Bill Gates on 60 Minutes

I am always a fan of Bill Gates because of his contribution to technology as well as to the social cause.  Recently 60 minutes had a program on Bill Gates. Watch and enjoy.  For those of you that wonder why only 13+ minutes of video, well...rest is for commercials my friend.  Even I was zapped and thought it could be some mistake from my part.

Bill Gates in 60 minutes

30 Big Ideas from Seth Klarman's Margin of Safety

Recently read this very good article from safalniveshak.com which is a site I visit very often. One needs to read and re-read these to get these ideas into our system for this thinking to come intuitively

Seth Klarman's 30 big ideas from Margin of Safety

Bonus and Splits – Slices of the Same Pizza

Picture Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

I received a postal ballot to approve bonus shares for a company I hold.  Generally March quarter is the quarter when bonuses and splits are announced by companies to improve investor sentiment.  It is believed by most of the investing public that Bonus and Splits are like free checks that have been given to them by companies which enhance shareholder value.  In fact most of the companies report this (in their annual report) as if these are shareholder value enhancing.  Is this just a myth or is the value creation real?  To answer this, let us go through some basics.

Fantasy Business Team (Portfolio)

Picture Courtesy : Puriwaves

Fantasy  or dream teams exist in all forms of game like Baseball, Football, Cricket etc.  Everyone gets to choose their best players from various teams and bet on it.  If someone asks me to pick my fantasy team of business on similar lines,  I would pick these 11 businesses which forms my Fantasy Business Team.  These businesses would be evergreen with each member having longevity like Sachin Tendulkar.

These are companies that operate in various industries and operate with considerable moat.  When I have this fantasy team, I can just stop looking at the market and go on a cruise without worrying what would happen to them.  I will know for sure that in 10 years or 20 years, they would have added significant value than most of the investments.

Stock Does Not Know That You Own It

By Amcilrick (Own work)  via Wikimedia Commons

Most of us would have come across many instances during our investment career when the stocks we buy do not go up in price after we have bought it.  Ironically, in many cases it generally goes down after we buy.  In the reverse, the stock we sell is the one that goes high after we sell.  It has happened countless number of times in my investing career. I always wondered if it is the stock that is at fault or us.  I am sure you know the answer but I would like to explain it a bit.

When we buy a stock based on our own calculations, we know how much effort we put to discover this particular stock and also to analyze it after we discovered it before we decided to buy.  We know the pain that we took and whenever we take this pain, we feel that we should be rewarded.