“The game of investing is a process of discovering who you are, what you’re interested in, what you’re good at, what you love to do, then magnifying that until you gain a sizable edge over all the other people.” — Li Lu
Hi, my name is Shlok and I’m a student at Berkeley. I built this website to be an evolving record of my mistakes, philosophies and ideas.
An investor once explained uncertainty to me through physics. He said that electrons exist as probability clouds, where we can only describe the chance of finding them in a certain place. If two atoms were forced so close that their electron clouds completely overlapped, we’d need to know exactly where each electron is, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that’s impossible. That impossibility creates resistance between electrons, and that resistance is why we don’t fall through the floor. That idea has changed how I think about markets. If the physical world itself rests on uncertainty, markets surely do too. It has shown me that uncertainty is structure that ironically brings sense to the world around us. My work is about learning to operate within uncertainty: to study it, respect it, and document the process of trying to understand it. It’s a lifelong quest I’m ready to dedicate decades to.
On this website, I’ll share what’s capturing my curiosity and the mistakes I’m learning from each month. I hope it marks the beginning of understanding who I am as an investor.
Notes/Resources
Developing a framework to research companies
I am trying to develop a repeatable process and speed up the amount of time it takes to ramp up on a company. To do this, I combined elements The Investment Checklist, Big Mistakes, Fooling Some of the People All the Time and investors that I spoke to at funds with different investment philosophies to create this document: “[Ticker] Initial Research” I am open to any feedback on ways to improve this, so feel free to shoot me an email if you feel like I am missing anything.
Recently I have been increasingly captivated by short-selling and specifically fraud companies. The Art of Short Selling and Financial Shenanigans, Fourth Edition have been wonderful in teaching me the fundamentals/history of the space along with some red-flags to look for. I highly recommend both books and have included some of my notes/takeaways below.
I think the best way to retain these concepts is to pitch a company and apply them, so I will upload that pitch here when I’m finished.
Fraud shorts
Currently reading through the Eighth Edition of Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies. Actually bought this book so most of my notes are within the margins, but is a great way to understand how executives manage value and great tips for understanding valuation concepts in-depth.
Valuation
I want to document my emotional patterns and study why some of my theses unfolded differently than I expected, so I can build a clearer understanding of how I think. I’ll try to keep it extremely concise so I can be more proactive about updating it. Here is the working document: Mistakes & Biases