Tag: investing

Living in times of bull markets

We have just lived through the first leg of the bull market in India and as with all bull markets there is no dearth of fund managers, individual investors, sovereign funds, high net worth individuals etc. who have done exceedingly well for themselves and their investors.

This definitely is a reason to raise toast – As someone said “Make hay while Sun shine” and a single bull market allocated properly can change your life.

bull-1

and I for one definitely don’t belong to the school of thought which cribs on over valuation of securities as majority of who crib on valuations over companies leading bull market are the ones who don’t own the company. I have seldom seen people being unhappy when there holdings are hitting upper circuits every day 🙂

Cribbing takes away precious energy and is of no use, if you think a security is overvalued / momentum driven / operator rigged just move on there are 5000+ listed companies, I am sure there will be few with whom you will find peace.

But as Warren Buffet said stocks can’t outperform business indefinitely.

What could be more exhilarating than to participate in a bull market in which the rewards

… Read the rest

Why Paying up can cost you – Analysis using payback box

Motilal Oswal wealth studies are great source of learnings for any investor, They adopt a unique approach of taking up a theoretical concept every year and then explain it through numbers.

In year 2000, they introduced a concept called payback period, this is what the study said

Focus on payback period

As the legendary Warren Buffett says, “Investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future in real terms, after taking inflation into account”

Generally, it is observed that market price is often based on the assumption that earnings will grow at their current rate for another five or more years and then remains constant

P/E is a very useful tool of valuation but does not reflect growth assumption upfront

PEG is another useful tool but assumes stable growth rate for a long time. It also relies too much on current growth rates. But the reality is that new economy companies record high growth rates in the initial stages, but are unable to sustain for a long period. This leads to mis-pricing

Keeping the above shortcomings and market wisdom in mind, we decided to examine the concept of “pay-back ratio” or “purchase price recovery in

… Read the rest

What drives value of a business – Part 1

Here is one page snapshot on what drives value of company (and its ownership parts called shares)

Value-1

In this post I am not going to dig into those valuation parameters as I have detailed post on these parameters in past, you can read them here and here

We are going on spend some time today on inputs that drives these valuation parameters to draw some conclusion to refine at the process on how we approach on valuing business

Given we are dealing with 7 input factors this post would be in two parts

Free Cash flows

Value-2

Let’s draw some inferences

  • A company which converts its revenue to cash flows higher in proportion to other companies in similar industry should be valued more
  • A company which has relatively less cash expense (better credit terms, tax advantage, deferred expenses) compared to other companies in similar industry should be valued more
  • A company which has lower capital and maintenance expenses compared to other companies in similar industry should be valued more

The roadway surface of the bridge has been built and designed to behave as an antagonist to the activities and functions of this body enzyme that cialis cost 20mg plays front role … Read the rest

The edges of being a salaried Investor

Bored with your job ? Sick of taking orders all day ? You are not the only one who is thinking of becoming full time investor, but before you take the plunge, I want to persuade you to remain in your job and continue as salaried investor (SI)

A salaried investor has tremendous edge over a full time participant in market, What are those edges ? Let explore them

Your bread is not dependent on returns from markets

This is an obvious edge, bear market or bull market, you take home a salary thereby ensuring basic necessities of you and your family is taken care of, you don’t have to sell your shares in distress to pay bills.

You will be less stuck to the screen

In any competitive job, no company will leave you without extracting 60-80 hours a week, which means you will have limited time outside work. This is great as you will miss the daily swings in markets, as Daniel Kahneman wrote in “Thinking Fast and Slow”

Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains. Once a quarter

… Read the rest

True Diversification

Why do we add a new security to our portfolio ?
To reduce risk and ensure not all our eggs are in same basket, the underlying thought process is if stock A doesn’t do well at least stock B will provide some returns and compensate for loss if any in stock A
This makes perfect sense if you go by what Harry M. Morkowitz said in 1950’s [emphasis mine]

The investments have different types of risk characteristics, some caused systematic and market related risks and the other called unsystematic or company related risks. Markowitz diversification involves a proper number of securities, not too few or not too many which have no correlation or negative correlation. The proper choice of companies, securities, or assets whose return are not correlated and whose risks are mutually offsetting to reduce the overall risk

It explains why investors invest in diverse spectrum of industries whose fortunes are not tied to each other
However many investors feel discomfort in adding a new company from a similar industry, At least I do. My thinking process is I already own TCS what the use of adding another IT company in the portfolio ? After all the company related … Read the rest

Understanding Pricing Power

What is pricing power ?

A simple question from Prof Sanjay Bakshi on Twitter got a gamut of responses from his legion of followers, Don’t miss the entire discussion here

I have tried to penned down my understanding in form of few questions hope they help you next time when you are evaluating a business

When you think of Pricing Power

What’s obvious ?

