Raymond Moses - Founder, MoneyWorks4meI think it is important to write this down before we launch the site, so that we don’t forget why we are doing this. As one of the initiators of this project, I can honestly say the reason why we got into this site is because I was dissatisfied with how I was managing my savings, the way I invested in stocks and mutual funds. Most of all I was unhappy with the current options that were available and I was using. My colleagues know my views on banks, financial institutions etc and trust me I am quite articulate when it comes to expressing them.
It is quite common for all of us to be dissatisfied with various goods and services that we buy, but we seldom go around doing much about it, least of committing a large fraction of your time, energy and money to find a solution for ourselves and our fellow human beings. We just crib, vent our frustations and get on with our lives. We are seldom outraged enough to do something significant about it. However this time I was and so were most of the fellow alchemists in the room
I have a healthy pride about being an engineer and going through 5 years of rigorous education at IIT Kanpur. Most of all I simply loved mathematics and what numbers reveal to a trained mind. In contrast I believe rightly or wrongly that finance is a much simpler application of maths and logic. So I was convinced it cannot be really all the difficult. In my next visit to my favourite place on the earth, the bookstore, I picked up books on investing in stocks. The first book I picked up was on value investing and I was hooked. I started diving deeper into it, read what people wrote about Warren Buffett’s way of investing and it was clear to me, that we need to follow the principles of value investing
Soon Sreeram, my partner, was also completely sold on investing directly using this approach. We got Madhu, our computer geek, to search for the data required to make the investment decisons. We wanted 10 years data and it was not available on the net. We had to spend huge amount of time converting available data to the form we required to take decisions. This was proving to be quite frustrating. It appeared to me that the current state of affairs were all conspiring to make it impossible for an ordinary investor to get this right all by himself. But that is precisely what we should be doing with our hard earned money, taking charge of investing it ourselves
Around the same time, I was reading The World is Flat and was very impressed by what is says about how individuals have the unprecedented opportunity to compete with the larger players on a level playing field. I was getting more and more convinced about the need for a solution that enabled people like us to take sensible stock investment decisions. A solution that gave us the confidence about our decisions even when the market behaves erratically. That solution is Moneyworks4me.
Team-MoneyWorks4me
hello,
it is quite clear from this web site that you are an articulate person.your demo is quite impressive,one can clearly see the imprints of ben graham and buffet.I ,to some extent share the views of this value investing class.most imortant advice,i believe, fom ben graham is that a true investor is seldom force to sell his shares .but i should add that value investing has its negative points.No share is at discount without a reason.you should be humble to accept that you have taken a wrong bet,this i believe is what required in stock markets.congrts for this initiative taken by you.
alok agarwal
Thanks Alok. I agree with you that one must be humble to accept that one makes some decisions that don't quite work out, makes one wish that one had done it differently. I certainly have learnt a lot from such decisions and hopefully wiser not to repeat the same ones.
There are always some reasons why a stock may be at a discounted price, some valid, some valid only for the short term and not valid for the long term. Ones ability to make this distinction is really the journey, isn't it. It is here that one needs a framework, which may not be 100% right, but robust enough to help us make sensible decisions and learn from it. Every framework becomes more and more useful as one uses it regularly. I have found it very useful to stick to the principles of Value investing. I also believe times like Oct 2008 to Mar 2009 when the markets are irrationally depressed will happen again and wish that people who believe strongly in value investing will not miss such opportunities