Play The Strategy Game On Your Own Terms

Play the game on your terms- Life, sports, and Markets- the example of grass

As in sports, markets, and life in general, there are several ways to play the game.

Strategy as a style

The question is which style, strategy, or philosophy to adopt. While you may experiment in various ways, over a period of time as you gain experience, you realize your strengths and weaknesses and that’s when you should broadly freeze upon the strategy to play the game.

It looks like a complicated task to build style, strategy, or philosophy but understand that building these strategies itself is an investment. The strategy saves you from getting confused and proves to be beneficial in the long run.

When you write code to create software, you are instructing the computer on what to do. When you instruct computers on what to do, you can rely on them because they can do a lot of repetitive tasks without taking a break.

However, there are many tasks that computers cannot do (like understanding your strategy and helping you get results).

When you are building strategies for your investment portfolio, you are writing code. But the code is to help you stay focussed on the exact steps to make sure that you are getting results and are happy with your decision.

Style, Strategy, or Philosophy are unique to different companies and their requirements. If you focus on a particular industry that falls in a small cap, you will be able to have unique insights about the companies that are not available to mid-cap and large-cap companies and vice-versa.

You are basically building a SaaS but this is “strategy as a style”. The Style, Strategy, or Philosophy that you build become assets and a “product” that can multiply value for you efficiently with low energy and higher returns.

Rather than go around trying different things to win the game or make returns in the market (day trading, stock tips, F&O, etc) stick to a philosophy that you believe in or are strong at and wait for the game market to turn.

In other words, rather than running to the universe, let the universe come to you.

In this journey, be patient.

A lot of people are attracted to building their investment portfolios because it needs to be built once and with minor regular tweaks, they can keep getting long-term returns.

For things may not turn your way immediately. Have conviction in your philosophy/strategy and if need be, make minor tweaks to refine. However by and large stick to your own philosophy which you have formulated after years of hard work and experiment, come what may.

Be like the blade of grass. Strong yet flexible! Being flexible is based on the outcome you desire. It’s the awareness, which will help you to decide, where are you in your current investment cycle, how much you know about growing your funds, and what level of flexibility with minor tweaks is required to finally see your investment strategies working for you.

It’s similar to building any other SaaS product (software as a service) with a value of more than a billion dollars.

But SaaS is not as shiny as it looks on the outside.

The problem with software is that it requires constant updates, and needs to reduce prices to stay in the market, requirement to raise funds, and pay more for acquiring customers.

SaaS companies are cash-burning machines. It is very hard to make them throw out positive cash flow every month. That means being in losses or near-zero margins for a long time and waiting for the time when you become the only game in town, and if everything goes according to plan, then it will all be worth it.

I don’t have anything against SaaS companies. I am also planning to build software and digital platforms in the future to give a shot at a massive exponential scale.

If you are just getting started building your investment portfolio, first build something that can produce cash flows and good returns, then invest it back to build something bigger in the long run.

The steps of Building an Investment Portfolio

When you build an investment portfolio, takes a lot of human time.

Running a successful Investment Portfolio requires:

• Market research and identifying potential companies
• Understanding the financials, next or updated product/service launch, and any changes in governmental policies, etc.
• Deeper analysis
• Negotiation with self (not running behind that perfect investment timing)
• Investing
• Patience
• Observation and continuous monitoring
• Optimizing the investment portfolio
• Revenue expansion through additional investments

That’s 9 steps already. I might have missed a few.

5000+ Companies listed on the stock exchange

According to information published on various stock exchanges, at least 5000 companies are listed on the stock exchange.

Most of them are existing companies with growing profits and growing market capitalization. This means that these companies have a product, product-market fit, customers, traction, and most importantly, revenue.

They need investors to invest in them and they will be ready to pay good dividends and good returns over a long-term period.

That’s why there is a huge need for Investment Partners that can help you make better investment decisions.

These companies can’t come to you and tell you to invest in their companies and explain the benefits on a one-on-one basis. They leave it to you to do your analysis, prepare your strategies, and tap on to them for better returns. They just focus on their products and services.

To invest in say 20 companies, you might need to either outsource your investment portfolio or build your organization to 4-5 team members to assist you in analyzing the minutest financials and many other aspects of the respective companies.

Only investment partners will work with you full-time to make sure that there is a dedicated point of contact for you. An investment partner knows the right strategy to use to identify those companies to stay invested in.

You see, building an investment portfolio makes for a very good investment decision that will be throwing out positive returns in the long run. If a company doesn’t give positive returns, in the long run, it is not an asset but a liability.

Invest Back into Building something bigger.

You can reinvest the cumulative profits in your investment portfolio in order to build something bigger for the long term.

Having an investment-first approach is not just helpful for generating returns in the long run, but also to understand such companies in a deeper way.

The first $1m is the toughest. It is simple but hard. It takes time, patience, and consistency. But the approach is guaranteed to work as it has worked for 1000s of investors. Because the stock market rises and economic growth is clear as daylight.

The second $1m will be easier because you will have capital leverage, time leverage, confidence gained by investing, and a better understanding of the stock markets.

If you build a profitable investment portfolio, you can roll over the profits from that investment into building something that might be bigger.

Our philosophy in markets is to stick with good small to medium to large-cap companies over a 10-year horizon.

Cheers,
Fund Manager Akalp Gupta,

Founder at StockInvest2Grow.com

P.S. At StockInvest2Grow, we are helping our investment partners reach the same goal: build a strong investment portfolio.

Want to join StockInvest2Grow? When you are ready to invest, do connect with me at [email protected]