What would an alien say

Some years ago, I wrote that if an alien were to visit Earth - and that sets the stage for how we should see things - they would say that English was invented in the US.

And now it occurred to me that if they were told that there was a global financial crisis in 2008-9, they would say - - ah, it started in Europe and Japan. No wonder they are doing so poorly.
That's quite something - somehow the originator of the crisis is faring rather well right now, and geniuses, and capital following them are still flocking to the US.

What would they say about India?
- may be, why are people leading such sorry lives, especially in very some sorry state of being.

An alien was at Sanjay Bakshi's seminar a few days ago, and she told me that - this is a very large number of people who seemingly dont want to find the next best investment idea... but want to learn about psychology and human fallacies. Pissed off biases and such.

Seeing the forest

As I try to make sense of why my portfolio has done so well, I realise that my concentrated portfolio has done well because of luck, and a very strong tide.

It's easy to say that my chosen X company has done well, performed well, and is building a foundation for future growth; but when I see the forest, I notice (almost all of a sudden and rather scarily) that too many companies have grown manifold.

It reminds me of the 2010-2012 time frame when people looked back at the 2004-2008 boom and said that you could throw darts to choose your companies and you would have doubled and tripled your money in quite a few names.
Pharma, housing finance, finance, textiles, chemicals, consumer products (but not FMCG), some auto, agrochemicals - a ridiculously large number of companies have been priced very strongly - and at times those prices seem to reflect true value, and in other cases they have gone way beyond their optimistic values.


And yet, infrastructure, telecom, hospitality, some auto, public sector banks, have performed rather poorly - - here, the prices seem to reflect the capital destroying capabilities of these companies.



The question is: Will today be a day when I will look back and say - man, this was never sustainable, and I was being too rosy about my own companies and it was all luck
Or
yeah, sure, there was a big correction but quite a few companies became stronger through the ensuing period even though I was lucky to have made returns up until this period.


The tide is bound to go out.
I have to focus on keeping my focus on the facts.