Often enough I have rued the fact as to there are very few personal finance blogs written in the Indian context. There are 2 reasons for that – first it has to do with the fact that there is in fact a dearth of Indian personal finance bloggers in India. Secondly, I believe I have also been ignorant to an extent and that is something I can look to remedy.
Today, the blog I want to talk about is a popular Indian blog based on value investing, titled Safal Niveshak (meaning successful investor). Started by Vishal Khandelwal in 2011 and now run jointly along with Anshul Khare, this is a blog you would want to read if you are looking to invest some time and money (for the long-term) into direct equity.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT
In India, we are quite conventional and believe in toeing a straight line. It is only now that some people have begun to take risks and pursue passions instead of a systematically laid out job, only to end up doing better.
Vishal must have been an early adopter when he quit his conventional job of being a stock analyser in 2011 to start educating people on value investing. Today he does exactly that, not only through his blog posts but also through the value investing workshops he conducts through out the country. In fact, as soon as you sign up for their newsletter, you can download a host of value-added documents including a stock analyser.
The main emphasis of Safal Niveshak is on the concept and application of value investing. Through the posts, you can see that the duo literally worship the 3 best known names in value investing: Warren Buffet, Benjamin Graham and Charlie Munger.
Some of the frequent categories are stock talk (where a specific stock is thoroughly analysed without proclaiming a buy/sell recommendation), poke box (meant to poke your brain through thought-provoking content related to investing) and latticework of mental models.
ONE BIG POST
While most posts talked about either specific stocks or taking the learning from something else to investing, my favourite post has to be “A crash course in building your latticework of Mental Models”.
What started out as a book review of a Robert Hagstorm book – Investing: The Last Liberal Art, spawned off an entire category of posts. The book is based on Charlie Munger’s premise that good investing comes from deriving frameworks from various other disciplines. It is Munger who came up with the terminology of a latticework to talk about the various mental models contributing to better investing.
The post goes on to talk about some big frameworks (talkd about in Hagstorms’ book) from other disciplines like Physics, Biology and Social Sciences and how they apply to investing.
Starting from this post, there is a series – “Latticework of Mental Models” which does an amazing job of applying this learning of taking models from different disciplines. It makes for an intellectually simulating read.
Other 2 personal favourite posts from Safal Niveshak:
You can connect to the Safal Niveshak through the Website, Email, Facebook or Twitter
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