Let us have some gratitude towards many people who have made investing easy and inexpensive.

Invariably the first person you should be thanking is Vanguard – John Bogle, the founder. He is the person who dramatically reduced the cost of investing. Remember even in the early ’90s in the USA sales load was 8% upfront (oops!) and the asset management charges never fell below 1%p.a. Imagine when you invested Rs. 1000, only Rs. 920 got invested and you paid Rs. 12-13 every year IMMATERIAL of how the fund performed.

Today you have fund houses charging almost nothing. You can pay .05% in an ETF. In India asset management companies are happy earning Rs. 20 crores for managing Rs. 10,000 crores. Well, it can’t get better than that. Wait for Amazon coming into fund management. You might get paid for investing!!

Then there is Google which lets you read all the great things that have ever been said. Graham, Fisher, Soros, Munger, Vallabh Bhansali, Prashant Jain, ….name the investor, and you can access it. Like Graham said “maybe we are our own worst enemy”. Maybe. Maybe not! Mr. Graham taught us that you should deal with Mr. Market ONLY when you want to, not when Mr. Market wants you to!! I have not mentioned many other bloggers like Morgan Housel, maybe a separate post for bloggers should be done!

Bloomberg and Morningstar in the international context and many websites in the Indian context – Valueresearchonline, Moneycontrol – and CMIE, Capital Market etc. which give you tons of data. Mostly raw data, but sometimes you can get decent research reports. So a big thanks to them also.

We have always stood on the shoulders of giants. We have built on what many people taught us. We today know about every incident wherever it happens. Sure, I am not clear how more data helps, but for a fee of less than Rs. 100,000 a year you can buy a lot of good quality data. CMIE, Vans, Morningstar,…all of them have good quality data well researched and dissected. Sure, it is for a fee, but it is nothing compared to the efforts that we needed to get a simple balance sheet in the 1980s! So a thanks to them too.

Peter Bernstein, Taleb, – the people who taught you that you should consider “what could have happened” and “what can never happen”. One can never ever thank them enough.

Also read a different post where I have made a list of books to read. Search a little – not putting a link!