The Compounding Years

The second half of one story: what he did with the money, and the strategy that survived being wrong for nineteen months.

The method is four questions about the business, one question about the price, and two rules about size. It is given in full — along with the eleven lakh rupees lost to a company whose accounts he read carefully and misunderstood confidently, and the single line he added to the sheet of paper afterwards.

Written against the grain of the genre. The track record is reported against a plain index fund over a period the author did not choose, with the caveats attached rather than footnoted: the decade was favourable, one position produced most of the margin, and the standing instruction he set up in eleven minutes in 2019 built more of his wealth than every annual report he has ever read.

Includes the parts other books leave out — the man selling screens and the three questions that price him; why a falling share price is information about other people and not about your company; the journal entry that reveals which of your ideas were thin; and the twelve lakh rupees deliberately given up to buy a house in cash so that no document exists anywhere with his mother's address and a debt on the same page.

Part two of two. Four parts, twenty-two chapters and an epilogue. Begins in The Rupee That Stayed.

Contents

• PART ONE — THE SEARCH FOR A METHOD
• 1. Four Hundred Hours
• 2. Where Twelve Per Cent Comes From
• 3. The Man Who Sold Screens
• 4. Why I Did Not Sell the Index
• 5. What Was Worth Reading
• 6. The Circle I Drew
• PART TWO — THE FOUR QUESTIONS
• 7. The Sheet of Paper
• 8. Question One: Four Sentences
• 9. Question Two: Who Pays, and Why Will They Keep Paying
• 10. Question Three: What It Earns on Tied-Up Money
• 11. Question Four: What Would Kill It
• 12. The Price: Five Closed Years
• 13. The Rule About Size
• 14. What the Portfolio Actually Looks Like
• 15. The Second of the Month, Still
• PART THREE — WHERE IT WENT WRONG
• 16. Eleven Lakh Rupees
• 17. Nineteen Months
• 18. The One That Worked
• 19. When To Sell
• 20. The Mistakes I Keep Making
• 21. What Eight Years Actually Returned
• PART FOUR — THE OTHER SIDE
• 22. The House in Kovilpatti
• 23. What Changed and What Did Not
• 24. The Whole Thing, on Two Pages
• 25. What I Would Tell the Boy in the Shop
• Epilogue