3 years since I updated my portfolio and WOW - what a difference 3 years can make! Can safely say - when I started this thread, I was an absolute rookie completely clueless about the world of equities barely 1 year into the stock market. As I landed upon ValuePickr in Sept 2014 - as many people have said before, thought I had landed upon a goldmine. Infact I thought, such was my luck - here’s a goldmine where just being at the right place at the right time will make you very very rich without even searching for the gold. With the VP Public Portfolio being updated regularly, the gold was just being handed to you and all I had to do was copy the portfolio to begin my journey into the world of riches! As days and months passed, more and more seniors went quiet to comply with the SEBI guidelines and soon the realization dawned on me - there are no free lunches or atleast they stopped being served at VP
The saving grace - there was no retrospective action on any of the threads to comply with SEBI guidelines - meaning everything recorded on VP till date could still be accessed, read, absorbed, understood and imbibed in our investing philosophy and investment decisions. Without this, my investing journey may have stopped even before it started like most retail investors - win some, lose some, and then lose big one time to once and for all stay away from equities.
So - as days, weeks and months passed I tried to read as much as I could through books recommended on VP, different threads of businesses on VP, annual reports, investor presentations, following famous investors, other sources such as websites, blogs, youtube videos, etc. to try and make some sense of all this information. Little by little or jargon by jargon, literally at a snail’s pace started to understand different concepts around drivers of investment returns - BQ/MQ, margin of safety, portfolio structuring and allocation, financial analysis, technical analysis, diversification, RoE, macro, micro, etc, etc. As I read more and more threads about different businesses on VP - started to understand more and more (except things specific to that industry) about how people develop their investment thesis, what risks impact those and how companies should be / are valued.
Dot by dot - started developing some mental frameworks, rules and guidelines to base my investment decisions. But soon realized, there are literally zero no-brainer/buy and hold forever investment decisions (only in hindsight do they appear so) available in this market. One needs to invest significant time and effort to understand businesses thoroughly and their key monitorables, diligently read annual reports, understand managements vision and strategy on concalls and translate all this information into a somewhat predictable expected future financials.
All of this has meant - my PF is hugely inspired by a lot of businesses covered on VP and my sincere heartfelt thank you to all the people doing a brilliant job in identifying and analyzing some of the best (or potentially best) Indian companies on this forum. Even though my PF is nowhere near the performance achieved by some others on this forum - I’m extremely pleased with the progress I’ve made over these 3 years by putting in place some sort of a process to identify investment candidates for my portfolio.
I think very few people have a perfect portfolio and I’m definitely not one of them - so really look forward to your comments / suggestions / recommendations on my portfolio.
PS: Predict this as one of the first observations on my PF, so let me be the first one to admit that like any investor I’m still working on and trying to overcome certain biases like price anchoring, booking losses, etc.