Lately, few of my friends advised me to succumb to my sadist tendencies. Hence, in that spirit, I have decided to be regular in my writing endeavor and inflict torture on readers on a regular basis. My struggle to find the best way to do this, led to the inception of 2 different series, which I am going to write on a fortnightly basis.
First one will be named ” Octavo Pansophy” ,which will be an effort to take the published documents like prominent books, research papers, newspaper articles , interviews etc. and make a journal of key learnings from those and how those learnings fit in the overall scheme of my investment philosophy.
This is meant to pick the brains of some of the most prominent thinkers and investors and learn from them, not imitate them. The first item I am going to cover in this series is:
“The rediscovered Benjamin graham ”
Benjamin Graham, appropriately named as the ‘Dean of Wall Street’ , brought sanity in otherwise chaotic financial markets. His philosophy has inspired the greatest of investment minds and even though his advised methods of investing may or may not be directly relevant for one, his way of approaching markets and philosophy of investing has been, is and will always be a dependable guide to sail through the smooth and rough tides of financial markets. This will be an attempt to revise and ‘rediscover’ the legend.
Second of the series I am going to work on will be named as ‘Financial Shenanigans’
As companies become more creative, it has become absolutely imperative for financial analysts to be fully aware of the ‘tools in the crook’s bag‘ to be able to do his job effectively and avoid the traps laid out by companies. This series of articles will be based on a few prominent books like Financial Shenanigans by Howard Schilit, Quality of Earnings , Creative cash flow reporting etc and also learnings from few experiences of prominent investors for eg. David Einhorn’s experience, my friends’ and my personal experiences and observations of how companies find creative ways to fool investors.
Hope this series of articles add to your knowledge and help you to improve your investment process.