Portfolio for next 10-15 years - Starting now (Jan-Feb 2021)

TL;DR - Noob, Late entrant to market, Looking to stay invested for period of 15 (or more) years, seeking review of targeted portfolio and investment pattern over next 3-5 years.

Hi,

I have been somewhat interested in how economics work and stock since late 90s. Been observing stock market behavior from same period. But truly understood the principle of compounding and thus the opportunity lost only in the last couple of years. But never late than never, so last year after the crash (Approx aug 20 I started studying with a goal to invest). The last 6 months have been repeated rounds of reading (amidst all the other stuff life throws at you, hospitals, offices, kids, bills etc). Tried to ingest as much of ROE, ROCE, EPS, P/E, D/E, P/E By Industry P/E (this is something I made up to judge relative over or under valuation - because in current scenario, everything is over valued) value investing, growth investing, contrarian investing as much as I could. Discovered screener in the process (thank you, thank you. If you IPO, I am buying). Also discovered Saurabh Mukherjea and Ashwath Damodaran. Regretfully I could not finish the intelligent investor. Have a copy, but it progresses very slowly. Should I force myself through to the end? Sahil’s suggestion of ‘The Swedish Investor’ is much more my type. Read a lot of annual reports and other bse/nse docs as well (Understanding of the same has lots of room for improvement though). Also discovered valuepickr, and have read through most of the threads about the firms I have chosen. Usually from 2020 onwards, some from 2019. Have not read all the way from top to bottom though - you guys discovered some of these when they were basically non-entities.

My final portfolio chosen for investment is given below. A brief note of the investment rationale is also given. I follow it up with a brief about some of the other companies which came very close but I finally discarded with a heavy heart (Nestle for example). The portfolio has been chosen to approximately be equally exposed to large cap blue chips (consistent compounders), growing mid caps (growth) and small and micro caps (just discovered or undiscovered or value unlocking yet to happen). Don’t know if my choices are appropriate or not.

My plan is to invest in SIP fashion over the next 3 years, equal weights when buying. May not rebalance - but not decided yet. I have been looking for the last 6 months for the economy to catch up to the market, or vice versa, but that is not how the ground reality is playing out. So finally almost ready to jump in. Choosing SIP mode over lumpsum + SIP, cos with current valuations, markets correcting is very likely, but irrationally it may go up. Over the next three years though, we will probably have seen the up and the down and I would have managed to average - now whether I average upwards or downwards remains to be seen.

I would like to achieve long terms 20%+ on my portfolio - Otherwise funds like Axis Equity, Quant Active, PPFAS are doing 19%. Advisory services like Purnartha - 35%+, Rohit Chauhan and Vijay Malik - 19%, any one of those would work.

Current Targeted Portfolio

Category 1 : Blue-Chip or close, Consistent YOY growth, Relatively low volatility on screener charts, High ROCE - consistent compounder theory. I add the key tipping point or key doubt next to the stock.

Pidilite - excellent on all parameters. Secondly, this is an industry which should be dependent on the economy, but it hardly cares, good eco, bad eco, it keeps going upwards.

Atul - again rock steady growth, firm is around for almost like 100 years or so, international presence, highly diversified, favorable sector.

Whirlpool India - best rock-steady growth among the consumer durables, also good appreciation.

Britannia Industries (won over Nestle on account of better stock appreciation and lower per stock price, in spite of its near 97% monopoly in baby powder). Also more fair value (PE to industry PE) at the moment.

HDFC Bank - still don’t know very well about understanding banking and NBFCs, so going by recorded history on this one.

Bajaj Finance - primarily on account of the Saurabh Mukherjee analysis about the big data aspect of this business,

Asian Paints - again the Saurabh analysis about business process efficiency.

Abbott India - Growth Charts and relatively undervalued still. PE to Industry PE is 1 or thereabouts. (Divis is 2.47). Pharma sector.

Category 2: Growth Stocks - Usually mid-cap to large firms. Expectation is these have momentum, tailwinds and are in the expansion stage of their businesses, should be high gainers for a few years before they settle down to steady growth (but with the current markets and economy, will have to keep fingers crossed).

