In the 1st part of How to Learn & Grow in Investing we covered the board framework of creating a Positive Feedback Loop and discussed (including why) various areas one needs to cover in investing.
In this part-2, we will discuss some specific resources, tips & hacks to enable you to cover those areas.
The very first & important thing that you need to do is create some time & space to cover each area. One of the common mistakes that a lot of investors make is focusing mainly on stock specific research and not enough on thinking, writing & reflecting.
Reading is a relatively easier exercise than writing, thinking & reflecting and thus unless you create a separate time space entirely for these areas, you will never be able to devote them enough time & efforts that they deserve.
Farnam Street explains this very well-
Now before going into how I divide my time to cover all these areas; let me first talk about Twitter.
Twitter is the primary source of information for me on a daily basis. Provided you follow the right set of people, Twitter is an absolute goldmine for everything- news flow, stock ideas, research, frameworks & thoughts and so much more.
I think it is an absolute must for every Investor to use Twitter as a source of information.
And if you are on twitter, you need to use Tweet Deck.
My personal tweet deck is organized in five columns-
Stocks News- Here I follow various news outlets like Mint, CNBC, ETNOW, BQ etc
Investing Community- these are super investors who’s not even an single tweet I want to miss and includes the following people-
Analyst Mohalla- This account tweets summaries & snippets of results, interviews and also some high frequency data.
Companies- Here I follow accounts of promoters & companies that I am tracking and/or invested in. Nowadays a lot of companies & promoters are relatively active on twitter and sometimes you might get some interesting insights about the company or the promoter itself through their tweets.
Home- Everything else comes under this.
Two hacks you can follow here-
If you create separate lists like how I have done for news, investors etc. You can unfollow those accounts to avoid duplicity of their tweets on your Home feed and keep it clean.
If you come across someone’s tweet and found it valuable, you should follow them and overtime see if their tweets are adding value to you. If not, you should look to unfollow them, otherwise your feed will get cluttered and noisy overtime.
Idea is to keep things organized & clean to be able to benefit from it.
And you don’t have to check twitter constantly; determine some specific times of the day when you will go through your feed.
I personally go through my entire twitter feed thrice a day- once in morning, afternoon and night; it provides a good balance between being updated & quantum of feed to read each time.
Now, I personally divide my week as follows to cover all areas-
A. Monday-Friday (1st half): Reading
First half of every day, I focus on reading all sorts of things like blogs, forums, reports, management interviews etc.
As I highlighted in the 1st part that your readings should not be limited to only a specific company that you are analyzing at any given point in time; these readings cover that other readings part.
Following are the resources that I follow for my readings-
Daily Basis-
Other resources that I try to cover; not on daily basis as updates on these are not very frequent (once every 2-3 months); but I try to cover few of them every week on a rotational basis and that overtime allows me to cover all of them once every quarter or so-
Here as well, I follow the same principle of noise cancelling wherein If I come across a certain post of some blog and found it to be of value, I add the same in my list and then overtime if I do find value from their new posts as well, I keep following them or else they are out of the list.
Even if you don’t want to read any of it, I’ll highly recommend you to atleast read Alpha Ideas on a daily basis. They share a list of 8-10 links every day and one should try to read atleast those.
The best use case of Alpha Ideas for me has been discovering various other blogs & resources. A lot of the names in the above lists were first discovered by me through Alpha Ideas only.
B. Monday-Thursday (2nd Half): Stock Specific Research
2nd half is when I do my research on a particular stock that I am currently looking at.
Earlier we had written a post on How To Go About Researching a Stock, do check that out for some broad framework & insights on this topic.
C. Friday (2nd Half): Writing
In part 1, I had discussed the importance of writing and the need to maintain a diary. Well, that was the level 1 of writing.
Level 2 is when you start writing proper notes around stocks, frameworks, insights etc. This sort of writing helps you review your research & understanding and identify & fill gaps in them.
And then Level 3 is when you write such notes and put it out there in public forums. Writing something that would be read by everyone makes you work much harder & think more clearly because others will call out any bullshit. It also opens you up to counter views which can improve your understanding of the topic that you have written about.
And more than anything, it helps you with networking. I can tell you with my personal experience that I was never part of any group or I never knew many people through my professional experience; my entire network has been built on the back of my public writings on Twitter, ValuePickr, Substack Blog (Diary of a Private Investor) and now on Surge.
In fact, the whole idea of Weekly Insights was born out of these principles that whatever raw thoughts that I have, I need to put them into writings as proper notes. And this process of writing has helped me expand my thought process, research and understanding of these thoughts.
D. Saturday: Thinking & Reflecting
I keep Saturday reserved entirely for thinking. As the markets are closed there is no distraction and the news flow on Saturday is also very low and thus without much noise & distraction it becomes the perfect day to think and reflect.
Areas that require a lot of thinking & reflecting and that I cover on Saturdays include;
Thinking & reflecting on various thoughts & observations that I have in mind and my diary to generate some actionable insights
Existing portfolio & investments
Review watchlist to determine which next stock should I take up for detailed research
E. Sundays: Break
Market is an ocean, there is so much to do and there is no end of it; there is always something new to read and research on. So, unless one takes a forced break, they will burnout.
And the importance of this is something that I have realized only in recent times and thus have started with this practice. Though I have not completely achieved it, I still end up working half day on Sundays (so it’s a WIP); but I try to do things that require less efforts & thinking.
That cover everything that I wanted to share in this post. Whatever I have shared in these two posts is entirely what I have learned, know & practice on a daily basis; and don’t think I can share anything else or more with anyone who comes to me seeking some advice on learning & investing.
I’ll end these series with this old video of Late Mr. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala on Wizards of Dalal Street; if you have not watched this; leave everything else and watch it first.
This video is what got me into the markets in the first place, made me realize & believe in the possibilities that equity investing has, and at every low point in my investing journey I always revisit this-
That’s it for this week, new insight coming up next week. So stayed tuned!
Surge Capital is a trade/brand name used by Ankush Agrawal (Individual SEBI Registered Research Analyst INH000008941) to provide equity research services in the Indian Equity Markets.
“Registration granted by SEBI, and certification from NISM in no way guarantee performance of the Research Analyst or provide any assurance of returns to investors”
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