Assimilate the learning

Here we go! Its Diwali night and I'm beginning the next phase of journey, after having frozen my portfolio to ride on the 'mother of bull run' as Mr. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala advocates...

I'll now try my best to learn more and more, continue and resume reading so many books and articles and assimilate the knowledge. Since there's so much to do, I try to list down the order in which I'll read, and prioritize and organize it all...here's the list

Note that I've kept the items A and B at top since they form a foundation which can then be used to build the knowledge further.

A. The Checklist Manifesto. I've started believing, both based on experience at work, as well as reading about investing and from people like Vishal, that creating checklists and using them to 'filter' things is a great way to keep in discipline. My target is to finish reading this book and gain more insight into checklists. This is on top of the list since thereafter, I'll extract some checklist points from learning assimilated from each further step, and grow my eventual checklist for finding great investment opportunities.

B. I'll next read writings from Nasim Taleb, especially, 'The Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness', which give a different perspective on how to handle uncertainties in life, and this topic is very important in investing.

Thereafter, I'll focus on following, ongoing activities, and as time permits, explore the points starting from 1:


a) This one will continue along with other items. I've not been able to follow up of late, but will now dedicate time to analyze Buffet letters to shareholders and participate in nice discussions on SN forum.

b) Another series has started is to assimilate learning from what Munger has said. I'll also pick up and get to speed on this yet another interesting discussion series. Of course, as I participate in this, I've also read 'Psychology of human misjudgement'

c) I'll continue reading Prof. Sanjay Bakshi's blog posts and gather learning from him. After all, he's one from whom we learnt about the idea of vicarious learning :-)


1. Complete reviewing 'One Up on Wall Street' and then create a 'Peter Lynch Investing style checklist'. One's already at the end of the book, but we need to sanitize it in current times and Indian context.

One of the major questions to answer is - while Mr. Lynch always tells to invest in boring business that're ignored by wall street, we need to think about how to avoid stories that'll remain undervalued since major players in market will always keep ignoring them. This is one big question that keeps worrying me, and I've tried to find answer to this one here and here, but still need to refine and get a conclusive 'checklist' to find crisp answers.

2. That's what my next exploration would be - to find the good take away from Mr Lynch style. Understandably, we can't blindly follow what worked 20 or 50 or 70 years back, and need to refine the philosophies...

Next step is to complete reading the following books:

3. Common stocks and Uncommon profits. This will give me insight into Fisher style, and importance of finding scuttlebutt...

4. Based on several discussions, and some real life experiences, I've learnt that business moat is a huge thing, and one must pay very big attention to it while analyzing businesses. Pat Dorsy's 'Little book that builds wealth' is known to be a good book talking about business moats, and I plan to read this book, at least the review of this book written by Sanjeev to assimilate and then extend my idea of moat valuation to make it more practical.

5. Security Analysis. I've read part of this book, but need to complete it and learn about various quantitative methods Graham has taught us, and then categorize them into their application in various situations.

6. Next is to focus on portfolio allocation, i.e. that of equity portion, and to choose various styles and selection approaches, while staying within circle of competence and learning from my own mistakes, like this, and create some 'elimination checklists' to keep a healthy composition of portfolio.

Its a lot of work, let's see how much time can I take out from the busy schedule of next 6 months in my life...wishing myself all the best :-)