Book Review - A Piece of the Action

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. ~ Mark Twain

I love reading financial and market history, in addition to general history. So, when Pradyumn said he wanted to do a long-form summary of the book "A Piece of the Action" by Joseph Nocera, I was really excited. This is a book on how the US financial markets shaped up in the 20th century. It was written in 1993. 

You can see how products like credit cards, mutual funds, NBFCs took shape in that period in the US and get glimpses of how things can turn out in India. 

It is a long read but absolutely worth your time.

Open / Download it from here - www.intelsense.in/Saved/201006121344396_Book_Summary_-_A_Piece_of_the_Action.pdf

Weekend Reading

Reading across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen. Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week. 

I especially try to not post Corona related articles as that is all one gets to read in all traditional media.

If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate.

Benchmarking

When you see other people buying new cars, boats or other toys it can lead to a sense of entitlement. There’s a huge difference between buying stuff and being wealthy. Unfortunately, when you see those around you buying stuff it’s hard to avoid the temptation because we benchmark ourselves against the stuff we see and wealth isn’t something you can see parked in someone’s driveway.

It’s a cliche at this point to say that money doesn’t buy happiness because money sure can solve a lot of problems. But it sure doesn’t buy contentment or make it any easier to stay out of your own head sometimes. Benchmarking yourself against people who are more successful than you could provide the motivation to get better but it could also blind you to the fact that no one’s life is perfect.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/09/benchmarking/

Wave to Pay

Amazon is unveiling a new biometric technology called Amazon One that allows shoppers to pay at stores by placing their palm over a scanning device when they walk in the door or when they check out. The first time they register to use this tech, a customer will scan their palm and insert their payment card at a terminal; after that, they can simply pay with their hand. The hand-scanning tech isn’t just for Amazon’s own stores — the company hopes to sell it to other retailers, including competitors, too.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/9/29/21492351/amazon-one-hand-scan-payments-palm-checkout-whole-foods

Your mobile makes you dumb(er)!!

The authors of the paper report the results of a straightforward experiment. Subjects are invited into a laboratory to participate in some assessment exercises. Before commencing, however, they’re asked to put their phones away. Some subjects are asked to place their phone on the desk next to the computer on which they’re working; some are told to put their phone in their bag; some are told to put their phone in the other room. 

Each subject was then subjected to a battery of standard cognitive capacity tests. The result? Subjects measured notably lower on working memory capacity and fluid intelligence when the phone was next to them on the desk versus out of sight. This was true even though in all the cases the subjects didn’t actually use their phones.

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/09/22/do-smartphones-make-us-dumber/

Save 50% of your increments to retire on schedule

Lifestyle creep is when someone increases their spending after experiencing an increase in income.  So that new raise quickly becomes a fancy new object or an expensive new habit, and it’s gone.  Some lifestyle creep can be very satisfying.  After all, what’s the point of working so hard if you can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor? Once you spend more than 50% of your future raises, then you start delaying your retirement.

https://ofdollarsanddata.com/lifestyle-creep/

The relentless focus on the long game

I brought Michael Jordan a deal three years ago for $100 million,” Falk said. “And all he had to do was, other than giving his name and likeness, make one two-hour appearance to announce the deal and he turned it down. And God bless him. He’s been so successful, it gives him an opportunity to do whatever the hell he wants or not to do things he doesn’t want. And I really admire that. He’s very, very selective in the things that he wants to be involved in.

Falk said this was the norm for Jordan at a certain point adding, "By 1991 every deal that I signed with was at least 10 years." Falk said Jordan "never did one-off appearances" and would only sign deals where there was a long-term investment involved.

https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/michael-jordan-turned-down-100-million/14hh2vkbtpau11831dq0k4rlee

May We Live In Interesting Times

The markets currently are at a dicey juncture.  After the phenomenal rally in the past few months from the lows of 7500, there has been a phenomenal rally in the nifty and broader markets. And this has happened in the backdrop of investor disbelief.  Most market participants have wondered why markets are going up and have always been sceptical.  

We ourselves also have been sceptical about the rally but while a lot of investors have been sitting on the sidelines and worrying about correction, we have tried to focus on individual companies and sectors where we see strong business tailwinds and which are reflected in strong chart formations.  Whenever we see clear cut trade setups,  we apply our techno funda approach to uncover potential trade setups for the short to medium term.  

Our focus has been to identify fundamentally good companies with strong business tailwinds and good charts and try to recommend them.  The idea of HITPICKS is to provide recommendations in good companies where breakouts have happened or are imminent.  The idea is to recommend stocks where we feel the waiting period for up moves is reduced. This requires us to recommend strong breakouts or imminent breakouts.

