CTFN's #ICYMI weekend edition: #Merger and deal activity are expected to be robust in 2021, and regulator scrutiny is expected to be rigorous.

(thread) #antitrust #investming #stocks

It's been more than 60 years since Philip Fisher wrote the investment classic in "Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits".

The book is famous for the 15 questions which one must ask before investing in any company.

THREAD

These are the questions which help us in determining the "quality" of a business.

Warren Buffett has time and again said that he is 85% Graham and 15% Fisher.

Let's have a look at these 15 questions.

P.S.: Stocks listed in this thread are not to be taken as recos.

1. Does the company have products or services with sufficient market potential to make possible a sizable increase in sales for at least several years?

The important point which you must note here is that you must not just look at the size of the company.

You must also look at the opportunity size of the market in which the company exists.

Let's take the case of HDFC Bank. Although it is a huge bank, but it controls just 9% of the total credit market in India, suggesting an enormous opportunity for it to capture.

2. Does the management have a determination to continue to develop products or processes that will still further increase total sales potentials when the growth potentials of currently attractive product lines have largely been exploited?

A children's book explanation of what's happening:

1. If you are "smart money" you are allowed to take your $1 and leverage it up to $15+

2. You can now buy $15 of stock AND if you promise to short companies, you can short $15 of stock as well

3. In finance language, this means that you are $30 "gross" ($15 of longs + $15 of shorts) but $0 net (+$15 of longs -$15 of shorts). This makes everyone feel good because it feels like you are taking zero risk...but in reality, your $1 is exposed to $30 of risk.

4. Now you go around and tell your friends about both your longs and your shorts and when you do it at a restaurant vs on Reddit, its called an "ideas dinner".

5. You also publish your longs on a quarterly lag via an SEC rule. You don't have to tell anyone about your shorts.

6. Now the less cool people who weren't invited to the ideas dinners, start copying your longs based on your report.

7. You realize that publicizing your shorts is also a good idea so instead of only selling stocks, you also BUY options (puts) which has to be reported.

8. Now everyone can see both your longs and your shorts and if you have a hot hand, you can likely predict that the cool people from the dinner as well as the less cool people monitoring your filings will copy you.

9. But then an outsider notices that the math is way off!

Everything You Need To Know about Emergency Funds

A Thread 🧵👇

1/ Let’s understand the meaning of Emergency Fund, it is a fund that will help you at the time of financial crisis or unplanned scenarios. It is also known as contingency funds.

An Emergency Fund is the first step towards financial freedom.

2/ For example, when the Covid-19 hits many people lose their jobs which results in loss of financial support and people find difficulties buying basic necessities for themselves. So, having emergency funds helps you to sustain the period.

3/ Now the question arises, how to build an Emergency Fund?

An emergency fund cannot be built overnight but it can be done gradually. Firstly, you need to analyse your monthly expenses and then, you need to set aside a particular amount every month.

4/ Say, you have decided to have an emergency fund of ₹3 lakhs. In this case, you can set aside ₹45000 or ₹50000 every month to accumulate the corpus you need. It is fine to even cut down on your investments to build this amount.

To understand Financial Shenanigans & detect accounting manipulations from Annual Reports with checklist
In detail and lucid terms

Financial Shenanigans
(Part-1)
https://t.co/wa6HSElug0

(Part-2)
https://t.co/Vrva17GvgP

(Part-3)
https://t.co/XuziOCDHL2

@dmuthuk @ms89_meet