Tag Archives: Temperament

Why Don’t you Get a Job? – Cashflow Quadrant

Posted on by under Bibliophile: Cashflow Quadrant

With the continuation of the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” series, I am hereby starting a series from the book “Cashflow Quadrant” which help us identify our core competencies and which area is suitable for us. And help us to achieve our financial freedom.   

The author explains that when he was homeless, unemployed with his wife and living in the car. Both of them did not get any job but they tried to do some work so that they get money at least for food and fuel their car. It’s always been important for such situations to have job security, steady paycheck. They were graduated and have a good skill set, but they have decided to achieve financial freedom so that they don’t have to work for the rest of their life. The author has achieved the initial part of freedom in the 4 years and remaining in the further five years.

We feel that we need money to make more money but we can see that author got financially free from being homeless once upon a time (Rags to Riches). Then we might have a question in our mind that what is needed to become financially free? The answer is – we require to have a dream, determination, willingness, skill to learn quickly, ability to use our skillsets.

Where we fall under the quadrant, that will identify the way cash flow comes to us.

We have seen in series of rich dad poor dad that – What our schools and poor dad teach us is to get good employment or self-employed. They don’t teach us to do investment. While rich dad advises us to go to school, graduate, build a business and become an investor. This book is for those who are E or S and want to achieve B and I. This is not an easy journey to shift from steady paycheck to volatile paycheck of B and I.

Different quadrant requires a different skillset, different psychological requirements. Employees and self-employed are low with risk-taking behaviour whereas B & I are known for their risk-taking behaviour. B & I require to have a vision (not a Vision from WandaVision ?) that enhance their future success. 

For example – a doctor can be work at a private hospital as an employee or start a private practice as self-employed or open a clinic & hire other doctors as an employee to become a business owner or make an investment in other businesses.

We can become a millionaire or go broken in any of the quadrants, no quadrant gives grantee of financial freedom. Many of us show off due to social fear that money is not at all important for them. But we are working a whole life for the money and then showing off that it’s not important then it’s a wrong thing to do.

Rich dad believed that life is more important than money, but money is important for supporting life. For doing many things in life, we require money. We cannot buy happiness through money but what we need to make us happy is bought through money so that money is important. The major thing upon this all is we have to learn that money work for us, rather we work for money.

For knowing which quadrant suitable for us, we need to work in all four quadrants. These help us to know our temperament, likes, dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses. So that we can choose our suitable quadrant.

If we try to understand that financial freedom is a freedom of time. Getting time available with family, for health, for well-being. Not anyone quadrant is better than others but it’s upon us which one suitable to us. But if we choose to opt for B or I then we need to put a huge effort because the skills required in B and I do not teach us during our school days.

Read for more detail: Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant: Guide to Financial Freedom

I am grateful to Mr.Meihol Jhaveri (Founder of Gatisofttech) for development of Lucky Idiot website.

DON’T TAKE NEWS ANCHORS SERIOUSLY – Chauffeur Knowledge

Posted on by under Behavioral Finance

There are two types of knowledge. First, we have real knowledge. We see it in people who have committed a large amount of time and effort to understand a topic.

The second type is chauffeur knowledge – knowledge from people who have learned to put on a show. These people just make show that they know everything but they just speak what they have heard from the source. They speak as per the predefined script ready for them.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand. – A. Einstein




Source – Vivify

Investment – It is difficult to judge who is an expert and who has just a bird view of knowledge.

In 1998 Wesco meeting, Charlie Munger Quoted –

I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge. To me, they are like the bee dancing its incoherent dance. They are just screwing up the hive.

Mr Warren Buffett suggests us to decide what we know and stay with it, what he calls a circle of competence. Mr Munger suggests that the size of the circle is not important but important is, we stay within its limit well. If we do not know anything, we should simply say we don’t know rather act as an expert. I also faced such problems during the initial days of my career. I considered people with Chauffeur knowledge as an expert until I do not meet real experts.

In the stock market, we meet many people who act as an expert but the majority of them not. We have to carefully check their knowledge before trust on them. We have to understand their investment philosophy and process before making a judgement of them. True experts recognize the limits of what they know and what they do not know. If they find themselves outside their circle of competence, they keep quiet or simply say, ‘I don’t know.’ We also have to perform the same for becoming an expert in our field.