When a company has following attributes

  1. Easily pass on increases in costs to customers without having volume declines
  2. Strong brands and customer loyalty allowing company to charge premium price over competitors
    1. Pricing power is when you can sell $120 phones(manufacturing cost) to people at $650 just because you are Apple
    2. Making/marketing a product that is so loved by customers that they find ‘value’ even at increased prices
  3. The ability to increase the prices of your product without losing market share to competition
  4. Ability to price ahead of inflation
  5. When elasticity of demand of your product is not price sensitive

What’s not so obvious ?

  1. Pricing power isn’t just about increasing prices of your OUTPUT .It’s also about lowering prices of your INPUTS
  2. Pricing power is not just about RAISING prices. It includes power to CUT prices,

… Read the rest

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Download an ebook on Warren buffett partnership letters

Jim Rohn famously said,

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with

As a young investor starting out it would serve you well if you can spent time with Warren Buffet (vicariously) by reading his fantastic letters

At Tankrich – We have taken an initiative to share his learnings through our video channel

This week having finished the partnership letters I thought it would be good if I could document those learnings in a single place

After few weeks of editing here is the final copy for you on Learnings from Warren buffett partnership letters

Below is Table of content of this ebook

Download a copy by sharing any of the above social links (I do this so that this reaches maximum people through your social networks)

If you are reading this in your inbox go to this link to download a copy

Building blocks

  1. What should be focus of long term investor
  2. Surest means of profit is value investing
  3. Think long term to evaluate performance
  4. Beating index is very tough
  5. True conservatism
  6. Magic of Compounding
  7. Price is everything aka Margin of Safety
  8. Cigar butt as a group works out to be a good

… Read the rest

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Tax

Will government’s tax rate cut be game changer ?

In last budget government announced a key intention to reduce corporate taxes to make India par with other emerging nations

Tax-1

Note this is only proposal and there is no guarantee that this will fructify in next 4 years. Now imagine in 2019 that this becomes a reality

How will it improve CAGR returns from companies ?

5% is big saving and can fill corporate coffers tremendously with direct impact to FCF available to owners

So I did a thought experiment on how this tax edge could impact investor returns

Read carefully – Few key assumptions that you are making when relying on this analysis

  • would stick to its promise of reducing corporate taxes by 5% in 4 years – To me this is biggest risk
  • Predicting profit growth for next few years, in most business this is difficult if not impossible
  • Assigning an PE exit multiple, this requires years of practice, we would be wise to be conservative on this
  • Margins would be remain as 2015, for cyclic business this would lead to faulty outputs again if business had an extremely good or poor 2015 then results would be skewed on either side
  • There would be no equity dilution, which

… Read the rest

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Why you should not mix emotions and investing

I love the below quote related to emotion and investing

Emotions can be a great asset in life, but when it comes to investing, they may be a liability

Very important line and one needs tremendous patience and practice to avoid mixing emotions with acumen when making an investing decision

Let me tell you story of Anil, a retail investor,and how his emotions cost him dearly

Few years ago his friend told him about an established NBFC Bajaj Finance as a stock tip, he looked at the company’s ticker it was INR 88, he added stock to his watch list and waited for price to drop so that he can buy

Bajaj-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A year went by and one day while browsing prices of his watch list he was stuck, Why ?

Bajaj-2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stock suggested by his friend has moved almost 50% up, there was huge guilt in him on having missed 50% returns but then he consoles himself by saying ‘We can’t make money on every stock in markets’

He thought this would be end of his story with Bajaj finance, but almost a … Read the rest

Few takeaways from study of wide moat companies

Wide Moat companies(1)

I started with wide moat ratings of morningstar and selected 10 companies randomly as below

Asian Paints Bajaj Auto Colgate India Dabur Cummins HUL Infosys ITC Nestle Lupin

Then I collected 10 year data on above companies from 2005 to 2014, collecting 10 year data will ensure that you can avoid sampling errors although I want to clearly point that selecting 10 companies and trying to interpret patterns in itself will have sampling errors

If you have gone through our previous posts on competitive analysis , ROE dissection or Earnings framework you know I like to understand a concept through key metrics and examples , I have selected 3 important metrics and plotted on how have they performed for 10 companies in last 10 years

Lets take them one by one

Understand this first  you get rated as improved if a particular company is able to beat its own average over last 10 years in year 2014. So if year 2014 was extremely bad/good year for the company than data interpretation below could be erroneous

Gross Margin – My reason to select – this indicates pricing power

Wide-1

8 out 10 companies were able to improve their gross margins

Cash … Read the rest