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Sold off Asahi Songwon for a very good profit.  The below shown chart should give you an idea of how much the stock grew in the past 1 year.

Also bought more stocks of MIC Electronics & Graphite India

This year the dividend payout has been pretty good. Add to that bonus shares from both Dabur (1:1) and & TVS Motors (1:1)

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Peter Lynch is a Wall Street investor and a research consultant at Fidelity Investments, one of the biggest fund companies in the world. Unlike the Warren Buffett model of investing where diversification is not the norm and the investments are concentrated around a few good solid companies, Peter Lynch’s investment principle is to invest in what you know and to keep the basket of companies diverse and large.

He’s the one who coined the word, “ten bagger” which means an investment that is worth ten times its original buying price.  Lynch goes on to give pointers on how to pick up the ten baggers, the kind of companies to avoid, how to design a portfolio, the silliest things people say about stocks.

This book is one of the best books to read before entering the market. If you are someone who would like to enter the stock markets and get into equity, mutual funds etc, this book is a must read.

Read more about Peter Lynch at his Wikipedia page here

A list of all the books that i have read till now and am currently reading are on the right side of this blog.  Though not a prolific reader, this year i have been reading quite a few books.  With still 4 months to go for the end of the year, i hope to have read at least 12 books this year; which would mean a book every month.  Hmmm….not bad

One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market
Author – Peter Lynch
Pages – 304
Publisher – Simon & Schuster

Above picture courtesy: Bfanderson

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Been a while since i updated my equity portfolio.  Some of the stocks were already at their highs; and i felt it was appropriate time for me to liquidate them and invest in others.

Bought the following

Sold the following

Hoping for the markets to correct sharply once the much expected double dip recession hits the US economy.  There would be lots of great bargains out there then.

Above stock price history courtesy:  Yahoo Finance

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The author has perfected a formula that he has used to beat the market consistently and earn more returns than what the index has provided. He calls it the Magic Formula Investing.  The formula is explained in the book in relatively easy language.  According to Greenblatt what you need to be concerned is just 2 things about a company:

• A company’s earnings yield

• Return on capital

The rationale is straightforward: buy shares in good businesses, measured by returns on capital, only when they’re available at bargain prices, defined as a high earnings yield.

The magic formula looks for companies that have the best combination of earnings yield and return on capital, with each input weighed equally. An outstanding company with an expensive stock ranked, say, first for return on capital but 1,999th on earnings yield, would have the same combined ranking of 2,000 as a low return on capital company within expensively priced shares, ranking 1,999th in return on capital but first on earnings yield.

Using this approach to create a regularly updated portfolio of about 30 stocks with the highest combined rankings, Mr Greenblatt tested his formula between 1988 and 2004. The results were remarkable: with only one down year, the magic portfolio would have returned 30.8 per cent a year, against a 12.4 percent annual return for the S&P 500. Rather than using the latest 12 months’ earnings to calculate earnings yield and return on capital, Mr Greenblatt and his analysts try to improve on the rote application of this formula by using earnings estimates in a “normal” year, one in which nothing unusual is happening within the  company, its industry or the overall economy.

source: Amazon

The Little Book That Beats The Market
Author – Joel Greenblatt
Pages – 176
Publisher – Wiley

After having nurtured the telecom sector of his company and the carving of the business meant that the business went to younger brother Anil, the elder brother Mukesh Ambani seems to be in a tearing hurry.

Mukesh Ambani-led RIL’s foray into the telecom sector will entail an investment of about $5 billion, for which it is open to sharing infrastructure of younger brother Anil’s group firm Reliance Communications, company officials said. The flagship firm of Ambani, who is known for making ultra-mega projects, would invest about a billion dollars for rolling out broadband services to attain a target of 100 million subscribers through the just acquired Infotel in five years, RIL top officials told analysts last night.

RIL acquired Infotel for Rs 4,800 crore on the day the Nahata group firm emerged as the sole player to have bid successfully for all-India spectrum at the end of the 16-day-long auction conducted by the government on Friday.Apart from this, the cash-rich RIL will have to pay Rs 12,872 crore to the government as the licence fee for spectrum bagged by Infotel, which would become the subsidiary of the Mukesh Ambani group’s flagship company.

Incidentally, the second largest largest telecom player, RCOM, bagged the highest number of circles along with Bharti Airtel for the 3G license auction, which concluded recently.

Read the full article here

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