My New Agenda

Today is China’s 60^th Anniversary Celebration. If I were in China, I would have been enjoying the seven-day vacation. Chinese vacations are always longer than the U.S vacations, except for the summer, in which an almost four-month vacation is mostly used to gain internship experiences. What a difference!

I added two other weekly to-do’s in my agenda besides keeping up with this blog: reading at least one book outside of class and going to the weekly comp (seminars on investing taught by Barclays Wealth M.D. Preston McSwain) for Smart Women Securities at Harvard. However, these two commitments take longer than I thought, mainly because of I can’t read that fast and the commune is quite a pain given that I’m not a big fan of bus rides.

I finally finished reading Seth Klarman’s “Margin of Safety.” The GurusFocus did not exaggerate; it really is a masterpiece, making sense of value investing in the most basic terms. No wonder Amazon sells in the $800 bracket. I don’t want to summarize the main points as other readers have done, but I do want to point out one thing; that is from the way he addresses different issues in the book, he also seems to be a great salesman, something extremely important but some fund managers lack. He makes fine distinction between his beliefs and disbeliefs in different investing strategies, but still leaves space for his disbeliefs to turn around. Such open-mindedness is quite important, at least to me, because what have happened does not decide what will happen, thus any beliefs might be turned against by time, the ultimate determinant.