Dear Readers, I wanted to wish y’all a Very Happy New Year! I hope you had time to enjoy the holidays with your family, friends and loved ones, and are now looking forward to 2024. December for me and my family has been eventful. After recovering from the after effects of COVID, we used the last few days of the year to take care of some important projects around the house. This kept us really busy for the most part. However, in between all that, we took some time to chill out and take a bit of breather. I really did not have a chance to pay much attention to the portfolio or the market. This w ..read more

Dear Readers, Due to falling way behind on my posting schedule, I am having to combine the monthly income updates for both October and November 2023. But before getting into the update, I wanted to take a brief moment to say a word about Charlie Munger. Readers would know that Charlie passed away a few days back at the age of 99. A lot of us know him as Warren Buffett’s “right-hand man” at Berkshire Hathaway, and for his witty one-line and short responses during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meetings. But beyond those witty remarks is a man with an astounding wealth of knowledge. In my opinion ..read more

Dear Readers, I humbly apologize for the prolonged silence on this blog. I am ridiculously behind schedule as far as posting my updates here. No real excuses, but stuff happened and it was impossible to make time for this. I will post a short update explaining what is happening first and then polish up the drafts for posts that I did want to send out before but just couldn’t because of paucity of time. Well, firstly news on my own health. After successfully avoiding COVID since 2020, I finally managed to contract the disease at work. I have been up-to-date on my COVID vaccinations, but this ne ..read more

Dear Readers, Every once in a while we come across certain events around the world that can shake our entire belief system. The recent events around Gaza and news coming out of Israel is one such situation. Some of the visuals and news are so disturbing, I basically had to get off Twitter/X and social media in general in order to keep my mental sanity. I have read about some absolutely deplorable events of violence and genocide from history: the Jewish holocaust, incidents related to Hindu genocide in pre-Indepedent India such as Direct Action Day, Mopplah rebellion etc., stories of genocide f ..read more

Dear Readers, If you have not read Howard Marks’ most recent memo, you should read it! Why? In a market where it is easy to be swept away in the general euphoria of a bubble, Marks is one of those voices that help me stay grounded in my thoughts and remain rational. This is very important to me as an investor because it is incredibly easy to make a bad decision in a second, and extremely difficult to undo that bad decision with a good choice without spending a lot of years. I really enjoyed this memo, mostly because it discusses what I consider to be a vastly under-discussed topic in the inves ..read more

Dear Readers, We are in the middle of September already. Time is flying by! After what has been a blistering summer here in Texas with day time temperatures soaring in the 105+ degree range for weeks, we finally have the first signs of a season change. The oaks in my backyard are shedding their leaves and I have a lot of back-breaking raking work coming-up in the next few days. The last few months have been rough for our family, to say the least. So we decided to go on a well-deserved vacation! This time we hit the picturesque San-Antonio! The riverwalk in the heart of downtown San-Antonio is ..read more

Dear Readers, For the first time in nearly two years, I am woefully late on publishing my monthly income report. Apologies for this! Why the delay? Well life happened. As I mentioned in my last monthly income report, I was dealing with medical emergencies in the family. Thankfully (fingers crossed) those are now on the path of resolution. But since my family needed me during this time, the blog and the portfolio took a back seat (as it should). Luckily, July was supposed to be a “slow” month for my portfolio, as we shall see in the numbers shortly. But there is no slowness in the market as ear ..read more

Dear Readers, We are half way done with 2023. At the end of 2022, there was a lot of anticipation around a possible recession in 2023. Well, that has not happened (as yet). In fact the broader market is up nearly 12% YTD. But it has not been a smooth ride (seems like it never is). In the midst of all that, we have had some serious questions about the banking sector in the country. We have had mass hysteria around the debt ceiling negotiations, which ultimately fizzled out (some would say as expected). So what will the remaining 6 months have in store for us? Will see the much anticipated reces ..read more

Dear Readers, Today marks the day when this blog turns 2 years old! This is a pretty huge deal from a personal standpoint. While I have maintained a blog at different junctures in my life, those blogs eventually died away because I simply lost interest OR some other project took precedence. The fact that I have been at this for two years is an achievement onto itself. When I started this blog, I had my doubts as to whether this was the right medium to document my personal journey as an investor. The YouTube scene was pretty vibrant. Folks were (and still are) getting onto podcasts. But someho ..read more

Dear Readers, As I have stated multiple times in this blog, I have derived (and continue to derive) almost all of my knowledge about investing by reading books. I feel this is a far better medium of learning the tricks of the trade. It also comes as no surprise that the most successful investors of our times are also voracious book readers. This was perhaps my biggest motivation when I started my investing book review series on this blog. I do not want this to be a quantitative exercise where I mindlessly read dozens of books every year. I really want to discuss these books and my takeaways f ..read more