Aarti Industries - Undecided about this, late entrant, growth is rock steady, the DMAs are like straight lines, but the debt is worrisome.

Fine Organics - Rock steady growth since inception, high ROCE, good reputation, favorable sector.

GMM Pfaudler - The current correction from highs seem like an opportunity, Otherwise firm seems like a very good monopoly play across a whole bunch of industries, but especially a very solid proxy for the pharma and chemical sectors, both of which are pretty good sectors now.

Muthoot finance - Growing steadily, has harnessed the untapped gold in our country, lots of expansion still possible, caters to masses.

Dr Lal Path - Same as Muthoot basically, except this has harnessed health instead of gold.

Indiamart intermesh - Somewhat of a conviction bet against the valuation aspect. Platforms will be the next thing - google, facebook, whatsapp, airbnb, uber, ola, - same for this. Additionally first mover, and profitable. How many profitable tech unicorns there are out there - almost zero (uber, zomato, swiggy, etc etc). Info-Edge I let go just because of the profitability angle. Also their mobile first approach.

KPIT tech - Sahil was looking for an IT firm, Maybe he could take a look at this. Everything they are doing is in the sunrise sectors of tech - AI, robotics, etc. Recent listee.

Ratnamani metals - consistent compounder, only slower. Steady growth. even in a horrible sector. let go of maithan alloys, APL Apollo and APL Apollo Tricoat here just because this seems safer.

Indraprastha Gas - Best Gas bet I could find. Gas reserves in our country, drive against fossil fuels, solid growth.

Indian Energy Exchange - Sits squarely in the intersection of the platforms, deregulation, anti-fossil fuels, and mass participation plays. monopoly to boot.

Relaxo Footware - Consistent compounder, Consumer, Mass market, Steady growth.

Garware Tech Fibres - Parameters are good. But the story - An old indian company (in ropes, of all things), reinvents itself, rebrands itself, and becomes a leading player in scandinavian and australian fishing nets and in general, value added fibres - the management capability (vision, direction, execution) required to be able to pull off something like that is imho, incredible.

Category 3- Basically bets.

PI Industries - solid steady growth - consistent compounder type, big old company, agro-chem. This beat both coromandel and vinati.

Suprajit - valuepipckr forum thread was what convinced me at the end. Especially donald’s notes. And especially the part about where it foresaw the decrease in halogen OEMs and went for the after-market. International, quite diversified, seems to have fixed its problems in recent past. If auto revives, is well poised for growth.

RACL Geartech - The client list. Growth is somewhat steady but the spike last year worries me. Do we have runway still?

Chemcrux - quite old, very solid management with great academic backgrounds, excellent numbers. Easiest annual reports to understand.

Dixon - Overpriced, but huge opportunities and is perfectly placed. Wins over amber for its diversification.

Galaxy Surfactants - This is basically from Little champs by Saurabh Mukherjea, but their web-site was what convinced me. Also the client list. Basically a proxy for FMCG growth.

CDSL - again the platform play, duopoly, and consumer participation in stock market will invariably increase over the gyears.

Laurus - Similiar to Dixon. Very well placed, Very overpriced. Pharma tailwinds.

Suven Pharma - somewhat risky, but seems like proper value unlocking after demerger is not yet through. Plus pharma sector tailwinds.

IRCTC - monopoly. Will grow as the india railways grow.

Thats it.

Category 4 - Companies which lost out -
Affle India, AIA Engineering, Alkyl Amines, Amber Enterprises, Apollo Tricoat Tubes, Astral Poly Tech, Avenue Super., Bata India, Berger Paints, Colgate-Palmolive, Coromandel Inter, Dabur India, Deepak Nitrite, Dhanuka agritech, DISA India, Divis Labs, Frontier Springs, Gujarat Gas, Havells India, HCL Technologies, HDFC, Hind. Unilever, Honeywell Auto, Info Edg.(India), ITC, Jubilant Food., Kotak Mah. Bank, L & T Infotech, Larsen & Toubro, Lumax, Mahanagar Gas, Manappuram Fin., Mangalam Organic, Mishra Dhatu Nig, Navin Fluo.Intl., Nestle India, PPAP, Pulz Electronics, Refex Industries, Reliance Industries, Sanofi India, Shree Cement, SRF, Symphony, Tasty Bite Eat., Tata Consumer Products, Timken India, Titan Company, Trent, TTK Prestige, Hawkins, Vaibhav Global, Varun Beverages, Vinati Organics, Voltas, Axtel Industries, Maithan Alloys, MoldTek Packaging, TCS

A few questions that bother me -

Should I be entering the market at this time?
What should I be looking at for exit criteria?
What should be my monitoring frequency - in my understanding, if I have to monitor this daily, then my choices are, most probably, already wrong.

Apologies for a very long post. I understand this sort of question has probably been asked many times on this forum before so you may be tired of it. I wouldn’t have posted this, except that the current market valuations are very scary and diving in just like that seems, you know, a little foolhardy.

Any advise, ideas, suggestions, opinions - will be much appreciated. Thanks.

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I guess you have listed lot of them. I would reduce the list of companies. Maybe pick one from the sector.

I own aarti industries so basically management wants to keep D/E below 1 and that was their aim always.They are growing rapidly so debt is necessary. I believe though Atul is not exactly same but they are kind of competitors.
Some of the stocks like Pidilite, HDFC Bank, Bajaj finance are standard stocks in almost every portfolio one of the basic reason is they are compounding their earnings year after year but then can they do going forward considering they have very high base value as of now is something we need to check.
I don’t have much knowledge about other stocks but i see you picked stocks from Metals, financials, retail, FMCG, chemicals, contract manufacturing many more. Do you have knowledge of all these fields? Some of them are cyclical in nature. If you don’t have knowledge then you would loose big time. Irrespective of their past growth you must be sure of their future. If they stop growing then it makes no sense to invest. So though they are good companies you still need to go through their P/L, balance sheet, Annual reports, Business prospects, analysts reports, management transcripts, stock history etc… before you make any investments. With so many companies it would be hard to check out.

Is this the right time to invest? So every stock is at some price in its journey at times they are overvalued and at times it is under valued. Among these group of companies some maybe under valued at the moment which you should buy right away. Some may be overvalued for which you have to wait.

If you ask me if overall Market is overvalued then Just purely based on NIFTY i would say Yes . I don’t see it is getting cheaper any time soon though unless some geo political tensions, corona or something else.Market has conveniently ignored any bad news right from 23rd march because US FED has given free hand for the stock market by buying even Junk corporate bonds and assuring investors that interest rates will not be raised till 2022 with accommodative stance on inflation which means as long as inflation really not going out of hand they do nothing about it. So essentially bond yields are not going to go up any time soon so only few places left for investments are stock markets, crypto currencies and commodities.

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Stick to 15-20 companies, you wont be able to handle following earnings calls, fundamentals and news for more than that. Proper investing is a time consuming business, you have to treat your portfolio like a garden, the more you cater and nurture it by learning about the business, attending earnings calls, reading about development in industries, they more your garden (portfolio) will flourish. If you have too many plants in the garden and it starts looking like a forest you will not be able to prune and cater to it.

Since your investment horizon is long (15-20 years) think about what the world may look like 20 years from now. Start identifying sectors that have a very high probability of being bigger than they are today. Will renewable be bigger than it is today? Most certainly yes. Will Electric vehicles be the norm? Most certainly yes. Will pharma and chemical companies in India be bigger than they are today? Most likely yes.

Once you have identified these trends, invest in well run, low debt and high earning growth companies. Don’t buy companies that are trading at 30x their 5 year forward earnings (Dixon, Adani Green etc). These stocks at current price do not offer any margin of safety (very important concept, learn it) to their investors. Stay away from such stocks and wait for them to correct, there will most definitely be a time when these will correct sharply.

