Black Mamba

If you are a basketball fan you can easily relate to the title and the above picture. From the basketball world, I am only aware of the legendary player Michael Jordan.

In 2003, Kobe Bryant was in the top of the world winning game after game for his team Los Angeles Lakers. However, the life has other twist for him and he was accused for rape charges. Though the charges were later dropped. He also proclaimed himself to be innocent. Later on, both the parties reached civil settlement.

We are not aware of the actual truth what actually happened. But for sure the image was deteriorated completely. That’s when Black Mamba was born. His name was attached with so much negative emotions that it was difficult to flush out those memories. But Mamba helped him. Later, he also created the Mamba brand by partnering with Nike.

He was a very competitive and hard working player. He used to read the referee’s handbooks just to identify some moat. The reading help him in identifying the blind spots or loopholes where the referee can’t closely observe the play and he start leveraging them to improve his game.

In one of his interview, he shared 2 instance to reflect the importance of hard working. Suppose you wake up at 12 pm . Go to practice for 2-4 pm in the noon. Thereafter take some rest and again practice 6-8 pm in the evening and return home and the cycle repeats. Basically you are just practicing for 4 hours. On the other hand, he gets up between 3-4 am go to practice for 6-8 am then 10 am -12 pm. He is already 4 hours ahead of you and the difference of that 4 hours over a long period of time shows us the miracle and magic of compounding.

In investing, there is no referee unlike in any sports. But we have the most popular hypothetical character of the investing world, “Mr. Market”(Mr M.) who behaves like a drunken psychopath all the time, walking on a random path. Sometimes Mr. M. will be willing to buy from you at a sky high price and sometimes selling at a depressed price. We need to make him our friend not enemy. It is an amazing game, where you can see the price fluctuating every moment. Charlie and Buffet had learnt the blind spots of the referee and were able to buy stock at cheap rates and sell at high rates. Hope you realize the correlation.

Renaming helps a lot. Will you buy a packet of wheat from Gold Flake or Wills? Probably you won’t buy. At the same time we are buying happily Ashirvaad Atta, sold by ITC (Indian Tobacco Company). Aren’t we indirectly helping the tobacco company to grow more?

Sharing with you an mashup of Mamba Mentality.

Until then…