Hi,
This is described at the beginning of the thread. Initial picks were quite random, based on financial trends for past few years and very basic macro knowledge, not much depth in the analysis, never even glanced at any book on market-analysis/stock-picking (this part is still true). I found valuepickr (forum) almost 8 months after the PF was initiated. After having looked at MMB (money-control forum), ET-markets etc. it was a bit of a pleasant shock 
, though it took (a fairly long amount of 
) time to realize that there could be decent quality discussion in the stinking fish-markets I had seen otherwise.
But starting to learn, was interrupted in 3-4 months, and after just pruning down the long list of bad-quality stocks, I did not keep track for almost a year (starting from the month ILnFS happened, talk about bad-timing 
), without realizing that my quality of stock-picks were not exactly coffee-can, to put it very mildly. 
It was like a slow boiling frog kind of experience, between Sept 2018-Sept 2019, the PF went from 10% profit to 50% loss. I just put it down to a ‘correction’ after the euphoric peak of Jan 2018. Totally did not track any market news etc. in that time.
This situation demanded drastic action, starting by paying close attention to the VP forum, reading threads, following the discussion, looking for answers etc., and thus a major PF churn was done in end of 2019, 1-2 months after which this thread was started.
In last week of March 2020, only 30% of my entire PF value was left, it has become 4x since then, within 6 months.
The essence of my revised stock-picking work-flow is to spend some effort to build conviction for your picks, gather the essential back-story and keeping to the targets so evaluated. The strategy was to keep around a dozen stocks in total in PF, which fit the description of being under-valued (margin-of-safety + strong-upside), but had a strong background (looked like ‘decent’ ‘quality’) relative to the valuation of course, and a developing story of increasing revenues/PAT with relatively safe out-look + good growth plans in works (maybe GARP simply describes this strategy). This meant looking mostly at the small-cap space, though there were some relatively cheap large-cap big-hitters initially in the list.
I have a full-time job and have not even read a handful of ARs (whatever few were in the past weeks only), so my effort level has to increase. Right now I am doing MF kind of returns, which is not-bad, and it looks like reaching PMS return levels is going to be easy enough. 20% pa should be enough expectation for anybody as a ball-park figure.
Thanks and Best wishes!
Note – PF base (invested) value has been added over time, 35% has been added this year, in SIP like fashion, so 15% overall gain since inception, translates into a 6-7% pa return roughly.
. Like their approach to integrate and dominate their verticals. Tailwinds sector again. Maybe bit expensive to be GARP though.
