Month: December 2015

Don’t buy and forget

Warren Buffett is one of most misquoted [in terms of context] investment gurus of our times.

What happens when we are given below advise ?

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

or

“If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes”

We buy businesses and then hold them, thinking that Warren Buffet has recommended to hold our positions for long term. In fact one of most repeated quote I hear is

“I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”

Trust me there are several businesses in India which if invested today and then magically the stocks markets shut down for 5 years, after 5 years you have to search the company and its promoters to get pennies back on the dollar invested.

Another chart that is thrown at me is this

Buffet quote -1

Warren Buffett is holding Coke and American Express for 20+ years.

 

Honestly tell me how many Coke’s like business are their out … Read the rest

Learn to evaluate management

Evaluating management is one of trickiest part while building an investment case. Especially, when it comes to small caps and mid cap companies run by first or second generation promoters, were much information about them in not available publicly.

Also many of retail investors don’t have privilege to meet management, time to attend AGMs and question management over quarterly conference calls (if they do). So how does one evaluate management ?

Well I don’t have a panacea but in this post we will try an establish a process which can give us reasonable ammunition to understand and evaluate management. As an investor you start with a hypothesis that management is honest, able, trustworthy and intelligent and then as you run a series of checks, you may find that one or more components you wished for are missing therefore at the end of checks you can take a call whether you want to partner with such management or not.

While there are numerous parameters which you can use to evaluate management quantitatively we believe below are good for a start

  1. Depth
  2. Integrity
  3. Disclosure Norms
  4. Compensation
  5. Skin in the Game
  6. Regulatory compliance issues
  7. Walking the talk

 

Depth – While evaluating depth … Read the rest