Poise

Hey.

Story’s changed already.

IT has suddenly become a defensive buy, it seems.

Not perceived as oil dependent.

See how fast that happened.

Five weeks ago one was hearing the RIP bugles for IT, or so the spin-doctors were trying to spin it.

Bottom-line : don’t believe the stories being spun. Have your own…

… high conviction.

And, the opportunity is…

…now.

Make up your mind.

Invest where you see stability and growth. Invest in India.

There are a lot of high conviction ideas in India that can be latched on to.

Fear makes good investments fall too. That is happening now. To take advantage of this effect, one needs to be fearless with high conviction.

How does one build high conviction in a stock?

Repeated shareholder-friendliness shown by a management.

Clean balance-sheet.

Abundance of free cashflow.

Debt-free-ness.

Longevity.

Vision.

Margin of safety.

That’s it.

Oh, one more thing.

Don’t force the market.

Let it make you enter.

Be poised with a funded GTT order in place before market open.

Keep doing this throughout the fall, as margin of safety deepens. One can do this if one has created enough liquidity during good times, and if one keeps entering with small entry quanta proportional to one’s networth.

Idea is to enter with and into high conviction multiple times, each time lowering the buying average.

With that, one sets oneself up for a fast multiple when markets recover.

It’s boiling down to…

…poise.

Hot-Iron Action

Cockiness, …

…over-confidence in oneself, …

…under-estimation of adversaries, …

… rule the world as if king forever, no matter what, …

… irrespective of domestic and international horrors committed, …

… when an entity exhibits such characteristics, …

… implosion is not far away.

Right. Entity implodes.

Now what?

You’ll get value. Buy it.

Use a small entry quantum.

Buy repeatedly. As value deepens.

Buy as much as you can, so that your buying average gets lower and lower. Needless to say you are buying high-conviction underlyings. Ideally, you are then fully invested during the ensuing mayhem and before some kind of normalcy resumes.

However, when there’s blood on the streets, it’s very difficult to buy. Fear rules. Everyone you know is advising you different things. Your own pants are threatening to slip. One of the best independent indicators to green-signal buying is when every square inch of your body and mind squirms at the thought of buying. Can you teach yourself top buy during such times?

It doesn’t come automatically. We are not born with it. We have to rewire. We need to see such times, more than once, watch others do it right, and learn. Going against the crowd needs courage and self-belief. Comes with time.

How does one identify contrarian times?

At such times, close people will have a world full of advice to offer. It doesn’t matter if one has been doing something for multiple decades, they ‘know’ it better and will ‘teach’ one how to do it properly. If one can recognize such moments, one knows that contrarian times prevail. Why such behaviour? People around us become enthused. Perhaps owing to ‘developments’, the ‘this time it’s different snare’, or owing to some mania that has caught their fancy, or something or the other that has deranged rational thinking. You need to recognize those times when such derangements prevail.

Like now.

And this will continue. Am sensing a huge derangement. Noticing large irrationalities in thinking. Lots of advice flowing in. Noted. This is the time. Identified. Big chunk done.

Fine.

Now, we act.

No second-guessing once identification is done.

We remain active till there’s time to act.

What if…

…after the mid-term election in the US there’s no opportunity to invest in value for a while? Longish while?

Might as well do so when value is available.

Right. Let’s go.