Stock Shastra

I currently invest using the principles of Value Investing. It took me a long time to get here as I bought my first stock 25 years ago!  I was 23. What was I doing, living in Bombay and not being aware of Dallal Street? Well like a good intelligent middle class boy, ensuring I got into a good college, which I did. I got into IIT Kanpur.
I heard about stocks from my fellow trainee, in HLL. He got the name and address of the broker and off we went to buy our first stock. What I remember was I had no clue what to buy. So we asked the broker, who gave us some names and we picked 50 shares of GNFC at Rs 50. The only explanation I have for picking this share is that both of us were Chemical Engineers. Anyway I spent Rs2500 that day which was [...]

One of my favourite questions when I meet people is this: Is your money working for “You”?

The most frequent response I get is this: ‘How can money work for me? I work for money, don’t I?’
The second kind of response I hear is: ‘Yes, but it depends…..’ When I probe more and ask: ‘Okay, it          depends on what?’, they say: ‘It depends on the share market, on the real estate market…’
And there are a third kind who say: ‘Yes, of course! I make my money work for me’
And there is a fourth lot of people, who don’t answer. When I insist that they answer, they say: ‘I don’t know!’

Where are you in this? Are you a ‘I work for money’ guy? An “It depends’ guy? An ‘Of course’ guy? Or, are you an ‘I don’t know’ guy? I don’t know about you, but when I was first asked this question [...]

I think it is important to write this down before we launch the site, so that we don’t forget why we are doing this. As one of the initiators of this project, I can honestly say the reason why we got into this site is because I was dissatisfied with how I was managing my savings, the way I invested in stocks and mutual funds. Most of all I was unhappy with the current options that were available and I was using. My colleagues know my views on banks, financial institutions etc and trust me I am quite articulate when it comes to expressing them.
It is quite common for all of us to be dissatisfied with various goods and services that we buy, but we seldom go around doing much about it, least of committing a large fraction of your time, energy and money to find a solution for ourselves [...]