Usain Bolt has won 9 gold medals in last 3 Olympics and he has run less than 2 mins on the track.

That’s economy of effort Usain Bolt ran for less than 115 secs in total in his 3 Olympics career and made 119 million dollars!

That’s more than $1M for each second he ran!

That’s a new unit of speed for the “run” for money… $ 1Million/sec

But for those 2 mins he trained for 15+ years ! That’s investment.

I am sure all of you know this. Now if you did this for Sachin Tendulkar or for any actor..you will come to such conclusions.

Similarly in investing too – a lot of time has to be spent in meeting managements, talking to them, shredding balance sheets – to decide what to buy and what to keep. I keep saying when you do equity investing or recruiting people – it is the rejection process that has to be amazingly good.

For me to buy 100 LMW or 10,000 Bharti Airtel takes the same time – one phone call. However the process of what to buy takes a lot of time. I remember reading in Sam Manekshaw’s book…’it took 6 months of preparation to do a 4 day war’. When Sam was asked by the Parliament he said ‘it will take a month or at least 20 days’ or something like that – I am not Googling for accuracy – but this was the essence.

And when I find people asking ‘which share to buy’ or ‘which fund to invest’ on a daily basis for a Rs. 20L portfolio, I am amused. I see people with 50 crore portfolios sitting and doing NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Or they give Rs. 50L (1% of their equity portfolio) to a guy who will day trade with that money. Even in such cases they look at the monthly profit / loss figure. Last year a friend had a 100% return on his trading portfolio – and he paid a bonus to the trader. Why would YOU want to sit on the terminal day in and day out trying to day trade?

Or figure out how to invest what to do..why to change…geeks it gives me goose bumps. My equity MF portfolio was created long ago and i have not seen any reason to get out of Hdfc, FT, I Pru, schemes. Sure Birla, Dsp, Fidelity, Kotak, Reliance,  …etc. have / had good schemes, but over all my funds have done well. If I were looking at it on a daily basis maybe I would have sold A and bought B..and it would not have mattered EVEN IF I HAD done it !!

Yes, like Usain Bolt or Sam Manekshaw – a lot of ground work and preparation is necessary but action itself is very short.

So go and do your home work. Action can wait