The Tortoise Speaks...

A blog which periodically revisits evergreen investment principles!

Measure Twice, Cut Once

“A lot of shavings don’t make a good carpenter.”

My carpenter said to me as I watched him work, perched on a stool. He was shaving a wooden panel from my work table. I had been complaining to him for over a week about one of the drawers that creaked as I pull it out. This is really odd for a brand new, custom made table. Usually these issues creep up over years when changing weather and moisture take their turns to age the wood. Now that he was here and identified the problem, he got right to work.

He made me empty the drawer and observed what had gone wrong. To my untrained eye it was all straight lines, but he spotted something and pulled out a tiny wood shaver and shaved a small portion. He said that “the apprentice in my shop who made this drawer shaved some part of the drawer far more than necessary. Maybe he was not confident with the cut.”

I wanted to tell him I did the same thing with my portfolio when I started investing. I was not confident about my ideas and therefore allowed the price movement to control my decision making. I acted more often than necessary and expected better results due to my “nimbleness”. More activity doesn’t always mean better results. Sometimes doing less & being decisive is a better choice.

He bent down to check if the wooden strip on which the drawer rests, fits properly or not. He didn’t even need a torch. He just ran two fingers down the strip and immediately found another problem. The strip that was supposed to be one single piece of wood was two pieces joined together. The seam was cleverly concealed but nevertheless it was not a single strip.

The carpenter told me again that he was sorry but there seems to be another problem. The apprentice also made another basic mistake that he shouldn’t have made in the first place. I was more curious to know what wisdom he was about to offer. He hit me with it, “Sir, he broke the first major rule of woodworking – Measure Twice, Cut Once.”

He pulled out a plain strip of wood made careful measurements & marked it for cutting. He pulled out the previous two strips and nailed the new one in. He put the drawer back in and it slid back in place like it rolled on butter.

I was blown away. I never thought a skill like wood working would have so many teachings for an investor. The table is supposed to last for at least 15 years. The responsibility of the person who makes it to last that long, is enormous. The same for any investor who invests for the long term. We should always investigate the basic premise and act decisively once we have made up our mind. Any other factors like price movements in between shouldn’t shake us from our long path.

“Measure twice, Cut once.”

Why Should Companies be Well Behaved? – Part 1

By Raunak Onkar | [email protected]

Normally when we think of a word, our mind creates a mental image of it. We realise if we associate some strong meaning / feeling with that word. The word ‘corporate governance’ doesn’t invoke any of those things. It’s a bland, technical word which only seems like a good filler in an otherwise boring conversation about stocks.

If we wish to really create a mental picture for good corporate governance, first we need to create a good picture of the business world in general. Good governance, in simple terms, is being treated fairly when not in power by those who are in power. It applies as much to governments as to companies.

How our use of language can twist reality

By Raunak Onkar | [email protected]

We use language to think. The grammatical elements of any language help us express our thoughts better. That can pose a problem while thinking with incomplete information. In that case our emotional state can sway us into believing our own thoughts.

Take investing in stocks for example. It is a guarantee that no matter how well researched the investment idea is we are bound to have some gaps in understanding. We have no choice but to allow for some margin of error to protect us from any temporary setbacks.

One way would be to know our biases but that’s a theoretical solution. To reach a more practical solution we need something that is easy to test & which applies across all our thinking.

The art of Bad-vising

By Ankur Mahajan, [email protected]

“We’ve done a lot of stupid things but we’ve avoided a small subset of stupidity and that subset is important. It’s about avoiding the dumb things” – Warren Buffet

There have been a considerable number of arguments and an equal number of blogs and posts written about the plight of a retail investor. One of the prime subjects have been the many grounds where a typical investor conks out to make returns in the market. “Market makes returns, but the investor doesn’t” has become the slogan of the Aam Investor (on the lines of aam aadmi). And there have been umpteen reasons attached to the same. Some of them being getting carried away by greed and fear, investing after the bull run, redeeming during the bears, chasing fancies, investing without understanding, etc. While it is easy to blame the investor on the lines of an aam aadmi who pay taxes but abstains from voting, there is a compelling need to question the role of your advisor and his ability to avoid deviating from the fundamentals.

Why Nifty and Sensex may not be the right barometers to look at!

By Raj Mehta, [email protected]

Last week, I met one of my friends who asked me an interesting question, “Why is it that Nifty and Sensex were up 25% in the year 2012 but I have lost money in my portfolio?”. Many times I hear people say Nifty is up 13% year to date or Sensex is up 12% but what does it mean to your portfolio?

CNX Nifty or Nifty 50 is an index of 50 stocks whereas S&P BSE Sensex is an index of only 30 stocks. The criteria for the constitution of this index is set in such a way that only companies with a large market capitalisation can enter these indices. Other factors which are more important like business sustainability, profitability, growth, management have not been considered. So this would include a possibility that “Hot sector companies” might find the place in the index whereas a well managed, dividend paying company might not be included. The criteria of selecting the index constituents shifts the bias towards large market capitalisation companies and the index is not well represented. For eg. ITC has a weightage of 10.68% in BSE Sensex currently but you might not have it in your portfolio considering the valuations that it is trading at. If today ITC moves up by 5%, then the index would move up just by its weightage in ITC but your portfolio return could actually be negative.

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