FAIR & FINE ???

Let us say, your friend and you are partners in a partnership firm. Your friend chances upon a piece of land which may be of use to your partnership firm. Let us say the fair value of that land is Rs 125 but he seems to be getting a good deal at Rs 100. What should he do?

Is there a ‘Bubble’ in Quality?

The entry of ‘quality’ and ‘moat’ into the lexicon of most investors has resulted in valuations of these businesses touching stratospheric levels. Consequently, investors of today are faced with some difficult decisions.

Fool’s Wisdom #4 : An alternate approach to position sizing

Howard Marks in his classic, The most important thing, divides the investing community into people who think that the future can be foreseen or the ‘I know’ group as against the ‘I don’t know’ group viz those who believe that it is absolutely impossible to tell what tomorrow will bring.

Wheels India Rights Issue – A Free Lunch for minority investors??

Wheels India has announced a rights issue only for minority investors, which seems to present an interesting opportunity.

Fool’s Wisdom # 3: Tennis v/s Roulette

Students of behavioral finance and game theory would have probably read about the group mind exercise which involves choosing a number between 0 and 100 such that the winning number is 2/3^rd the average of the guesses of the group. 

Fool’s Wisdom # 2: One, Few, Many or All??

No framework on portfolio construction can be developed without first choosing between the camps of concentration and diversification. In this second, of a four part series, we discuss the subject as we see it.

Fool's Wisdom # 1 -Its how much that matters !!!

Whenever a novice investor suffers financial losses in markets pat comes the advice from relatively seasoned players “Consider it as tution fees for your learning”. After having paid (and continuing to pay) enormous amounts of such tution fees on numerous occasions we are beginning an attempt at collating some learnings through posts thus appropriately labeled “Fool’s Wisdom”.

VIP Industries – Packed off by the Rupee

While domestic consumption oriented stocks have generally been having a party of their own in the past 2-3 years, one tribe member they clearly forgot to invite is VIP Industries, the largest seller of branded luggage in the country.

Polaris – A good value punt?

We think Polaris Financial Technology Limited is a good punt in the (oft misused) context of value investing.

Post Delisting Options

Some time back we had made a case link for avoiding the delisting theme since we thought the current regulations are 1) flawed and 2) significantly favourable to promoters.

A swan or an Ugly Duckling ??

In Feb 2012, the promoters of Numeric Power (now Swelect Energy Systems) chose to sell its core UPS business (roughly 90% of revenues and profits) to Legrand for ~ 825 cr through a slump sale.

Is this a fat Pitch?

Buffet has been frequently quoted on his strategy of swinging hard at a fat pitch (a juicy full toss for us Indian cricket lovers) when the right opportunity presents itself. Likewise, we have been swinging hard at two recent open offers where we believe the odds to be quite favorable. Needless to say that this post needs to be seen in light of our vested interests. 

Please mind the Gap

First up a disclosure – This post is about a company whose business falls way outside our circle of competence (its more like a dot of competence J in our case). However, we are still inclined to stick our neck out because Mr. Market’s behavior (or rather the lack of it) has surprised us. Your views are sought to lend greater clarity to our thoughts.

A brush with (Brain) death

This post talks about the role of “shit happens” in special situations

Extraordinary Popular Delusions

Last year the Atlas Copco delisting made us great returns!!

Licensed to Speculate!!

This post talks about an untouchable sector, the institutional imperative and the art of speculation in long term investing (ironical isn't it!)

Hic...Hic..Hurray !!!

This post elaborates a probabilistic thinking framework we used to evaluate an idea. Worked well in the end, but with dollops of luck!

An Introduction

Welcome,

A joint effort of Abhinav Mansinghka and Niren Parekh this blog will focus on thoughts & investment opportunities in the Indian equity market. “Manufactured Luck” as the name suggests is the basis of our investment philosophy.