Or in the words of Buffett – don’t ask your barber if you need a haircut. Or in still simpler words – don’t ask the faculty of a GMAT training centre about the career prospects after MBA. His incentive is to get you enrolled, and thus would create a bias in his mind no matter how honest he is as a person. continue reading…
Kurt Cobain yells out in the end of smells like teen spirit – a denial !!!!!!
And wordsworth once said “ my heart leaps out in thousand joys , as it beholds a rainbow in the sky”. Or he said something to that ilk I cant exactly remember – the point is that a rainbow is an illusion but since it is pleasing, Wordsworth is ready to believe it. continue reading…
Since I know that most of the people who visit this blog will not open the links mentioned in “About this blog” post; So I will explain the 25 principles discussed by Charlie Munger one by one.
The first one is about Incentives. continue reading…
Charlie Munger says that one mental model he finds useful is inversion. He uses the quote by a dead mathematician – invert always invert. Inversion allows us to compare and contrast the original with the inverted. Pretty good example was this movie.
This book is half the size of Snowball (the other buffett biography). On top of that, it was written some 15 years before Snowball. So I did not expect to up any new insight about Buffett having read Snowball already. Indeed Snowball manages to do a much better job of demystifying Buffett, the writer of snowball would have had used this book among other materials for her research. Snowball makes a more earnest attempt to get to the bottom of the person rather than the businessman. Maybe fifteen years ago Buffett was just a business curiosity and since then has become much more.
But demystifying Buffett ?!. Isn’t he a simple what you see is what you get aww shucks hillybilly businessman. Well, even after reading both these books certain questions about him remain unsolved. continue reading…
I always thought that Indians should be instinctively good at value investing. I mean we love bargains and like to minimize our expenditures. And if there is any community which would be best at value investing it has to be Gujjus. Mohnish Pabrai makes the same point in his book Dhando Investor. Dhando ( dhanda or business) as practiced in Gujarat has always been minimizing the downside risk while retaining the upside potential pretty much what value investing preaches , or so the author claims. continue reading…
“You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender”
-Marlon Brando as Terry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrq96cW2BuY
Americans are very fond of lists such as top 100 this or top 20 that. And whenever they make a list of top Hollywood quotes of all time, this one invariably finds its place. Apart from the fact that it was Brando delivering it, the reason for its immortality is that we often feel like saying in life– I could have been a contender. But essentially this is nothing but self pitying and won’t get you or Brando anywhere. continue reading…
It is the case study every MBA student is aware of – illustrating the significance of branding by citing the hostile reaction of Americans to try a new improved version of coke. No offence to anyone but the behavior of the people was very similar to what would be the behavior of your docile, most harmless dog if you take his bone away from him. continue reading…
