The Tortoise Speaks...

A blog which periodically revisits evergreen investment principles!

Investing for Beginners & Finding our own Investing Style

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.

Risk vs Uncertainty

By Jayant Pai | [email protected]

Quick question: When was the last time you woke up in the morning and felt completely certain about the way your day would pan out? Sure, you may have aimed at accomplishing a series of tasks and also meticulously planned your path. Despite this, you tacitly knew and acknowledged that there was always the possibility that things may not turn out as planned. This, however, did not paralyse you and make you sit at home.

The point I am making is that we live in an uncertain world. While some factors are within our control, there are others which are not. That is why I am puzzled to hear some market mavens advise stockmarket investors to desist from investing now and step in when things are certain.

Mutual Fund Scheme Selection : A Do-It-Yourself Kit

By Jayant Pai | [email protected]

Choosing good mutual fund schemes is not an easy task for beginners. The same applied to me too. I too have undergone many teething troubles before finally honing in on a few rules which work for me. Initially, I relied on the advice of others, but my entire investing approach changed when I subscribed to a highly reputed magazine meant for serious investors. Today, my scheme selection process is a distillate of of several intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Here are a few of them:

Mutual Funds: The missing “I” in Monthly Income Plans

By Jayant Pai | [email protected]

I feel that the financial product with the most misleading moniker is the ‘Monthly Income Plan (MIP)’ offered by mutual funds. The nomenclature suggests that these schemes assure some income to their unit holders every month but this is far from reality. Many of these schemes not only declare dividend at irregular intervals, even the quantum of dividend declared each time varies widely. A bigger irony is that most MIPs offer a “Growth” option too, something which is anachronistic, to say the least. In a nutshell, “True-to-label” MIPs are more the exception than the rule.

Getting it wrong

By Raunak Onkar | [email protected]

Investing requires a lot of conviction. Especially in equity investing where the future outcomes of any business are uncertain & many variables can affect business performance in the long run. In such a case conviction is a good currency to have.

But what is this conviction made of?

Conviction is to believe that something is right by judging the facts which we gather after going through available data. Why do we believe that something is right? Well its tricky to answer it this way. So we can try and invert the problem into thinking – why do we get things wrong? To put it into context, why do investors make mistakes?

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