INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
India has a rich heritage of storytelling
Some of my most interesting childhood memories have been reading Chacha Chaudhary comics, Panchatantra, the Mahabharat and Ramayan
However, reading a story is not the same as understanding it
Sometimes it can take a lifetime to unpack and fully understand a story.
What I found interesting was that not much time was spent on the
Who wrote them and in what context did they do it
While growing up, I didn't come across any literature or study on how some of our cherished stories were written, yet it didn't make them
It's possible that they'd be studying these in universities, but none of it was visible in day-to-day life.
Also, I'm not surprised by the
relatively recent onslaught of books, suggesting how we are biologically inclined to love stories
Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller, The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig and Narrative - Numbers by Aswath Damodaran all speak about how
stories can drive our thinking
Stories provide a nice structure for our thoughts and allow us to hang bits of data on it to make sense of them.
From an analyst report or
an annual report of a company to a Booker Prize-winning novel, all stories rely on the same formula: "I've some information and this is how
you should look at it." In fact, some of the non-fiction books also take the form of narrative storytelling to make a nice visual
documentary out of it.
Stories about investing come with a twist
Too much emphasis is put on who is the storyteller rather than the merits of the story
A full, pre-judged profile of the storyteller is available in the form of a label like - Value, Growth, Momentum, Long Term, Short Term,
Trader, Investor, Technical, Fundamental, Techno-Funda, Quant, Quality, and so on
There are as many labels as there are eyes reading the story.
This shows tremendous literary awareness to understand the context of the
But at the same time it has a tendency to go against our natural instinct to just love a good story
The flip-side of this awareness is that as time progresses and luck or skill favours a few storytellers, the perceived value of the
storyteller surpasses the value of the story
It can also so happen that even if the story may no longer be as good as it was earlier, we may keep liking the storyteller, because the
stories they told in the past were so good
Often, we like stories so much that we even start liking the stories about the storytellers.
Experience in investing is a valuable tool; it
can help us filter past patterns in businesses but it can also anchor us to an older version of the story
Markets are dynamic and unpredictable; so sometimes there may be great value in updating our stories by adding fresh perspectives to them
These fresh tales can come from anywhere and if we choose to ignore the storyteller, we can actually learn a great deal from these new