As with all investment approaches, our approach is also not infallible. As seen in the past we also have had our share of stop losses being triggered. But we believe in the concept that it doesn’t matter how many times you are right or wrong. (The idea is to be wrong as infrequently as possible). But its important how much money we make when we are right and how little we lose when we are wrong. Hence our adherence to stop losses despite the selected companies being good companies with decent business prospects. 

Coming to the current levels of markets and the patterns seen in the past few days, we have had a big bar reversal on 31st August which marked a short term top for the markets. This was followed by a head and shoulders breakdown in the nifty. The target for this pattern was 10600. But the first port of call was the 200 day exponential moving average at around 10800 levels. As we saw today on 25th September, that level provided a strong support and we saw a strong market bounce from the important support level. Next few days should be crucial to determine the market direction. If markets take out the recent swing high of 11794, we could see another bout of strong upmove will a lot of broad market participation. If the market hesitates after a brief rally and starts falling, then the head and shoulders pattern of 10600 would come soon and our guess is the fall would not stop at the expected level. It could extend much lower, though we would take a call when we get there. Till then we would be on the lookout for reasonably high probability tradeable opportunities and recommend it if we see a good risk-reward potential.

Wishing you all the best in your investment/trading journey.  May we prosper together.

From the Desk of Dr Hitesh Patel

Weekend Reading

Reading across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen. Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week. 

I especially try to not post Corona related articles as that is all one gets to read in all traditional media.

If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate.

The secrets of a fulfilled life

I usually do not read such bullet pointed summaries titled "8 points to great happiness" nonsense. But this article is a culmination of The Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman's long career so is worth reading. Some main points:

- There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating.

- When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

- The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower.

- The advice you don’t want to hear is usually the advice you need.

- The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it.

- The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one.

- Selflessness is overrated. 

- Know when to move on.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/04/oliver-burkemans-last-column-the-eight-secrets-to-a-fairly-fulfilled-life

Are you wealthy? Depends on your friends and relatives! 

People gauge their wellbeing relative to those around them. And rising income tends to raise the gaze of your aspirations as much as your bank account.

A thing that’s obvious but easily overlooked is that feeling wealthy has little to do with what you have. It’s more about the gap between what you have and what you expect. And what you expect is driven by what other people around you have.

There are a million ways to get more money. But the only way to feel wealthy is to maintain a gap between what you have and what you expect. The expectation part has to be managed as much as the income part. It’s easy to ignore the expectation part because focusing on the income side alone is much more intuitive.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/obvious-things/

Investing isn't easy (Yeh aag ka daariya hai….!!)

If investing were as easy as looking at market cap to revenue or PE ratio or book value and declaring “It’s cheap” or “It’s overvalued”, then anyone with a calculator would be immensely wealthy.

But it isn’t that easy. Because cheap stocks get that way for a reason – deteriorating fundamentals or existential business model threat. The hard part is deciding whether or not the issues are temporary.

Expensive stocks get that way for a reason too.

Sneering at optimism and turning your nose up at momentum doesn’t make you the superior investor. It doesn’t signify that you’re the more high quality market participant. In fact, over the last ten years it’s made you a laughing stock.

https://thereformedbroker.com/2020/09/02/how-dare-you-sir/

The Dunning-Kruger Effect - The less you know, the more you think you know 

The least competent participants in a study conducted by Dunning and Kruger — the ones that scored in the bottom quarter—were more likely to overestimate their performance. The least they knew, the more they thought they knew. Meta-ignorance (or ignorance of ignorance) arises because lack of expertise and knowledge often hides in the realm of the “unknown unknowns” or is disguised by erroneous beliefs and background knowledge that only appear to be sufficient to conclude a right answer.

How to get better?

- Block time for self-reflection.

- Use second-level thinking to make decisions. 

- Take smart notes. 

- Be aware of cognitive biases that may cloud your judgement.

https://nesslabs.com/dunning-kruger-effect

Creativity is not a 9-to-5 job

Creativity is the culmination of experiences we have in our lives and simply cannot be forced: “We tend to believe that the act of creating is what defines creativity, but creativity starts long before anything is made. The first word you write is a distillation of the knowledge you’ve accumulated over time. The first brushstroke you paint is a reimagining of the experiences you’ve stored somewhere in the mind.”

https://moretothat.com/creativity-starts-before-anything-is-made/

Disclaimer: Abhishek Basumallick is the Head of the equity advisory www.intelsense.in for long term wealth creation and a pure quant focused newsletter at www.quantamental.in. The blog posts should not be construed as investment advice. Please do your own due diligence before investing.

Want a smoother ride? Diversify your investment style!

Investors are known for their style of investing. The moment you hear of value investing, Warren Buffett leaps to mind; Peter Lynch reminds us of growth investing; Howard Marks of distressed debt; George Soros or Stan Druckenmiller are known for their macro trades; Jesse Livermore, a trader. And the list goes on.

