<\/p>\n
\u201cRisk means more things can happen than will happen\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n -Elroy Dimson<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a rising market, most investment\/ trading styles do well despite overpaying. For, money gushing into any asset class can raise its price irrespective of underlying value. Prudence and safety are needless, even penalised during such times. But like most good things, such good runs – even if they extend over a long time – eventually reverse. Waking up to build controls after such reversal is too late.<\/span><\/p>\n Portfolio safety is like a car\u2019s seat belt<\/strong>. Both are minor irritants in good times, but life-saving during accidents. Just as it is prudent to always wear seat belts tolerating minor discomfort, it is important to control risk in portfolios even in good times tolerating lower relative returns.<\/span><\/p>\n Our preferred way to reduce risk in the portfolio is to buy a diversified set of good companies cheaply <\/strong>and hold them till they remain good and<\/em> don\u2019t get super expensive.<\/strong> Yes, there is an inherent conflict in this goal. Markets have become more efficient and everyone is trying to do the same. So good companies donot come cheap. Mostly. But there are two pockets<\/em> where mispricings are common. First is temporary hardships<\/strong> either in the world, country, sector or company during which even good companies get traded at throw away prices. And second is smaller companies<\/strong> which are not so well tracked and\/ or are less liquid and can remain mispriced.<\/span><\/p>\n Doing the above is easy in theory but difficult in practice. We need to exercise discipline and have safety margin in all the three components \u2013 (a) diversified uncorrelated positions, (b) good companies, and (c) reasonable valuations.<\/span><\/p>\n And while doing the above, there are bouts of luck and mistakes<\/strong>. Many times, probable outcomes don\u2019t happen and\/ or improbable outcomes happen. Often we get good outcomes beyond our expectations due to plain good luck. These times call for humility and trimming positions that get super expensive. Conversely despite doing the right thing our positions can fall. If there is no material deterioration in underlying fundamentals, these are times not for despondency or self-pity, but raising our bets. Lastly, we make mistakes; they are normal in a pursuit of higher than risk-free returns. When we make mistakes, mention of their account precedes that of achievements so that we don\u2019t lose the lessons.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cRisk means more things can happen than will happen\u201d -Elroy Dimson In a rising market, most investment\/ trading styles do well despite overpaying. For, money gushing into any asset class can raise its price irrespective of underlying value. Prudence and safety are needless, even penalised during such times. But like most good things, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-investment-mistake","category-investment-process"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1165"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1167,"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions\/1167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cedcapital.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}