Once you have made your portfolio, sit tight and invest whenever noise corrects the stocks more than it should. Do not sell if you are regularly researching and have understood the business well. No company’s stock in the long run will deliver more returns than the underlying company’s earnings growth.

The only right time to sell a stocks is a) you have reached your goal b) the fundamentals of the business have deteriorated to an extent where it can no longer meet the story you have told yourself before investing in the stock

That’s all that is required in investing. Its hard work but really that simple.

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If I am not wrong, Kpit demergerd and resulted in birlasoft and kpit… birlasoft is more into digital ITservices while Kpit is an engineering play… somewhat like Tata elxsi and LTTS…if you like engineering IT services space, why not go with leaders like Tata and L&T considering they themselves are small companies still in this space and huge legroom to grow. What edge a KPIT would have over Tata elxsi and LTTS? Would be good to know. Thanks.

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Thank you.

couple of answers -

Trimming it down further is a problem. Not sufficient knowhow. And besides, its basically because of the lack of knowhow that the basket is large - essentially diversification. so that a tank in one stock doesn’t kill me.

Valuation is another problem, By what i have figured out about the basic principles of valuation, everything is over valued. Even firms which are basically trading at par with their sector PE are at 25/30/40 PE. Which is why I am falling back to this home made metric of PE to Ind PE.

Some sectors or businesses i understand better, others not so much. like finance for example. I followed the IDFC first bank discussion on value pickr and got completely lost. Essentially once I understand the basics, I am then trying for a qualitative feel for the stock, instead of quantitative. Now this may kill me, because human being suffer from an innumerable number of biases which they themselves know nothing about. But without taking some element of risk, FDs are the safest option.

Will try to trim further, but concentration is something which just seems like higher risk to me (more eggs in one basket sort of risk.).

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Thanks.

Did think about trends and possibilities. IndiaMart, Energy Exchange, Indraprastha Gas, CDSL - are all picked because of how I see the future evolving. KPIT too.

But it was difficult to stay away from high priced ones. Adani Green, even though in a sector i am sure will be big in the future, I moved away. Dixon and IndiaMart however, except for the incredibly high valuation and PEs, seems to have everything going in their favor.

I do intend to continue on my learning path. This however is more of - Should I wait more. Or Should I start right now, and hope averaging works out in my favor over the longer term.

Will pursue Margin Of Safety. Thx.

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The best day to start was yesterday, the second best day to start is today.

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Not sure if you would have considered passive investing through Index funds. I am not very sure with so many companies if you can really beat Index in long run. You put in so much work to pick stocks and buy them at right price just to see that a passive investor has made more returns than you

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For an overall discussion on KPIT there are a couple of threads on this forum. They can provide more insights than I can. I can add my thought process here - KPIT is a highly specialized platform. It is targeting the intelligent automobile industry. It has market traction and presence across almost all sub-division within the Intelligent auto space - IOT, Autonomous drive, Remote Diagnostics, Connected Vehicles, EV. I am IT architect by profession. All of these domains naturally leverage the sunrise sectors in IT - Cloud, IOT, AI, Optimization.

So note that it is not just an Engineering IT - It is an Intelligent automobile engineering IT firm. Very targeted. I think it is well poised to reap the benefits from the oncoming changes in the automotive sector and It’s specialization should lead to increased focus and dominance in this space vis-a-via lets say, TCS. It is relatively recently listed, so the prices have not run up to industry and the runway is significant. If it can execute, and scale, then I am optimistic about a significant run-up in the stock prices.

I ignored BirlaSoft since it plays in the same domain as lots of tech biggies, so no particular differentiation vs TCS, WIpro, Infy. On the contrary, it is disadvantaged on cost, bodies and scale. Reverse in the case of KPIT Tech.

But it has to deliver on the promise. That’s the key.

So that is the premise and my 2 cents. Whether it will play out or not - we will all find out.

