Risk aversion is what keeps the market honest & sane
Is there something like ‘too much trust’? Can there be a situation where we so blindly accept our fate in the future that we forget that there ever was something like uncertainty?
On the January 28th, 2017, I was given the rare privilege of addressing a room full of serious investors from the Tamil Nadu Investors Association (TIA). An organisation that has been dedicated in educating investors for the past 26 years. I spoke at the Bullet Proof Investing Seminar.
I spoke on the topic of building conviction in investing. Instead of a blog post on it, here’s my entire slide deck with heavily summarised notes.
Slides – How to Build Conviction
The entire event was very well organised & I urge you to consider making a trip to Tamil Nadu every year, to attend it. Here’s a list of the other talks delivered at the seminar.
Source: Image from the film “Sully”
No one has ever trained for an incident like that.
– Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Sully, 2016)
I watched the film Sully, recently. It’s a story about something that happened in USA, why should it really matter to us? After watching the film I realise how much we underrate the importance of the infrastructure that is around us. In direct relation to the film, The safety board, the aviation unions, the emergency services, the ATC crew, the flight crew. The image, sourced from the film, attests to the fact that it does take a collective effort to make things work smoothly.
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.
“The only way to win is to work, work, work & hope to have a few insights.”
– Charlie Munger
Insights are incredibly rare. I know that this insight itself is going to be lost on many of us. It was certainly lost on me for a while. I follow 200+ people on twitter & if at least 10% of them share some unique reading material everyday, that means I need to read at least 20 new things, each day. Well, great way to learn about the world, but is it something that I want to learn, today?