Selling my notebook

I finally decided to sell my notebook as I was sparingly using it for the last 1.5 years I had it with me.

My notebook is a DELL Inspiron 6000 with Centrino technology. When I bought it, it was the PCMag editor’s choice for 2005.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1777825,00.asp

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120201-page,1/article.html

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2376

Periodicals I read

This is important to note that one can stay abreast of the corporate world and the outside business environment only if one reviews books/periodicals frequently.

In my case, I have a passionate interest since 2003 to read up and soak up as much of knowledge as possible from the reading of periodicals.

My love affair with management books dates back to 2002.

Some of the regular periodicals I frequent are:

http://mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx

http://businessweek.com/

http://economist.com/index.html

In addition, my daily input of the Indian business climate is provided by means of the print edition of the Economic Times – http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/

General Electric – John F Welch, Jr.

Jack as he is popularly called raised the market cap of General Electric (NYSE: GE) by about $400 billion over the two decades of his reign at the top post of one of America’s best known faces – GE!

His autobiography http://www.straightfromthegut.com/index/index.html

spells out the roller coaster ride he had and how he moved into the top post at GE where he reigned supreme conquering corporate America by its horns!

I am deeply influenced by his innovative management style and the fact that here was a brutally frank yet such a demanding leader!

I usually like reading up books on corporate CEO’s and people who made it big.

I believe it teaches us the perspective of looking and thinking big picture.

IIFT peers doing well!

Just received an update from my IIFT peers that they have moved jobs and are into fairly high profile roles now.

One of them has mentioned that he is the Business development head for Asia Pacific and China for some MNC.

Another has mentioned that he has relocated to Denmark as a Regional head for their Sales/Marketing division.

Good for them and I wish them good luck!

Most of the others in our batch were anyway doing well already.

ex: We had a VP from Bank of America (BANA – http://www.bankofamerica.com/index.cfm) who used to head their GDIC who was from our batch, we had the head of HR of Ashok Leyland, we had senior people from Sales/marketing/BD background from Cummins, SHCIL, ICICI, Reliance, Swissre – http://www.swissre.com/.

The average age of people in our class was about 32 years. I was among the youngest to do the MIB at that time (2004) since I did it when I was 26.

The Warren Buffett way!

http://www.amazon.com/Warren-Buffett-Way-Second/dp/0471648116

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com

I have been an ardent follower of Warren Buffett and his investment practices since a long time. I bought my copy of the book “Buffettology” by Mary Buffett in 2003 when I first heard of Warren Buffett. Ever since, I was itching to know more about this man who can make compound interest work wonders for the world of investing! For the uninitiated, he is the only billionnaire who has made all his money just from the stock market and later on, by buying businesses! He also posts something like a CAGR in his holdings of over 21.5% (wow!) against the S&P’s index of roughly half of that (10%) from 1965 till 2005!

Needless to say, when I read a book called “The Warren Buffett way” by Robert G Hagstrom, I was not dissapointed.

It told me a lot about Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett that I did not know. It taught me his investment practices and gave me a firm foundation about reading up and assimilating the multitude of facts presented on the Berkshire annual reports and his annual letters to his shareholders.

It also told me that I have the qualities of being rational, level headed, going against the crowd – all prerequisites to jump into the world of investing.

I have deliberately stayed away from the stock market for the large part of the last 3 years. I did create online trading accounts at Kotakstreet.com and ICICIDirect way back in Spring 2004 but as usual it was driven by pure speculation.

I bought a couple of navratna stocks of ONGC and GAIL to test the waters then and made profit on GAIL (reasonable sum) while I lost money on ONGC.

I realized that is not investing – its trading and therein lies the difference!

Of course, one has to be extremely smart to be Warren Buffett and I would do wonders to even do 1/1000th as well as Warren Buffett did but I have made up my mind to move towards investing and not gambling/speculating. That mindset in itself speaks volumes for the influence the book (and Warren Buffett) has had on me.

I also did not go for some senseless real estate investments after reading this book. Thanks for that – a stitch in time saves nine.

If I invest Rs. 1 of my money anywhere, I want to make sure I do it sensibly knowing fully well about where I am putting my money. Lets see how things go!

Successful investing!

Additional information: http://www.thewarrenbuffettway.com/

Happy new year 2007!

Wish all my readers a very healthy, happy, safe and a prosperous new year 2007!

Its been a long time since I visited here.

Let me briefly explain what I was upto. I am a real estate investor and was caught up with some ‘site seeing’ activities – no pun intended!

Bangalore is currently in a huge real estate boom and the six stages of real estate investing need to be given a lot of thought. Its very difficult to get a good deal but the ‘deal of the decade’ is just a stone’s throw away – if one knows where to look and knows how to go about the due diligence process!

I am also currently catching up in reading multiple books.

Among them are:

– The Warren Buffett way by Robert G Hagstrom (Excellent book so far) – http://www.robertghagstrom.com/us/2002/0471648116/The_Warren_Buffett_Way_Second_Edition/

– Blue Ocean strategy – I bought this last year but have been too slow to read up so am trying to wrap it up – http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/

– The performance appraisal – question and answer book (a survival guide for managers) by Dick Grote

http://www.amanet.org/books/catalog/081447151X.htm

I am also catching up on a lot of spreadsheet activities as part of the due diligence process of my real estate Assets!

Successful investing!