Portsmouth, NH

It has been exactly two weeks since I last wrote a post. It seems like keeping this weekly habit would take a little time to develop.

Over the Columbus weekend, I went on my first anniversary vacation with John to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The town is really pretty, carpeted with tinted leaves that were warming the townspeople in the chilly weather of early October, which left me an impression of that similar to Guilin, in which a sense of calmness was pleasantly conveyed through the peculiar slow pace of life.

The average age of shoppers in Kittery Outlet in its neighbor town is probably in the 60s, sharply differentiates the town from Boston, where the young and the motivated strive. The leisure of living in such an environment is not popularly sought for by the young because the excitement of changes is more attractive to them than the beauty of the ordinary, which is only appreciated when the young are jaded by the excitements.

I’d love to visit places alike every once in a while when I need pauses to reflect what I have accomplished and check what changes are needed on my long-term to-do list. It serves as a mirror for me to recognize myself and recognize my goals.

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.