“When I first went to work at Citibank in 1968, they had a slogan “Scared Money Never Wins”
It’s important to play judiciously, to have more successes than failures,and to make more on your successes than you lose on your failures.
But it’s crippling to have to avoid all failures, and insisting on doing so can’t be a winning strategy.It may guarantee you against losses , but its likely to guarantee you against gains as well.”-Howard Marks
Category: Anecdotes
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Management Lessons:Adani Style
In the late 1990s, an employee of Adani Exports took a wrong call in sugar trading, resulting in a Rs 20-crore loss. Fearing he would be sacked, he apologized for the grave mistake and handed in his resignation letter. Gautam Adani, in his thirties then, tore up the resignation and told him with a smile: “I know you will not make a similar mistake in future because of this lesson. Why should your next employer benefit from this learning when I have paid the price for it?”
Close associates say Adani has a great ability to win over people, political or otherwise. When Mundra port was being built, a consultant came up with a novel idea of building floating break-waters to contain sea waves at the cost of Rs 7 crore. The experiment sunk — literally — within 20 minutes of its execution. Adani, who watched the disaster calmly, turned to the consultant and put his arm around his shoulder. “Well tried,” he said before leaving. The consultant broke into tears and worked for the group for the next 15 years.-from ET
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How to be a contrarian Fund Manager
In 1999, when his portfolio was composed of everything no one wanted, Walter Schloss was asked how, even if his own convictions were unshaken, he could ensure that his investors stuck with him. Being a true contrarian required just one rule, he said: “Never tell a client what they own.”-from Economist
Warren Buffett penned a recent piece where he talked about his real estate investments.
One was an investment in farmland in 1986 where the normalized return from the farmland he calculated to be 10%
The other was an investment in New York Realty where the unleveraged rental yield was around 10%
Both these investments worked out very well for him
Whats interesting to me was that both the investments gave him double digit yields when he invested.
Realty investors know how difficult this is to achieve.
In Mumbai,residential yields are now around 2% and commercial yields are around 6%.
The only other person I know who is getting double digit yields on the current value of her property is my Mother-In-Law.
Maybe,I should blog less and listen to her more !
After I was in the business for a couple of years, I made a lot of money and I thought, this is easy. I was selling short, I waited for the market to rally, I took all of my money and I sold short. Within 2 months, I was wiped out, I lost everything. I knew what I was doing about the companies, they all went bankrupt eventually. But in the meantime they all skyrocketed and I did not have staying power so I lost everything.
I realized how much I did not know about markets, about other people`s emotions. I realized there was a great deal that I needed to learn. Markets are not rational and you have to factor that in. Eventually they are rational, but there are times when they are not.-from Jim Rogers on the Markets