEs and have better returns than most chem/pharma players
	○ Indirect plays 
		§ Rites, IRCTC - Railways/infra
		§ Info Edge- Various
		§ Honeywell Automation - Infra/automation
		§ Orient Refractories- Steel
		§ Axtel- FMCG
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Very good read…

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Good article, This reminds me of an article i read recently about Rebel Foods & the Promoter /CEO was patting himself on the back by eulogizing on the fact how they have cracked the un-doable ( HOW CAN WE BUILD 1000 RESTAURANTS IN 24 MONTHS? AND 10000 OF THEM IN 5 YEARS? ) opened 1000+ restaurants through Cloud Kitchen mode in record time of 24 months and how they have ambitions to even take that higher …and i was like …wait a minute :slight_smile: We are talking Food industry here & not some sterile product created on an assembly line & packaged and ready to be shipped …Good lord …he needs to read this article :slight_smile: !! Otherwise …what Howard Schultz said “Growth, we now know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy, we lost our way.” !! :laughing: !!