One Kitchen, One Oven: How to Judge a Business That Makes Everything in One Place
A famous sweet shop makes every sweet in one small kitchen with one big oven. On an ordinary day that looks efficient. On the day a…
Blog · Page 2
Daily lessons in long-term investing
Plain-English lessons on judging businesses, reading annual reports and staying patient — 370 articles and counting, a new one most mornings. Educational only: none of these is a research report or a recommendation.
Value investing
Value investing
The Mango Tree Test: Raamdeo Agrawal’s Three Simple Questions for Judging a Business
A farmer who plants a mango tree asks three quiet questions before anything else: are the roots healthy, is it putting out new branches, and will…
Behavioural finance
The Interest Coverage Ratio: How to Tell Whether a Company Can Actually Afford Its Debt
Interest coverage tells you, in one number, how much room a company has between what it earns and what it owes its lenders. A plain-English guide…
Value investing
Three Honest Reasons to Sell a Stock — and Why “It Went Up” or “It Went Down” Isn’t One of Them
Every selection committee has, at some point, dropped a batter who scored a fifty in the last match, and kept one who scored a duck. The…
Value investing
The Well That Everyone Used, Until Nobody Did: How to Notice a Business Edge That Is Quietly Draining Away
A village well can serve every household for fifty years and then sit almost untouched within five. Nothing was wrong with the well. The world around…
Behavioural finance
Receivable Days: The Working-Capital Ratio That Reveals Whether Reported Profit Has Actually Turned Into Cash
A SEBI study found that roughly 9 out of every 10 individual traders in the equity derivatives segment lost money — a reminder that the fastest…
Value investing
The Small Print Nobody Reads: Why the Notes Behind a Company’s Numbers Matter
Why the footnotes behind a company's profit number often matter more than the number itself, and three simple habits for reading them well.
Value investing
When More Growth Makes You Poorer: Why Growth Only Counts When It Earns Its Keep
There is a bakery two lanes from my house that makes one thing well: a plain butter biscuit, sold loose by weight. Two years ago the…
Value investing
The Cart That Must Be Empty by Nightfall: How to Judge a Business Whose Stock Cannot Wait
Walk through any vegetable market at seven in the evening, then walk through it again at nine. The same bundle of spinach that cost thirty rupees…
Value investing
The Only Chemist Inside the Hospital: How to Judge a Business Protected by a Permission Others Cannot Get
Some businesses keep competitors out by being better. Others keep them out by holding a piece of paper nobody else can get. That second kind is…
Value investing
The Tea Stall and the Wedding Hall: How Often a Business Has to Be Right
Some businesses make a hundred small decisions a day and learn by evening which ones were wrong. Others make one enormous decision and wait twenty years…
Value investing
The Forty Kinds of Biscuit: Why the Best-Selling Product Often Pays for the Worst One
Almost every company sells a few things that do well and a long list of things that barely move. The surprise is that the accounts usually…
Value investing
The Thousandth Jalebi: How to Tell Real Learning in a Business From a Bigger Machine
A rule almost a hundred years old says a business gets cheaper the more times it has done the work — not the more it makes…
Value investing
The Name Written Into the Drawing: How to Judge a Supplier the Customer Chose Only Once
Most suppliers have to win the sale all over again every time. A few are written into the customer's own paperwork, and after that the customer…
Value investing
The Money That Only Passes Through: How to Tell What a Business Earns From What It Merely Handles
Crores can move through a company's bank account in a year without a rupee of it belonging to the company. There is an accounting rule that…
Value investing
The Milk Bill That Comes Even When You Are Away: What a Guaranteed Contract Really Guarantees
Some companies are paid by their customers whether or not those customers take delivery. It is the closest thing in business to a salary. But a…
Value investing
The Shop With the Price List on the Wall: How to Judge a Business Whose Profit Is Decided by Someone Else
Some of India’s largest listed companies are not allowed to earn more than a fixed return on the money their owners put in. That ceiling sounds…
Value investing
Who Pays for the Next Shop: How to Judge a Company That Grows by Lending Out Its Name
Some companies add a hundred outlets in a year without building a single one of them. Who pays for those shops, and what the company keeps…
Value investing
The Tailor Whose Name Is Never on the Shirt: How to Judge a Company That Makes What Someone Else Sells
A very large part of India’s industry makes things that carry another company’s name on the box. Some of those factories are wonderful businesses. Most are…
Value investing
The Bill You Cannot Check: How to Judge a Business Whose Customers Can Never Tell If the Work Was Good
Some things you buy can be judged before you pay. Some can be judged after you use them. And some can never be judged at all.…
Value investing
The Shop That Cannot Close: Why an Industry Stays Poor When Its Losers Cannot Leave
Every investor is taught to ask whether rivals can get into a business. The more revealing question is often whether the weak ones can get out.
Value investing
The Helmet Shop Outside the RTO: When the Law Sends the Customers, Who Keeps the Profit?
Some businesses never have to find a customer. The law finds the customer for them. It sounds like the safest business in the world. It usually…
Value investing
The Shop That Painted Only Two Walls: What a Company’s Spending on Itself Tells You
Every company spends money on its customers. It also spends money on itself: offices, staff, travel, perks. The second kind of spending is small in the…
Value investing
The Shop That Sells to Every Miner: Why Some Businesses Win Whoever Wins the Race
When a new industry booms, everyone tries to guess which company will win. There is a quieter kind of business that does not need to guess.…
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.