During 1970s, a sixth grade student, was working on modeling a device for his science project. He called this device, an infinity cube, which creates an optical illusion of an endless tunnel. He modeled this device after one he had seen in the store. What is so special about this device? The one in the store…
So far I wrote about accounting for long-term debt and leases. You can find them here and here. In this post I will be writing about accounting for taxes. In US, every company maintains two sets of books. One of them is prepared according to the GAAP rules which are read by investors, creditors, and…
Few months back I mind mapped Charlie Munger’s psychology of human misjudgment. You can take a look at it here. Mind maps are really powerful as it organizes information visually and it aids the associative nature of human brain. In this post I have mind mapped four different types of moats which Pat Dorsey talks about…
In the previous post we learnt how to do accounting for long-term debt. In this post I will be writing about accounting for leases. A lease is a rental agreement by which one party (the lessor) transfers to another party (the lessee) the right to use an asset for a stated period of time in return for…
In 1987, Achal Bakeri, moved into a new house in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Unable to air condition some parts of the house due to high ceilings and long passages, he purchased an air cooler. It worked perfectly and he was extremely satisfied with its performance. But he did not like its looks and he instantly came up with an…
Every time I read the book The Little Book of Talent I get a feeling of rewiring my brain. It’s a fantastic book and it has to be read at least once a month. The book contains 52 tips for improving our skills and one of the tip is to stare at who you want to become. If you were…
I am a Software Engineer by profession. Some of the accounting concepts involving operating leases, pensions, stock options, deferred taxes, and long-term debt issuances sound arcane to me. When I encounter them in the annual reports I ignore them. This limitation didn’t bother me much until I read one of the principles of Penman – Ignore Information At Your Peril.…
Few years back testyourvocab.com conducted an online experiment to determine the average vocabulary size of various age groups. The test results are given below. From this chart we can clearly see that between age 3 and 16, our vocabulary explodes at an average rate of 4 new words every day. Between ages of 16 and…
If I draw the frequency distribution of all the human achievements in the scale of 0 to 1 most likely I will get a bell curve as shown below. On the extreme right you will find people like Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Mother Teresa having an achievement score of 1. On the extreme left you…
I wrote three posts discussing about (1) p/e ratio (2) discounted cash flows (3) owners earnings (4) residual earnings (5) leverage effects on residual earnings. You can find all of them here. If you haven’t read them, I strongly recommend that you read them before reading this post. In this post I will be discussing about the limitations…
Imagine an alien inside a spaceship which is orbiting planet earth. The entire life of the earth is unfolded to the alien as a movie and every second in the movie will cover one million year of earth’s age. The movie will run for 75 minutes as the total age of earth is 4.5 billion…
Early this year, as a part of value investing coursework, I wrote about my understanding of IBM’s business which can be found here. Few interesting things happened after that and I wanted to discuss about it in this post. From the chart given below, you can clearly see that the stock went below the price paid…
