The Tortoise Speaks...

A blog which periodically revisits evergreen investment principles!

Category: Value Investing

Tweaks to our investing framework

By

On July 3, 2019

In Equity, Investing, Value Investing

The headline first.

“There is no change to the basics of our investing approach.”

Our investing approach consists of

  • Investing only with Promoters / Managers who have the best interests of shareholders at heart and who are competent in the business that they run.
  • Investing in businesses where the underlying characteristics are good. These are, limited competition and pricing power which ultimately is shown by high return on capital employed.
  • Limited use of leverage in the non banking / financial businesses we own.
  • A good potential for growing the business is usually a positive provided it can be done in a capital efficient manner.
  • Buying at attractive valuations.

Investors who do not care for the nuances may ignore this post completely.

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Can an investment process, Rust?

By

On October 15, 2016

In Investing, Value Investing

Only entropy comes easy.

– Anton Chekhov

Have we ever wondered why things rust? I mean apart from the chemical process permanently changing metals, rust is quite a fascinating phenomenon. For investors like us, rust comes in the form of two things, inflation & cost of capital. For the physical world, rust is still the chemical process where metal corrodes as it ages. As investors, what we fear though is a threat of moral corrosion than a physical one. More on that later.

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Investing for Beginners & Finding our own Investing Style

By

On June 21, 2013

In Investing, Value Investing, Warren Buffet

By Raunak Onkar, [email protected]

When a lot of people first start to read & learn about investing they invariably end up reading about Warren Buffett in their first few weeks of reading. From there onwards begins this fairy tale dream ride into the idea that someday they can also invest like Warren Buffett. The next automatic step that people tend to take is to read what any other fund manager worth their salt has to say about Warren Buffett. To remind you, at this point there is not a single rupee invested by this person, ever in his life (apart from may be the automated Fixed Deposit certificates & PPF investments).

After having read & being enamoured with Warren B’s performance & his dazzlingly simple explanations of how he analyses businesses, people start with the notion that investing is an easy affair. By this time, the activity of really sitting through an entire market cycle not being able to find great investment opportunities or even spending huge amounts of time & effort in researching industries & their managers has never happened to them.

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