It is important to know your own dominant style of investing. There would be something where you would be most comfortable in. For example, my natural inclination is to buy stocks which are compounding in nature and then sit and do nothing as long as they keep performing both on the business and stock price fronts.

The problem starts when we become slightly successful in your way of investing. Due to our ego, we tend to believe that our way of investing is the best and others are subpar. And then we look for confirmation from the external world. If we are a trader, we deify eminent and successful traders, if we are investors we do the same with the famous investors. And that is why you will find fundamental based investors deriding technical chartists and vice-versa. This also puts subtle biases into our mind based on the authority and commitment & consistency biases. For example, a generation of investors blindly followed Buffett and avoided tech stocks just because he said it was not within his circle of competence. And guess what, they missed the best companies and winners in the last 20 years – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc.

Most of the people who start investing typically start with either the technical or fundamental side, based on how they started their journey and what influenced them. And over years, they keep getting better at their craft. Very few have the curiosity and courage to take a peek at the other side. And even for those that do, it is not easy to be successful. Trading and investing require two completely different and mostly complimentary mindset and very few can actually do well in both.

I have friends who are so deep-value oriented that they find even entertaining the idea of studying a company with a PE of greater than 15 repugnant. Similarly, others would not even look at stocks which are not growing above a 15% CAGR rate.

The table is from the book “Excess Returns” by Frederik Vanhaverbeke. The book is completely ignorable other than this one table! It captures the CAGR returns of investor-trades with long term track records. When I chanced upon this table a few years back, it triggered a major change in my thought process and I actually started delving into alternate styles of investing. In fact, if you look closely, the people who have the best long term public track records (greater than 10 years), it is the traders who more or less win hands down. And yet their longevity was not there. The moment you increase the investment duration to more than 20 years, the investors and quant guys started taking over.

My main takeaway from this table was that it is important not to deride other styles and get “style-boxed”. Style diversification is as important as portfolio diversification, probably much more important. Since my own style was primarily a buy-compounders-and-sit kind, I was perennially missing out on shorter-term upswings in stocks of companies which may not merit a buy in a concentrated quality portfolio. But even those stocks had a great potential of giving decent returns.

I started exploring how the people on this list made money. That opened up technical analysis and quantitative investing up for me. Now, I try to improve my skills in those areas as much as I spend time doing fundamental research. And the main motivation is to be able to marry my fundamental, technical and quantitative methods together to get a smoother return profile over time.

 

Abhishek Basumallick is the Head of the equity advisory www.intelsense.in for long term wealth creation and a pure quant focused newsletter at www.quantamental.in. Nothing in the article should be construed as investment advice. Please do your own due diligence before investing.

Weekend Reading

Reading across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen. Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week. 

I especially try to not post Corona related articles as that is all one gets to read in all traditional media.

If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate.

The Lifecycle of Information

Whenever we point to “information abundance,” what we are really saying is that we have “endless opportunities to react to data.” Whatever we want to engage with and process will be there at a moment’s notice. Whether it’s a 30-minute TV news segment or a never-ending Twitter feed, we will be able to see what we want to see, and toss out the things that we find questionable.

Whenever we come into contact with some objective fact or event, it moves so quickly across these stages that it’s essentially unnoticeable. When we read something in the news, we don’t ponder whether this is data or information, and whether or not we want it to influence our outlook on a given subject. All this happens instantaneously, as if the transmission of data and the processing of it occur simultaneously.

https://moretothat.com/information-lifecycle/

Reasons why a stock is hated - lecture notes from Joel Greenblatt

There are four reasons why a business is hated which results in its stock price being hated.

Those 4 reasons are:

1. The business is unsustainable

2. The business has a bad balance sheet

3. The business is cyclical

4. The business is dying

https://www.mikegorlon.com/post/four-reasons-why-a-stock-is-hated

The history of soap

Ancient Mesopotamians were first to produce a kind of soap by cooking fatty acids – like the fat rendered from a slaughtered cow, sheep or goat – together with water and an alkaline like lye, a caustic substance derived from wood ashes. The result was a greasy and smelly goop that lifted away dirt.

By the Middle Ages, new vegetable-oil-based soaps, which were hailed for their mildness and purity and smelled good, had come into use as luxury items among Europe’s most privileged classes. The first of these, Aleppo soap, a green, olive-oil-based bar soap infused with aromatic laurel oil, was produced in Syria and brought to Europe by Christian crusaders and traders.