This entire series will be review with various examples from books which are “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Art of Thinking Clearly“.

Overconfidence – 2

Posted on by under Behavioral Finance

The Illusion of Validity

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Business – When the business personal preparing blueprint for a particular project and the narrative of the project seems good then he starts believing that this project is very good. Thus, they have to execute that project. But this confidence can turn out as overconfidence.

Investment – When we study a particular company and its narrative looks so good then we start getting confidence in the future performance of the company. But this confidence has created a story in our mind and that does not necessarily to be proven as true so that we also should work on writing down what can kill this idea. This helps us to make wise and rational decision.

The Illusion of Stock-Picking Skill

What made one person buy and the other sell? What did the sellers think they knew that the buyers did not?

Buyers think the price will increase and sellers think that price will fall.

Individual investors try to react to each news but institutions are selected about the reaction on the news which also proves their label of Smart money.

The majority of people have an illusion of skills. The majority of people believes that picking stocks and getting a return on them is mostly responsible for their skills and does not appreciate the role of luck.

But it is not the ultimate truth. There is a role of luck that should be appreciated. Not believing the role of luck will lead to overconfidence in their skill. And that will tend to make any irrational decision. So that after buying or selling, we will think that stock price will move as per our expectation because we have completed with all necessary study and confident about movement.  

We should always think that the seller/buyer has much more insights than us which make him selling/buying a particular stock. This thought process helps us with widening our thoughts process.

This entire series will be review with various examples from books which are “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Art of Thinking Clearly“.

WHY YOU SYSTEMATICALLY OVERESTIMATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND ABILITIES – Overconfidence Effect

Posted on by under Behavioral Finance

We tend to overestimate our knowledge, ability to predict events/future, own behaviour, etc. The overconfidence effect does not deal with whether single estimates are correct or not. Rather, it measures the difference between what people know and what they think they know.

Expert suffers more from overconfidence rather than normal laypeople. We have statistically proven data but we ignore it and overestimate our abilities and knowledge. Overconfidence has been called the most “pervasive and potentially catastrophic” of all the cognitive biases to which human beings fall victim.

The Illusion of Understanding

In The Black Swan, Taleb introduced the notion of a narrative fallacy to describe how flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

When we read about anything, our mind starts creating an illusion of understanding regarding those concepts or event. When we make any critical decision and that succeed then we give huge credit to our skills and underestimate the role of luck.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact, we understand the past less than we believe we do.

We try to learn many things from the success of others but we have to understand that things can be more different than what we are understanding.

Business – Management of any business easily fall under such bias, if they have a strong track record in past. Few managers have overconfidence in their ability to run a business. So that they acquire any business or plan for a new capex at the top of the business cycle at sky-high valuation. They just follow their intuition rather than follow data and facts. We should avoid businesses having such a manager for investment purpose.

Successful businesses also can meet failure in some of their ventures. Google has achieved success in the search engine, e-mail services, mobile operating system, video streaming, maps etc. but Google also has faced failure in social media platform such as Orkut, Google Plus.    

The Illusions of Pundits

Investment – When we have research and made investment decisions then we overestimate our knowledge and think that we cannot go wrong. Though the result shows that we have got wrong in past then also we blame it on external forces.

Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Few experts are becoming overconfident as they acquire more knowledge. They fall more under the illusion of skills. So that does not try to predict the future based on the past.

“The mistake appears obvious, but it is just hindsight. You could not have known in advance.”

When we see the 2008 financial crises now, we can say that such mistakes are obvious and should avoid. But we can only do it after it happens rather than during that period.

In conclusion: be aware that you tend to overestimate your knowledge. Be sceptical of predictions, especially if they come from so-called experts. And with all plans, favour the pessimistic scenario. This way you have a chance of judging the situation somewhat realistically. Experts miscalculate; championships change hands; and winners become losers.

We can save ourselves by killing our ideas.

When we are investing, we should write down every decision in an investment journal so that we can track the quality of our own decision. Also, we should prepare a checklist which helps us to reduce our emotions and improves decision.

This entire series will be review with various examples from books which are “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Art of Thinking Clearly“.