The Practical Way

Tuesday, 21st June 2011

Compound interest

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Personal Finance, Wealth Building

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Compound interest is when the interest you have earned gains interest itself. For example, if you deposit £1000 in the bank and you get 10% interest per year, at the end of year 1 you will have £1100. Then at the end of year 2, you will have £1210. During the second year the interest is applied to your original amount (£1000) and to the interest that you gained at the 1st year (£10). This is how money multiplies over the years and it works for you. Notice that you have only deposited £1000, but then the money that you gain from interest multiplies by itself (together with your original amount) and works for you. This is the secret of how to become rich. Many of the richest people in the world have used this simple idea to create their fortunes, e.g. Warren Buffet, John D. Rockefeller.[...]

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Thursday, 23rd December 2010

A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Presentations, Stock Investing, Wealth Building

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Charles Munger
USC Business School
1994

I’m going to play a minor trick on you today – because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom – a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least in an effective way.

And therefore, the talk is sort of along the lines that some behaviorist psychologists call Grandma’s rule after the wisdom of Grandma when she said that you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert.[...]

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Monday, 20th December 2010

Quotes Charlie Munger

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Quotes

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All intelligent investing is value investing – acquiring more than you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.
— Charlie Munger

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
— Charlie Munger

Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them.
— Charlie Munger

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.
— Charlie Munger

Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.
— Charlie Munger

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Monday, 20th December 2010

How to combat a financial crisis

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Personal Finance, Wealth Building

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A lot of people are confused on what to do in this difficult economic climate. People are losing their jobs, governments are raising taxes, goods are becoming more expensive, currencies are devalued, etc. This is not a nice picture and many people are feeling helpless in this doom and gloom.

Maybe this is not the best way to think, but you have to consider how all this affects you. Maybe the general economy is bad, maybe companies are not doing so well, but the real question is how are you doing? What does all this mean for you? What can you do to avoid the chaos and (to take it a step further) profit from all this? Do not think that this is totally selfish, it partially is. But looking after yourself, you can survive and then you can provide for the people that matter to you. You can provide to them in the form of money, but even better you can provide to them in the form of knowledge.[...]

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Tuesday, 9th November 2010

Warren Buffett’s Business Evaluation Filters

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Stock Investing, Wealth Building

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At a press conference in 2001, when Warren Buffett was asked how he evaluated new business ideas, he said he used 4 criteria as filters.

• Can I understand it (Is it predictable. Do I have a reasonable probability of being able to assess where the business will be in 10 years)?[...]

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Monday, 1st November 2010

Charlie Munger Investment Principles Checklist

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Stock Investing, Wealth Building

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I finished reading “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” that details the thinking principles of Charlie Munger about investments and life in general. The book is an amazing read, because it shows how Charlie thinks about problems using many different ways. This helps him to avoid the “Man with a hammer” syndrome and allows him to see other aspects of problems and try many different ways to solve them.

In the book he shares a checklist he is using in evaluating companies.[...]

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Thursday, 21st October 2010

Dollar Cost Averaging

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Stock Investing, Wealth Building

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A lot of people are trying to time the market, but very few are able to do it consistently. The old advice of buy low and sell high is not that easy to implement and many people end up doing the exact opposite. An easy way to invest in the stock market is dollar-cost averaging. Here is a helpful post from fool.com that explain how it works:

Let’s begin with a definition. Dollar-cost averaging is a fancy term for periodic investments of fixed sums of money. Simply put, dollar-cost averaging involves investing a set amount of cash ($100, $500, $1,000) at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly, yearly) into a stock, a group of stocks or a fund. The key to its success is consistency. Investing the same amount each time on a set schedule can really help grow your portfolio over time.[...]

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Thursday, 21st October 2010

Enterprise Value

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Stock Investing, Wealth Building

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When you are evaluating a company you need many tools that will help you to look at the company in different ways. One such tool is enterprise value. Here is a very good article from fool.com that explains what it is:

When trying to determine the value for a given company, a metric that many investors use religiously is market capitalization, better known by the shortened, slightly sassier term “market cap.” It’s simple enough to figure out — all you do is multiply the company’s shares outstanding by its current share price.[...]

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Monday, 4th October 2010

The Art of Stock Valuation, part 1

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Stock Investing, Wealth Building

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When you are looking to invest your money in the stock market you need to go through thousands of companies and decide which ones will prosper in the future and which ones will not. The way to decide which ones will prosper is more of an art than it is science. Unfortunately, there is no secret formula for this although many people have tried unsuccessfully to create one that will work over the years. Many of these theories have been created based on mathematical models and all of them failed in due course.

This series of posts will look at people who have been successful at picking prosperous businesses over the years and will try to reverse engineer their successful approach. We will look at both quantitative and qualitative measures that can be used to evaluate companies. The data available for each of these companies is so vast that we need to sort through it, ignoring the noise and concentrate on the key metrics that really matter.[...]

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Wednesday, 8th September 2010

Option Strategies

Written by George Traganidas Topics: Options, Wealth Building

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There are a lot of option strategies and each one of them should be used in the appropriate situation. The guide below is a summary of a series of articles about the stock strategies. This summary will help you to identify which strategy to use in which situation so you can maximise your profits and reduce your loses. I will update the list below as a find new information about the strategies or as I learn new ones.[...]

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