 In 1879, P&G introduced Ivory soap, one of the first perfumed toilet soaps in the U.S. B.J. Johnson Soap Company of Milwaukee followed with their own palm-and-olive-oil-based Palmolive soap in 1898. It was the world’s best-selling soap by the early 1900s.

https://theconversation.com/the-dirty-history-of-soap-136434

Sound of Silence

Learning when to speak, and when to keep silent, is an art that the best retailers are masters of. To listen carefully, marketers need to ask the right questions, and thereafter keep a true and open silence, in listening deeply to the answers. There are moments when consumers go very silent because they are happy, or satiated, or both. Marketers should learn to capture these beautiful moments of silence, and the accompanying emotions, in various touch points of their brands, including communication or packaging — because this can resonate deeply with consumers who have felt exactly that way, so many times. 

When consumers reject a product, or totally give up on a brand, they tend to go totally silent, because their involvement has just ended.

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/sounds-of-silence/article31913985.ece#

Stop and ask why

“It takes a very long time to become young,” Pablo Picasso once said. Adults miss the innocent curiosity of their youth; artists strive to reclaim their lost childlike creativity. The creative process often feels like a constant battle between an inner child and an inner critic. Being young is being curious: on average, children ask 107 questions per hour. But, as we grow older, we start accumulating factual knowledge, practical shortcuts, and mental models to make decisions faster. In a society focused on speed as a measure of performance, we look for the quickest path to achieve our goals. We prioritise so much knowing how and how fast we can get to the desired outcome, we forget to stop and ask why during the journey.

https://nesslabs.com/inner-child-and-inner-critic

Disclaimer: Abhishek Basumallick is the Head of the equity advisory www.intelsense.in for long term wealth creation and a pure quant focused newsletter at www.quantamental.in. The blog posts should not be construed as investment advice. Please do your own due diligence before investing.

Weekend Reading

Reading across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen. Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week.

I especially try to not post Corona related articles as that is all one gets to read in all traditional media.

 

If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.

A full article by AI (if even the creative pursuits are done by robots, what will we do?)

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

 

Maybe a bit of inefficiency is good for us

We worship efficiency. Use less to get more. Same-day delivery. Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third. Efficiency is seen as good. Inefficiency as wasteful.

The financial crisis of 2008 suggested that maybe there could be too much of a good thing. If mortgages and other loans hadn’t been transformed into tradable assets (‘securities’), then bankers might have taken the time to assess the credit-worthiness of each applicant. If people had to visit a bank to withdraw cash, they might spend less and save more. This is not mere speculation – for instance, research reviewed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler shows that people will pay more for an item with a credit card than with cash. Arguably, a little friction to slow us down would have enabled both institutions and individuals to make better financial decisions.

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-efficiency-is-dangerous-and-slowing-down-makes-life-better

 

Is Tesla a car company or a software company?

Tesla is functioning as a pure software company. As Craig later explained to me, his team relies on a bucket of features, bug corrections, etc. Developers draw from the bucket, based on priorities: number 1 is for the vehicle’s critical functions such as power management, braking, steering, safety features; 2 is for key functionalities of the car; 3 is for secondary features such as the electric windows or rear-view mirrors and 4 is for the rest. At regular intervals, releases are pushed over-the-air (OTA) to the car hardware, exactly like apps are updated on a smartphone. In the early days of the Tesla program, releases were made every two weeks.

https://mondaynote.com/code-on-wheels-a4715926b2a2

 

Ignorant consultants and uncertain experts

In every domain where decision-makers need the specialised knowledge of experts, those who don’t have the relevant knowledge – whether they realise it or not – will compete with actual experts for money and attention. Pundits want airtime, scholars want to draw attention to their work, and consultants want future business. Often, these experts are rightly confident in their claims. In the private market for expertise, the opposite can be more common. Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, described his time as a consultant as largely about trying to feign complete certainty about uncertain things; a kind of theatre of expertise. In The Undoing Project (2016) by Michael Lewis, Morey elaborates by describing a job interview with the management consultancy McKinsey, where he was chided for admitting uncertainty. ‘I said it was because I wasn’t certain. And they said, “We’re billing clients 500 grand a year, so you have to be sure of what you are saying.”’

https://aeon.co/essays/real-experts-know-what-they-dont-know-and-we-should-value-it

 

It's not the economy. It's the political economy!!

In the real world, it turned out, important economic outcomes are often the consequences of political forces. Lobbyists, who engage in “marketing” ideas to policymakers and to the public, are actually influential. They know how to work the system and can dismiss, take out of context, misquote, misuse, or promote research as needed. If policymakers or the public are unable or unwilling to evaluate the claims people make, lobbyists and others can create confusion and promote misleading narratives if it benefits them. In the real political economy, good ideas and worthy research can fail to gain traction while bad ideas and flawed research can succeed and have an impact.

https://evonomics.com/political-economy-blind-spots-and-a-challenge-to-academics/

 

Disclaimer: Abhishek Basumallick is the Head of the equity advisory www.intelsense.in for long term wealth creation and a pure quant focused newsletter at www.quantamental.in. The blog posts should not be construed as investment advice. Please do your own due diligence before investing.