Learnings from the March lows 2020

• Buy Good Quality companies
• Sit on you ass and enjoy the ride : The time saved is amazing.
• Avoid news about comparisons and other growth stories.
  
• Options trading is fun but super time consuming, overall it has been a new learning.
• Monday's has bee typically +ve and Thu/Fri is when the market drops [last 3 weeks, fingers crossed]
• Amazon holding for a decade has been so rewarding :-). I wish i had not sold them in March lows. But glad, Had made better investments.
  

Need to learn to be better

• Avoid daily Stock market check
• Careful with Options trading with right check and balances
• Read more about low volatility and value stocks.

How Mistakes became learning opportunities

PS: pardon for weird formatting with numbers

1. Common Stocks, Uncommon Profits: no need to chase silo stocks, look for good companies which you use on a daily basis, if you like their product, there is a good chance the stock is going to do better in the long term. Buy with Margin of Safety. 

2. Tap into Great Investors: See what other great investors are buying in this category, research and analyze them as Homework. you will come out stronger

3. Never buy Bad Management: DCHL stock: bad management(later realized) in spite of a good brand like newspaper, book store, IPL (Deccan Chargers)

• learning: never invest in bad management, look for signs of performance and integrity 

4. Play to your core competency: Build your competency and you will come out as a winner, compounding really works

5. Research about the company with better SEC tools: spend considerable amount of time reading books, studying Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger, Mohnish Pabrai, Guy Spier, understanding financial statements, 10k, 10Qs 

6. Not sitting on my ass: especially when we don't know how we will use the cash generated!

• Amazon: classic example, holded for 10+ years and look at the returns

• Covid: sold in 1950 and then the stock turns to 3300.

7. A lot of times sitting with cash is so useful

• Covid 19: March 17 - April 10 was a golden period, had i not had the cash, it would have been impossible to get those opportunities

8. Respect Mr. Market, Market has lots of swings: buy with conviction and solid foundations

• Buying VIAC, Discover Bank, Capital One and many others from the lows and selling them based on the quarter earnings was not good. Should have paused and understood the earnings report better

9. Headlines of Stocks earnings could be deceiving, read carefully

• learning: read 10Q better especially for bank stocks as they provisions losses upfront and it might disguise an opportunity depending on the quality of the bank

10. Avoid Impulsive purchases and Recheck your transactions: Mistake with Options buy due to Robinhood intuitive interface and impulsive buy

• loss of 5

• Learning: Roll back a mistake asap

11. Check your transactions, especially default settings: Wealthfront - How a wrong characterization of transfer pumped in 200k+ in a stock account, which led to 50k+ loss.

• leanings: 

1. verify your transfers, read the defaults

2. It's good to roll back mistakes as fast as possible [in my case i did mail wealth-front, but the ship has sailed and it takes 4-5 days to cancel] and by the time losses were increasing and i let it be there for some time with market flip flops

3. glad i sold all of them, moved money to RobinHood for buying actual stocks. [changed the landscape