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Anything you’ve picked purely on account of Saurabh Mukherjea, sell.
Those might be good companies but Nifty 50 bubble of 1960s-70s (US), shows what happens to good companies. Plus Saurabh Mukherjea’s act is a LOT like one of those Nigerian prince scams and a lot of internet scams.
What these scams do is, send emails/messages which have a lot of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Why? Because they only want to deal with people who didnt have the attention spam/literacy level to catch the errors.
Marcellus is doing precisely that.
image
source of img: Our approach to Valuations and PE multiples | Rakshit Ranjan | Marcellus Snippets - YouTube

The video goes on to show why PE ratios dont matter. So many mistakes with this image.
First : P = PE X E not “+”. But lets give him a pass because he’s probably just trying to make a point that price is a function of PE and earnings.
But the problem arises when he writes 32% = 7% + 25%. That’s not how the formula works.
For 25% earnings growth and 7% PE growth, the actual prices increases by (1.07*1.25=1.3375) which is a 33.75% growth, not 32%.
Did they know they were making a mistake? Yes (hopefully!)
Then why did they go ahead with it?
2 explanations:

  1. they wanted to keep things simple for first time investors, so they did the math wrong. Doesnt justify them doing MATH WRONG!
  2. Nigerian Prince scam… they only want customers who cannot understand that they’ve made a mistake.

If mods believe the above post maligns the reputation of an individual/PMS, it means that the post served its purpose and apologies for hurting the sentiment of his followers.

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Nice write up and collection.

The best and simple thing for you or for anyone in general who has job in hand is to do Index investing. The benefit outweighs the time required for active pf management. Period.

Rest it is your time and money and do what you want. Please don’t look for any external validation for investment thesis. You need to develop your own conviction and courage to steer the journey. All the best.

Happy investing.
VK

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I did see this slide. however, I did not pay a lot of attention to it. I know how dumbed down math works (do it in presentations myself - attention spans are fickle). What sold me on Bajaj Finance, Asian Paints and Galaxy Surfactants (well Bajaj Finance, mainly, - I had pretty decent faith in Asian Paints and Berger Paints all by myself before I had heard of Saurabh Mukherjea, all he did was tilt the balance in favor of AP), was the big data analysis he presented. That was a qualitative presentation, and I cross-checked, as far as I am able with the local stores and yes, Bajaj Finance can actually spot finance me right then and there. I went looking for a microwave - the missus has been talking about getting one recently.

Galaxy surfactants - I had encountered and dismissed as another chemical factory. I was going with Fine Organics for the oleochemical set (specialty chemicals). So after his little champs list, I went and looked at the web-site and that is when I realized the FMCG play behind the apparently chemicals firm.

One thing I find is I really like is proxies to entire industries with repeat business possibility. Intrinsic diversification (i like to think). GMM Pfaudler, Galaxy, Dixon, Suprajit, I discarded PPAP on account of the charts, even though I liked the story quite a bit. Will still track it for a while though. Discarded Axtel on account of the lack of repeat business - that sort of puts a limit on growth possibilities.

In any case, I do not intend to just go ahead just on a suggestion, even if it came from Mr. Buffet himself. In that method lies dragons. But if I like a story and analysis mentioned somewhere, and then the business looks sound after further investigations, And valuations (as far as I can value a company) is attractive, I would go ahead, albeit very timidly.

The sticking point though, right now, is valuations. Nothing seems fair valued, or even slightly expensive. Everything is outrageously, horrendously expensive. And thus, to buy, or not to buy, is the question.

Appreciate the suggestion though. And the math, you just taught me a little more than I knew about the Price, PE and earnings function.

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Thanks. Exactly what I have been trying to do - Find the Conviction and Courage. Now if only the market would cooperate by coming down to 42k levels.

Reading some history helps a lot. A short history of Financial euphoria is a quite literally, a short history of financial euphoria, Covers the major bubbles from 1600s.
Also look up Nifty 50 bubble which happened in US in the 1960s. This period is especially relevant for the period we’re in.
Once you know what’s happened in the past, it helps in building up conviction and not given to FOMO etc.

