ValuePickr Public Portfolio

Remember the VP Portfolio - it probably went some way in allaying risks
(for the newbies, uninitiated and borrowed-conviction folks) through
6-monthly Updates/Reccos; now with increasing clarity from SEBI on the
RA Guidelines, FAQ to RA Guidelines and the Insider Trading Guidelines,
it may be time to revive that, post a comprehensive review of all 3
regulations.

This was posted by @Donald in Shilpa. May be this provides some indicators for all guys waiting for an update. Final word is yet awaited from himself tough.

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Unfortunately, the Jury is still out on this issueā€¦

VP Public Portfolio will remain suspended till we get a CLEAR GREEN SIGNAL.
At the moment, we are being advised by very senior investors - better to be safe than sorry.

In any case, everyone has to learn to decide for himself. ValuePickr is positioned to be a business quality discussion place. It is NOT a place to come looking for Recommendations.

Thanks

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@Donald as per what you have learnedā€¦ What is the latest on this issue?
a. Can a forum or blog be used to discuss stock specific discussion provided there are no buy / sell recommendations and disclosures are done?
b. As per your understanding, is there an issue in showing oneā€™s portfolio while clearing stating that it is not a recommendation?
I understand everything is not clear but a little clarity from what you already know might help

Thanks

Balaji

No stocks related to Housing Finance and Banking here !

I completely agree with @Donald. We should focus on business and management quality discussion rather than looking for recommendations as I have observed from some posts recently. This is an excellent platform to collaborate, learn and enhance your knowledge rather than looking for tips/recommendations, acting on them blindly (greed) and when encounter loss then blame the messenger.
The only thing that should continue is flow of idea generation with a quality discussion and research.

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Yes I agree. We should take decisions independently.

@Donald

Looking at the future of ValuePickr 5 years from now - Iā€™m not sure if it would be hailed as, a great collaboration forum like it currently is unless some new members are able to do what seniors have done in the past (i.e. brilliant in separating the wheat from the chaff)

  1. Iā€™m confident most of the seniors here are sitting on significant profits by investing in great businesses which should continue to do well as long as Indiaā€™s economy does well over the next few years. All else being equal, all of you can keep making super-normal profits (by virtue of doing all the hard work earlier and getting in early) by keeping up with company related news. And that just means, for the next few years we would be lucky to see new ideas with high conviction being floated on this forum by any of the seniors. Two easily identifiable reasons - 1. The bull run has meant there would be very few opportunities in the market. 2. When youā€™re sitting on a great portfolio, it would take a lot of convincing and actual effort from you all to analyse any new ideas.

  2. Call it bad-luck/misfortune/etc, I never got to experience the brilliant journey that started on this forum for a lot of members since 2011. And Iā€™m confident the number of users on Valuepickr would have nearly doubled in the last year or so, making them miss the majority of that journey. And I know itā€™s all captured in the threads of yesteryear and I must say some of it is actually ā€œpricelessā€, but just reading one comment after another and being unable to relate the day-to-day market events, company news/results, etc with those comments / opinions / pieces of advice does reduce the learning significantly. Iā€™m a firm believer that stock market investing has to be experienced and cannot be learnt with just reading (especially in the initial few years). Although to VPā€™s credit, if a newbie landed straight on VP forum before making his first investments, it would definitely speed up his learning curve a lot. Thus, unless there is that level of participation from the seniors again, most of the newbies would be left to fend for themselves (which is also fair, but that learning curve which VP could have shortened would remain that long). Honestly, there are way too many new companies being discussed on this forum on a regular basis, and it makes it incredibly hard to try and differentiate the high quality businesses from average ones without some sort of guidance from experienced hands.

  3. Public Portfolio / Portfolio At a Point in Time Disclosures - Either we can restart the Public Portfolio or there should be a mandatory portfolio disclosure (only company names and no other details) thread where everyone posts their portfolio every 3/6/12 months. Since public portfolio may start becoming a recommendation tool for some novice users, Iā€™d recommend a Portfolio Disclosure thread where everyone just posts their portfolios without any kind of stock/company/business discussions and has to mandatorily update every few months. All the discussions can continue in the other relevant threads. That way, we can see everyoneā€™s holdings in different companies and over time relate how those businesses have performed and why certain people are still holding certain companies. Iā€™m 100% sure that would only increase the level of discussions in the separate business threads of those companies. Now, Iā€™m hoping no member here has a paid portfolio management service offering, whereby they canā€™t disclose their holding companies.

Iā€™m not sure what problems there can be in having the following disclosure for example :-

Page
HDFC Bank
Repco
Mayur
Kaveri
Asian Paints

About 10 months since Iā€™ve joined the forum now, and I must thank everyone for helping me build huge amounts of knowledge compared to when I first joined. But Iā€™m no where near separating the wheat from the chaff. Given how the forum is currently, Iā€™d not bet on it anytime soon as well and may be not even in the next 5 years.

