Basant Maheswari's - The Thoughtful Investor

This book finally fills the void of lack of high quality source of investing knowledge expressed for India.

While I can write many reams about how this book and Basant’s philosophy can make an investor wiser, In my opinion there are two aspects which are unique and standout in this book

1) Wealth vs Money: The book focuses upon generating long term wealth and not about how to optimize CAGR for a given year. While the difference between two is easy to miss, this is almost like enlightenment in the world of investments . As Basant said in the book - “The game is not about winner takes all but about the survivor making enough” !

2) Completeness & Practicality: There are many philosophies and books on investing which talk about the author’s way of doing it and why they do what they do. This book goes many steps further by adding a “how to do it” in most of the chapters. I have not read many books which touch upon so many aspects of investing and raise the right questions and propose the answers.

A lot of content and thoughts in this book seem to come from visceral experience and while all who are intrigued by investing will enjoy, those who have spent some years in the markets will feel an instant connect as some of the discussions are exactly what even veterans ponder over while finetuning their skills. There are many heuristics to make a smart choice where a purist may frown on exact numbers, but even they would agree that the concepts and practical usefulness of those heuristics are hard to deny.

This book is in the class of those few rare books where each time one opens the book and re-reads the same chapter there is something new to learn.

Finally I must thank Basant to pour his heart and no holds barred while naming names and writing down his mistakes and misses.