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Its been a while since last post. Bitten the bullet and jumped in - Slowly over the last three months. Current portfolio is as follows.

This is more to keep a record of how I am doing, but if anyone has any suggestions or advice they would be most appreciated.

Scrip Avg Price Allocation.
ITC 207.93 16
TIINDIA 1087.8 9
CDSL 606.88 8
APOLLOTRI 1003.82 7
IDFCFIRSTB 57.02 6
GMM 4099.46 6
DEEPAKNTR 1487.13 6
JUBLINGREA 324.55 5
PPL 120.6 5
LAURUSLABS 360.8 5
IEX 285.46 5
DIGISPICE-BE 42.8 4
RACLGEAR 242.64 4
OAL 602.02 4
ACRYSIL 355.78 3
APLLTD 977.92 3
KSCL 537.91 3
TATACONSUM 648.48 3
APLAPOLLO 1164.04 3
IDFC 53.4 2
BORORENEW 235.17 2
KPITTECH 187.19 2
PRINCEPIPE 439.13 2
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@blue - Has the portfolio evolved since posted last time in Apr.

Yes, it has. In fact, It been quite a bit of churn over the past few months, hoping to post an update sometime this month. Along with some hits and misses. And things learned so far. As of now trying to consolidate a little bit, catch a decent entry point for a couple stocks, Just waiting for this midcap meltdown period to stabilize and get a sense of direction.

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Marcellus is trying to convey that the stock Price CAGR is primarily driven by earnings growth. In a 10 years period P/E may either become double or become half (market given). This gives additional +/-7% CARG in addition to price increase due to earnings growth. P/E may not be of big importance if stock chosen has >25%(high) earnings growth.
So, if PE becomes half , still can get 18% price CAGR which is good.

Earnings growth is every year - this will be compounding. Where as P/E double or half during course of 10 year. this be only additive.
Hope this clarifies.

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It seems like we’ll diversified portfolio congrats !

What is ur exit starategy? I see idfc first is 40 % down also it had exposure to idea crisis. what’s your action plan? Also I see some of your entry price are excellent I’m sure few picks might turn our to be great multibagger for you. Picks like gmm, l.labs, cdsl etc

Its been an interesting 7 months. Hits, misses, learnings, damn fool moves, smart moves. In any case, here’s the current portfolio. Unlike last time, where I was anticipating a significant degree of churn, this constituents of this one are likely to stick around for a while. I will let the market decide in who the laggards are and then prune (or not prune, based on my theses and convictions). In fact, I am hoping to be able to add on, both in number of stocks, as well as allocation to each. There is, after all, a watchlist.

@manoopatil you did ask about the update, so tagging you on it.

Instrument Avg. cost Allocation
RPPL-SM 163.85 10.29
LAURUSLABS 530 9.31
CDSL-BE 723.57 8.62
ITC 207.93 7.59
RACLGEAR 502.92 7.11
JUBLINGREA 432.72 6.82
IDFC 51.21 5.96
HIL 5378.83 4.08
IEX 296.43 4
IDFCFIRSTB 42.33 3.93
PIXTRANS 642.22 3.89
FAIRCHEMOR 1837.55 3.5
FLUOROCHEM 1532.79 3.13
INTELLECT 635.6 2.81
PRICOLLTD 81.42 2.57
BAJAJHCARE 885.64 2.41
TATAPOWER 127.03 2.35
KILPEST 513.14 2.28
TEJASNET-BE 365.06 2.17
SIS 451.09 2.02
VAIBHAVGBL 706.9 1.79
DEEPAKFERT-BE 414.46 1.77
MASTEK 2587.55 1.59

Current Watchlist - Acrysil, Borosil renewables, Saregama, Ugro capital, Aarti surfactants, KNR construction, Aarti Industries (for the proposed demerger of Aarti Pharma), PPL (yes, its come back again, getting difficult to ignore) and Thyrocare. Funds permitting, will probably add on all of the above and let the market do the shaking out.

Will attempt to record my thesis for each of these, my hits/misses and learnings in subsequent posts.

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