PS: Just to drive home the point, itā€™s unbelievable how everyday some new user seems to start a new thread asking for advice/recommendations from the seniors. Iā€™m hoping that some of them actually want to learn, so if they just knew about the seniorsā€™ holdings, they would probably start reading those company threads immediately and reduce their learning curve a little.

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i think u have taken it all wrong. yes the undercurrent is to make moolah. but to think u are unfortunate that u were not a part of this journey since 2011 is wrong. its like saying you were not born in 1958 when Buffett was starting his journey. this is a learning platform. read everything. make your own decisions.nobody made it without hardwork. waise RK Damani started late. and now we know where he is. have faith

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Let this forum be not like a free portfolio building service as some other sites do. The best thing which can happen is, a lot of the people joining this forum come up with superb frameworks and models by following the knowledge repository available in the forum and go on to be some of the best investment stories to come out of Indiaā€™s growth story. Let there be hundreds of Mungers and Buffets :smile:

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@gurjota
Thanks for reaching out and taking the trouble to write at so much length. Obviously you have given this a lot of thought.

But as @sta has pointed out, everyone is a novice, a learner, a practitioner and a senior at some point of the journey.

Your point is more about the perceived lack of hand-holding/active intervention by seniors or their lack of need of participation given the bull run underway. While that may be true for some folks you may know, its naive to assume that to be true for most of VP so called seniors. India and Indian businesses are at an inflection point. When we started out in 2010, it was a difficult to come across a great well-managed emerging business capable of taking on global competition and hold their own. Today we are astonished to find more and more companies have that belief in their capabiities, are doing an world-beating job (on top of execution), and there are enabling tailwinds in many sectors of manufactured exports from India, which are likely to be there for next 5-10 years at the least.

The more we meet such companies, the more this belief is getting strengthened in us (no matter all the struggles/logjam in domestic policy/law-passing, credit and capex cycle stalling) that the next 10 years is really Indiaā€™s decade. There are hungry managements having the belief and the self-confidence, with execution skills and the required growth mindset - that are well-placed to harness the opportunities/rise up to the challenges in front of them. We are meeting many more such companies every year today, than we could find in 2010-11. So there is no reason for anyone to sit back on their laurels. Its about passion - its about the VP disruptive model - its about making a real difference in equity investing in India.

Those who are passionate - will prosper - with or without hand-holding from the seniors. They will quietly do the work themselves and actively seek out mailing/meeting/learning from the seniors. Out of top 20 contributors at VP in 2015, 9 have full-time active jobs, and yet they manage to do an exemplary job that energises others around them.

Its about putting YOUR hand up! Its not about being led by the hand by well-meaning seniors. Its about YOU. Its not about anyone else! The VP community and the Platform is the enabling environment for you. Are you among those well-managed sincere, hard working, laborious and hungry guys that will make the most of this platform - is upto you.

Its always very tempting to take the easier way out - (ride on borrowed conviction from others). How many work hard to go on to know even one business inside-out, so much so that they know the most about that business in VP. That is always my advise to new learners - on upping the learning curve. The Gurus have written everything, there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Its only when you work hard and try to apply (to your business that you are studying) that the real insights will be revealed to you. No amount of senior-talk ,or portfolio q&a, or accelerated-learning presentations at VP, or VP Public Portfolio can provide you short-cuts to upping the REAL learning curve - unless backed up by sincere hard, passionate work.

Like they say there are no free lunches in life!! Choice is Open :slight_smile: to all.

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Shriram City Union Finance is an NBFC, part of the dormant VP Portfolio.

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@sta Obviously you havenā€™t understood my message or I havenā€™t used the correct choice of words. Letā€™s not debate on that.

I donā€™t count myself unlucky or unfortunate at all, in fact itā€™s quite the contrary and I am extremely lucky that I started investing in July 2013 and in August 2013 the Sensex was <20k (around the lowest point in the last 2 years), which has meant that even with my extremely low knowledge at that time I have been able to make decent profits in the past 2 years. However, if it was the start of a bear phase, I might have forever shied away from equities.

The point is - I like a lot of other fairly new users, reading through the different threads of companies discussed here, can easily notice the difference in frequency of activity from the old-timers over the past year. (Although it has greatly increased since the new forum design and made it a lot more user friendly as well)

@Donald

I really like your comments around "India and Indian businesses are at an inflection point. When we started out in 2010, it was a difficult to come across a great well-managed emerging business capable of taking on global competition and hold their own. Today we are astonished to find more and more companies have that belief in their capabiities, are doing an world-beating job (on top of execution), and there are enabling tailwinds in many sectors of manufactured exports from India, which are likely to be there for next 5-10 years at the least.

