About

Welcome! ‘The Calm Investor’ is Warren Buffett’s first ever ghost-written site on investing, specifically for India! Not quite 🙂

Let’s try that again. ‘The Calm Investor’ is based on curiosity about the world around us, on how we can make better decisions, and become better investors.

Why this site

Dr. Feynman, on the difference between knowing the name of something and understanding it:

“See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.” [attribution – farnam street blog]

When I first started investing, it sounded like an arcane field only the super-intelligent and those steeped in everything from the world economy to fort architecture (moats anyone?) seemed to be qualified to operate in. The talking heads on CNBC held court on what was likely to happen in the market, on an hourly basis with references to central bank actions and currency movements in far-off countries. It was all quite intimidating. Small wonder then any ‘to be’ investor finds it a daunting prospect and feels not unlike a deer in headlights.

Sifting through the immense body of knowledge on investing provided the heartening realization that there are some core concepts of investing that every person irrespective of educational background and finance know-how can understand and indeed internalize. Also, the biggest determinant of investing success is in identifying and calming our own behavioral biases.

This site is an attempt to sift through a lot of the chaff around investing advice to unearth some of the more time-tested and reliable approaches, specifically applicable to the Indian market. A lot of the key messages on this site have been long propounded by some of the world’s foremost investors like Benjamin Graham, Philip Fisher, Warren Buffett and many more. In addition, I will try to highlight some common behavioral traits that tend to sabotage our efforts at achieving the goal of building long-term wealth.

If any post does not make sense because it’s shrouded in jargon, means, I either did a shoddy job writing it, or do not understand it very well myself. Please feel free to call me out on such instances.

What ‘The Calm Investor’ is:

• based on my personal experience, largely from investing in the Indian equity markets, supplemented by readings on the subject
• a distilled version of some of the most insightful content (books, annual reports, blogs) on the topic of investing. All of these are credited and links provided to the original source

What it is not:

• an extensive technical or academic look at the universe of financial management with in-depth commentary on every asset class under the sun
• a stock-tip service offering x00% returns in a few months

To get started, take a look at what guides my investing philosophy – Calm Investing Principles.

And a series of essential articles here: Investing Essentials

Here’s also the dull disclaimer in case any reader mistakes the content of this site as what the smartly turned out talking heads on financial news channels.

Do subscribe to email updates or the rss feed (links in the sidebar). You can also connect with us on twitter @calminvestor. I’d love to hear from you at thecalminvestor(at)gmail.com. Queries, feedback are most welcome.

Thanks for visiting!