Packing three decades of investing insights

Sankaran Naren, Chief Investment Officer of ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, manages assets worth over Rs 6.5 lakh crore. In a discussion with the Tamil Nadu Investors' Association in September 2023, he shared some invaluable lessons on equity market investing learnt over three decades of managing money. We have presented his learnings below as originally reported by Morningstar India. Check their report. Accepting the inevitability of mistakes It is not possible to avoid mistakes in investing. Never walk into the investing arena assuming that you will never make a mistake. Even the legendary Warren Buffett has erred with IBM, Tesco, Precision Castparts, and airlines. If mistakes are inevitable, it is futile to sweep them under the carpet. Every single time you make a mistake, never fail to introspect honestly. The key essence in all my 34 years in the market can be distilled to an important principle: Make fewer mistakes and get many other aspects right. Buying isn't the hardest part Buying is the easiest part of investing. Nearly all investment literate is focused on this aspect of the process...try to understand what the company will do over a period of time. We are in a bull market now. This cycle started in 2020. There have been a lot of advantages for investors who started their investing career in 2020. Their timing was inadvertently impeccable. They bought stocks cheap and made phenomenal money. That was the easy part. The difficult part comes now. Recognise that the situation is very different from what it was in 2020. Hence, the possibility of making mistak

This article was originally published on December 01, 2024.