What You Should Be Reading: #10 April 2022

One HDFC

Earlier this week, HDFC Ltd. which oversees housing finance and HDFC Bank announced the merger of their businesses. The merger will create the largest private sector bank in India, with the combined entity having a balance sheet of Rs. 17.87 lakh crore and a net worth of Rs. 3.3 lakh crore.

A nice read on the background of both HDFC Ltd. and HDFC Bank and on the merger.



How People Think

One hundred billion people have walked this planet. Nearly eight billion of them are alive today. Each has a story, few have a microphone. Each has seen something different and thought something unique. Most know something you can’t fathom, and you have experienced stuff they wouldn’t believe. But so many behaviors are universal across generations and geographies. Circumstances change, but people’s reactions don’t. Technologies evolve, but insecurities, blind spots, and gullibility rarely does.

This is an amazing piece on the most common and influential aspects of how people think;



When the Optimists are Too Pessimistic

People hate losses much more than they love gains. As a result, they spend far more time thinking about downside surprises (market crashes) than upside surprises (extraordinary growth). Nevertheless, upside surprises happen more often than people realize.

We don’t have a great grasp of compounding. We don’t understand geometric growth as well as we understand linear growth, because it’s just not that intuitive. This is why even optimists can be too pessimistic. Because we are using linear thinking to imagine a geometric future. It just doesn’t work. But if you can fight back against your default way of thinking, you might see things a bit differently.



The Ultimate Superpower in Investing

This post takes a look at best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 index over the past 30 years. And one thing is common amongst all these stocks — gut-wrenching declines at one point or another, proving that large drawdowns are an inevitable part of achieving high returns.

When thinking about big winners in the stock market, excruciating pain probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. We tend to focus instead on the final outcome (eye-popping long-term gains), ignoring the tremendous fortitude (holding through large drawdowns) required to achieve that outcome. To reap the biggest rewards you must be able to take the painful hits and keep moving forward. Which is why the ultimate superpower in investing is being good at suffering.



Back in September 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, kicking off a big and bold experiment for the popular cryptocurrency.

When President Nayib Bukele first announced the Bitcoin law in June 2021, he made a grand promise to his citizens. Adopting Bitcoin, he said, would digitize the economy, decrease dependence on the U.S. dollar, lower remittance fees — which account for about 20% of the country’s gross domestic product — and drive investment. El Salvador could become the first country to prove the transformative power of cryptocurrency on a national scale.

It is quite an ambitious project, especially in a country where cash is still king and almost 70% of the population is unbanked and also leaving behind those who don’t have a smartphone — mainly older Salvadorans — and those without internet access. In 2019, about 50% of the population was not online. Given all this, the shift to Bitcoin as a day-to-day currency was never going to be easy and it’s been just that.

A deep dive into how El Salvador’s ambitious bet is playing six months on :point_down:



What to listen



So what have you been reading, listening, watching to? Share below :point_down:

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this bit on HDFC Bank IPO… :shushing_face::grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

“A lot of us asked why we weren’t pricing it at a premium,” an executive told journalist Tamal Bandyopadhyay. “We could have got a premium but Deepak [Parekh] said, ‘leave money on the table for investors. They will appreciate this in the long term.’”

Kanye West once put it:

If you want these crazy ideas and these crazy stages, this crazy music, and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.

You ain’t got the answ- … oh… he does have the answers… :flushed:

After a few days of overcoming technical glitches, Bonilla was up and running and accepting payments in Bitcoin from customers.But the shine soon wore off. By February 2022, Bonilla’s list of complaints about Bitcoin was long: the only available Bitcoin ATM was too far away, the government helpline was slow, and the price was too volatile.

Soon as they like you make em unlike you :cry: :face_with_hand_over_mouth: