Just finished reading The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning by Gautam Baid
Why do we need to pursue lifelong learning? Imagine that you are buying a car and that it is the only car you will have in your lifetime. You will put all your efforts into choosing the right car and eventually take care of it in a way that shows you value it for life. The same is true for our body and mind. We have one body and one mind, and that's all we are going to carry with us in this lifetime. Would we be okay with ruining them, or will we choose to hone, improvise, and take care of them? Like how buying that one car is a conscious choice we make with utmost care and devotion, we need lifelong learning to make life choices that will leave an everlasting imprint in our legacy that we will leave behind.
In thirty-one chapters, Gautam Baid talks about the necessity of having a tunnel vision, an attitude of a long-term view, the importance of habits, discipline, and delayed gratification, the need for optimizing our actions and mind with the changing world order and interlinking the importance of all the above with value investing.
If you want to be successful in personal finance and investing, there is only one person whom you need to look up to, and that is Warren Buffet. Rightly so, all the chapters in the book capture the wisdom Munger and Buffett have learned, lived by, and propagated throughout their ninety-odd years. It starts with reading anything and everything to make informed decisions. The first two sections of the book deal with how to inculcate the habit of reading, implementing what we read into our daily actions and routines, filtering signal from noise (that is, taking information that is important and ignoring the majority of unusable information), writing as a mental exercise to be conscious and coherent in your thoughts, the commitment to incremental development by practicing delayed gratification, the role of humility in being a lifelong learner. the importance of patience as a virtue, the need for a role model, and the desire to learn from others' mistakes.
The last three sections of the book deal with the important components of value investing. The major takeaways from these sections are:
1. Build a snowball: The bedrock of successful investing lies in knowing your time frame. In this context, you need to know the rule of 72. To estimate the amount of time it will take for you to double your invested principle, use the below formula: t = 72/r. Incorporate the rate of interest in place of r and you will get your time frame to double the principle.
2. Quality over quantity: If you want to make sustained returns over a long time, do not get swayed away by one-year or two-year returns, as averages can be deceptive. Focus on the compounded growth since two years of high growth followed by one year of negative growth can hurt your portfolio. To choose quality stocks, analyze the intrinsic value of the business and buy them when they are undervalued. Intrinsic value is the value of an asset based on its actual worth, rather than its market price. A simplified way to analyze the intrinsic value of any business is to look for year-on-year growth above ten percent in profits, low P/E among peers, low debt-to-equity, return on capital employed (ROCE) above 15 percent, market cap above 100 crores, and competitive advantage compared to other businesses in the same sector, which can give an estimate of future cash flow.
3. Understand the market fluctuations: The market is similar to a swinging pendulum, and a historically high period of growth is always followed by a low period of slump. The goal is to control emotions and keep investing for dividends during the period of a slump while letting it compound during the period of growth.
4. Have a cushion: "Margin of Safety" are the three most important words in the field of investing. For example, if an investor determines that the intrinsic value of a stock is Rs. 100 per share, they would want to buy it at a price lower than that, say Rs. 80 per share, to ensure a margin of safety. This gives the investor a cushion in case the stock price drops due to market volatility, unforeseen events, or changes in the company's financial performance. The larger the margin of safety, the lower the risk for the investor.
5. Holy grail of investing: Diversification is the key to successful investing and also to peaceful sleep at night.
6. Trading Today for a Better Tomorrow: Opportunity cost is basically what you miss out on when you make a choice. Make sure you miss instant gratification for future wealth. If asked, “Why make all the money so you can save it?” make sure to reply, “Why spend all that money so you need to earn it again?”. Understanding opportunity cost is the first step to achieving financial freedom.
7. Understand mean-reversion: Past performance never guarantees future returns. Periods of above-average returns are usually followed by periods of below-average returns, and vice versa. This can indicate when an asset is overvalued or undervalued and help us make our buy and sell calls. Realize that time in the market is more important than timing the market.
Overall, this book provides a comprehensive guide to value investing. I would recommend it to anyone who needs help cultivating a long-term view of their financial planning. The first three sections of the book offer valuable insights into self-improvement, followed by a detailed explanation of the technicalities of value investing.