Chuck Akre’s Three-Legged Stool: The 25-Year Compounder Framework
When Charles T. Akre Jr. — the soft-spoken Virginia investor who turned a small boutique into a multibillion-dollar compounding machine — was asked at a 2011…
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Behavioural finance
92 articles. Educational only: none of these is a research report or a recommendation.
Behavioural finance
Behavioural finance
The Outsiders Doctrine: William Thorndike’s 2012 Study of Eight Unconventional CEOs and the Five Capital-Allocation Choices That Built ~20% Annual Shareholder Returns
Some of the greatest fortunes in American corporate history were not built by the most charismatic operators, the loudest brand-builders, or the most aggressive empire-acquirers. They…
Behavioural finance
The Conjunction Fallacy: Tversky & Kahneman’s 1983 ‘Linda Problem’ — Why Indian Investors Believe Elaborate Multi-Leg Bull Theses Are More Probable Than Simple Ones
“In 1983, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman published a six-page paper in Psychological Review with one of the most counter-intuitive results in cognitive psychology: when given…
Behavioural finance
James Montier’s Modified C-Score: The 6-Variable Cooking-the-Books Detector That Complements Beneish M-Score and Piotroski F-Score
India now has over 11 crore unique investors registered with NSE as of 2025 — up from barely 3 crore at the start of the decade.…
Behavioural finance
Capacity to Suffer: Tom Russo’s Doctrine on Why Long-Term Compounders Tolerate Short-Term Reported-Earnings Drag
Most Indian retail investors look at a quarterly result, see a margin dip or a flat top-line, and immediately ask the wrong question: “Has the business…
Behavioural finance
The Bias Blind Spot: Pronin, Lin & Ross (2002)
In April 2002, Stanford social psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross published a paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin…
Behavioural finance
Vigil Mechanism & Whistleblower Policy Disclosures: SEBI LODR Regulation 22 and Companies Act §177(9)
India’s equity investor base has multiplied roughly four-fold in seven years — from ~3 crore unique investors in FY18 to over 11 crore registered NSE investors…
Behavioural finance
Board Meeting Frequency: SEBI LODR Regulation 17(2) and the Forensic Governance Engagement Test
India’s retail investor base has gone from roughly 3 crore unique PAN holders at NSE in March 2019 to over 11 crore in 2025 — a…
Behavioural finance
Myopic Loss Aversion (Benartzi & Thaler 1995): Why Indian Retail Investors Sabotage Long-Term Returns by Checking Portfolios Too Often
In 1995, two behavioural economists — Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler — published a paper that won Thaler the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.…
Behavioural finance
Net Debt to EBITDA Ratio: The Single Solvency Test Credit Analysts Care About Most
Almost every Indian retail investor learns to look at Debt-to-Equity, EPS, and P/E. Very few learn to look at the single ratio that professional credit analysts…
Behavioural finance
Look-Through Earnings: Warren Buffett’s 1990 Berkshire Letter Framework for Measuring Your True Portfolio Earnings
Open a brokerage statement in India today and you will see one earnings number that the system insists is “yours” — the dividend credit. Everything else…
Behavioural finance
Ambiguity Aversion: Daniel Ellsberg’s 1961 Paradox and Why Indian Investors Prefer the Illusion of Probabilistic Certainty in Weekly Options Over the Honest Uncertainty of Long-Term Equity
Daniel Ellsberg — later more famous for the Pentagon Papers, but in his Harvard PhD work a serious decision theorist — presented a deceptively simple thought…
Behavioural finance
EV/Sales Ratio: The Capital-Structure-Neutral Revenue Multiple Every Indian Long-Term Investor Must Master
The number of registered investors on the National Stock Exchange has multiplied from roughly 3 crore in 2020 to more than 11 crore by early 2026…
Behavioural finance
Peter Lynch’s Six Categories of Stocks: The 1989 ‘One Up on Wall Street’ Classification Discipline Every Indian Investor Must Master Before the Next Multibagger Hunt
Peter Lynch's six-bucket classification — slow growers, stalwarts, fast growers, cyclicals, turnarounds, asset plays — is the discipline that prevents Indian retail investors from applying the…
Behavioural finance
Familiarity Bias and Home-Country Bias: How Huberman (2001) and French & Poterba (1991) Explain Why 99% of Indian Retail Portfolios Stay Inside India
An investor in Mumbai who buys only Mumbai-listed equities, who concentrates 18% of his portfolio in his employer’s shares, who has never opened a Liberalised Remittance…
Behavioural finance
Graham Number: Benjamin Graham 1949 Intrinsic-Value Formula √(22.5 × EPS × BVPS)
Among India’s 11 crore registered equity investors as of early 2026, fewer than one in fifty can write down Benjamin Graham’s square-root intrinsic-value formula from memory.…
Behavioural finance
Authority Bias: Stanley Milgram’s 1961 Yale Obedience Experiment and Why Indian Investors Hand Their Wealth to TV Stock Pickers
If you have ever bought a stock within ten minutes of a celebrity portfolio manager naming it on a business-news channel, you have not made a…
Behavioural finance
Hyperbolic Discounting: Strotz (1956) & Laibson’s (1997) Bias Behind Why Indian SIP Investors Quit at Month 21
Hyperbolic discounting describes the empirically robust finding that humans value a reward today disproportionately more than a reward tomorrow, but value a reward 365 days from…
Behavioural finance
Chairperson Independence: SEBI LODR Regulation 17(1B) and Companies Act Section 149(6) Test
The Securities and Exchange Board of India introduced a quiet but seismic governance reform on 1 April 2022 through an amendment to the Listing Obligations and…
Behavioural finance
Bird in Hand vs Two in the Bush: Warren Buffett’s 2000 Berkshire Letter Reading of Aesop
Every Indian investor who has ever tried to value a stock has at some point reached for a DCF spreadsheet, plugged in growth rates and terminal…
Behavioural finance
Director Remuneration as a Percentage of PAT: The Companies Act Section 197 Governance Test Every Indian Long-Term Investor Must Master
Director remuneration is the total cash and non-cash compensation — basic salary, commission, perquisites, ESOPs, retirement benefits, sitting fees and any other payment — that a…
Behavioural finance
Time Arbitrage: Why Stretching Your Holding Period to Five and Ten Years Is the Single Greatest Edge a Private Indian Investor Has Over Institutional Money
Ask a fund manager what edge he has over the index, and you will hear the usual answers — better research, deeper models, faster information. Ask…
Behavioural finance
The Halo Effect: Thorndike’s 1920 Discovery and Phil Rosenzweig’s 2007 Warning
Every quarter, a particular kind of stock idea sweeps through Indian WhatsApp investor groups. The CEO gave a magnetic CNBC-TV18 interview. The promoter is a Padma…
Behavioural finance
10-Year Revenue CAGR: The Foundational Top-Line Compounding Test Every Indian Long-Term Investor Must Master
SEBI’s landmark 2024 study revealed that 9 out of 10 retail traders in equity Futures & Options lose money — a cumulative ₹1.81 lakh crore destroyed…
The securities quoted in these articles are for illustration only and are not recommendatory. Investment in securities market are subject to market risks. Read all the related documents carefully before investing.