Intelsense Capital Blog: Curioity@Intelsense

Multidisciplinary learning is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen. Here is a summary of some of the best learnings of the week.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will know that I love writing. It helps me collate and clarify my thoughts. I usually write for an audience of one - myself. Paul Graham, one of the best essayists now, writes about why we need to write in this brilliant article. He also ties in the fact that unless you read well, it will be difficult to write well.

The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.

A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you’ll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

If you need to solve a complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to write about it. Which in turn means that someone who’s not good at writing will almost always be at a disadvantage in solving such problems.

Another brilliant collation I read this week is from Anil Tulsiram who takes wonderfully detailed notes of brilliant insights from Alix Pasquet III.

Another problem with this is that an action in the past environment that could have be a mistake could be a total success in a different environment. So be careful, you want to learn from your mistakes, you want to be careful from learning too much for your mistakes. You know, no lesson is better than wrong lesson. You want to have a mistake evaluation process. And the key suggestion I would make there is to involve others, is to get feedback from others that will keep you intellectually honest. One thing to remember, by the way, is great investors all go through periods of mistakes.

Thought of the Week

I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong. I have basically survived by recognising my mistakes. ~ George Soros

The main idea in both this thought and the insights from Alix Pasquet is that we need to be able to analyse our past actions for our mistakes. But while doing that we need to be watchful to understand the reason for the mistake and not just look at the outcome. At a different time, under a different circumstance, the outcome may be very different. The idea is to be able to put the odds of success in our favour if we do a particular activity repeatedly.

Video of the Week: Indian Debt and Equity markets: Aligning India’s future together