The more we meet such companies, the more this belief is getting strengthened in us (no matter all the struggles/logjam in domestic policy/law-passing, credit and capex cycle stalling) that the next 10 years is really Indiaā€™s decade. There are hungry managements having the belief and the self-confidence, with execution skills and the required growth mindset - that are well-placed to harness the opportunities/rise up to the challenges in front of them. We are meeting many more such companies every year today, than we could find in 2010-11. So there is no reason for anyone to sit back on their laurels. Its about passion - its about the VP disruptive model - its about making a real difference in equity investing in India."

Reinforces faith and renews optimism around Indian equities.

Regarding your other comments, Iā€™ve read enough articles/books reinforcing the risks of riding on borrowed conviction (classic examples of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala cult following where people madly clone his portfolio without actual position sizing he has) or not doing your own due diligence (have already burnt my fingers in poor companies).

But sometimes, you need a helping hand to differentiate the better business and future prospects between MPS, CCL Products and Atul Auto (examples). As you suggested, probably the way to go ā€œquietly do the work themselves and actively seek out mailing/meeting/learning from the seniors.ā€

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I donā€™t think I have any right to comment on whether there should be a Valuepickr Public Portfolio or not. For the simple reason that I have been a very infrequent visitor, so much so that I wasnā€™t even aware of the existence of Valupickr Public Portfolio till last month! There are pros and cons of both having and not having and I guess its a tough call for senior VPers too.

However I do wanted to share couple of thoughts related to the new user activity mentioned by @gurjota. As the popularity of Valuepickr increases, it will attract more and more non serious investors, just looking for tips and recommendations and posting casual queries about their portfolio and new ideas. (For that matter even I am a non serious investor, but then I donā€™t start casual threads asking for views). Over a period of time this will clutter the forum and separating the good threads from bad will itself become a task of separating the wheat from the chaff!

In this context a good example to share is of team bhp forum. I have browsed through it sometimes and what strikes one immediately is that each and every thread is worth reading and it adds value to the forum. It appears that they have strict rules around anyone posting a new thread adhering to a certain basic quality criteria and the threads are kept in draft mode till it becomes worthy of becoming part of the mainstream threads. Thereafter also any reply is which is just for the sake of responding is often flagged by moderators as irrelevant and if I am not wrong then it gets deleted. Depending on the thread topic, the threads are merged in to existing threads, closed or perhaps even deleted. I donā€™t think its fair to expect moderators here spending time doing such stuff, but perhaps having a strict rule that anyone posting a new idea should complete the basic valuepickr template would automatically eliminate most of these cluttering non value add threads. Moderators can just flag threads as junk or replies as junk if they happen to notice one.

A second example which comes to mind is of microcapclub. Only members have access and I am not a member. However recently they have come out with a plan that they want to launch paid read only access. Posting rights remain only with members, and you can become a member only through an application process, wherein 70% of existing members like your submission. (Not sure if its a new idea, or just your professional experience. Perhaps it is former). I am no way suggesting that valuepickr should go the way of having a paid access view rights only or any such thing, but was just wondering if there can be some kind of filter/restriction before you are allowed to post a new thread. By default you can just view and not spread clutter and seek advice all the time.

I do understand that there are lots of people who want to be hand held and guided and so on. But I am not sure if posting casual threads and questions is the right way to go about it instead of first taking the trouble to go through the educative threads and imbibing those learnings. I for one would want to take that trouble even if I manage to do that in months along with my professional commitments. Would recommend @Donald to have a look at team bhp from this angle and share his thoughts.

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Hi Rudra,
First of all i would like to thank you creating the valuable and amazing sheet you have created. keep up the good work.
is this scorecard will be updated periodically?
Is this is a sample portfolio or any investments held on this portfolio as mentioned?

Hello aguresh,

The portfolio is based on the earlier recommendations made at VP with prices updated from Google finance on automatic basis.

The rationale has been clearly mentioned in one of the sheets.

As discussed above, the portfolio has been discontinued in itā€™s present form. So any reference to the above would be for academic/reference interest only and should not be construed as investment advice in any form.

Hope this helps.

Any update on this thread? Since long valuePickr has not updated

Hello Experts , been waiting for any update on this thread for long :slight_smile:
Time to review public portfolio for 2017ā€¦

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It will be great , if the VP Portfolio gets updated. Thanks.

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Hi,

  1. Buffett every year releases share holder letters with his holdings
  2. All News channels cnbc, ndtv, etc., and now regional news channels also giving stock picks and explaining the reasons behind it.
  3. Analysts like Porinju, Vijay kedia, etc., are giving stock suggesstions on Twitter and news channels.
  4. Even Brokerage companies like hdfc securities, reliance give suggestions

Then why cant we have a discussion here from Valuepickr about the holdings they have and why they choose these companies, what is this restriction from SEBI

Thanks,
Vinay

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