For those interested in Value Investing, I cannot recommend enough the work of Sanjay Bakshi, a professor - and practitioner - vastly influenced by Charlie Munger and Buffett:
I noticed a lot of people talked about their Investment policy statement lately. Since my investment style tend to differ a lot from other members, I thought it would be a good exercise to layout my investment philosophy. of course, it may be amended with future experiences.
„Take a simple idea and take it very seriously.“ Charlie Munger
I decided to apply the idea of compound interest with utmost seriousness.
My goal as an investor is to compound my wealth at the highest rate possible. A compounding machine has three components:
I will continuously save between 65% and 70% of the money I am earning through my job, until I become financially independent (saved up 30 times annual expenses), which I expect to happen in approximately 7 years (give or take 2 years depending on market conditions). After which I may stop working (or at least stop exchanging my time against money when considering an occupation).
This one is easy: Being currently 32 years old, I expect to let my compounding machine run at least 30 or 40 years, hopefully much more depending on my health.
A nice tool when we have a long term horizon is the rule of 72, which gives you the amount of time needed to double your money by compounding.
It is all about the number of doubles occurring in your time horizon. With a 10 years horizon, there won’t be that many doubles, even compounding at 26% (there would be only 3.33 doublings in this case).
But with a 30 years runway, the number of doublings can be huge! Between 3 and 10 doublings using above rates (and 2^10 is a very sweet number where your money has been multiplied by 1’000…)
This is the part where I actually invest the money.
So far, I have classified these occasions in five categories:
The circle of competence is very important. If I am not able to understand how a company is making money, which factors are driving its earnings, where its competitive advantage comes from and how this advantage is likely to endure in the future, I should automatically pass to the next opportunity.
One last point : such occasions are usually found in smaller stocks. It is easier to go from a market cap of $100 million to $1billion (a lot of companies did it) rather than from $100 billion to $1trillion (very few did it) or from $1trillion to $10 trillion (no company ever did it).
This one is easier. I will sell when:
Thanks to @1000000CHF I have finally read James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. It is fantastic!
The book provides a comprehensive set of rules and advices that help us changing our behavior and instill new habits/break bad habits.
I had read before The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg, but had found it impractical although interesting from a theoretical point of view. Here it is the opposite: think practical and implement 
Hi Julianek,
I’ve been reading this forum for a few months now and also the jurnal section. A lot of great information and advice, I learned a lot from the posts here.
I’m trying to run a salary calculator simulation on https://www.lohncomputer.ch/en/your-result/
However, if I input 10774 chf per month for a married couple with no children, not church members living in Zurich they estimate net income 8285, that’s a far cry from 9944 I see on your table even if I add the employers P2 contribution.
Can you shed some light on how you reached those numbers, please?
If we earn say 130k between myself and my wife on a B permit, how much would that be Net, assuming we will live somewhere in the canton of Zurich most likely close to the German border.
We are planning to relocate there from Dublin and I am trying to compare overall cost of living & purchase power.
Thank you,
Regards,
Vlad
A lot more than in Dublin in any case.
Only US beats Switzerland in compensation
Hi Vlad,
Yes you got me on this one: in our situation in 2017 I earned most of our income (around 120k gross) while my wife did various small jobs and tasks (at some point she had up to 3 employers) for around 500 - 1000 CHF / month. So although I may have correctly recorded all the AVS/First pillar and witholding tax for my salary, in the case of my wife her salary usually arrived waaaay before the many payslips; So in her case I may not have recorded all the social contributions. But the Net income is accurate in any case. The above exercice’s purpose was more to track our daily expenses after net salary.
Anyway, if you want to have a more precise idea of how much you will take home in your pocket, I advise you to follow the simulator, the picture may be more accurate than our special situation 
Thank you Julianek,
So for example, in your calculation, did you include the Pension fund as Income?
Would you consider 6’377.20 CHF Net and than add twice the P2 value to reach your spreadsheet
Assuming you pay 50% of P2 and the employer pays the other 50%.
That’s 471 * 2 + 6377 = 7319
Also, any idea about that withholding TAX.
Can that be avoided or diminished P3a maybe ?
Thank you,
For the second pillar, it will depend of the pension fund provider chosen by your employer, but yes assuming that 50% is paid by you and 50% by your employer is a safe assumption.
For the withholding tax, this is not avoidable as long as you haven’t lived in CH more than 5 years. You can however invest in a 3a pillar (max ~6500 CHF per year) and deduct it from your taxable income. Then at the end of the year you claim a tax refund (except around 1000 CHF tax savings).
Thanks,
Really appreciate your advice.
Regards,
The human brain cannot grasp exponential growth, episode 194.
Consider the following question: “A sheet of paper is roughly 0.05 mm thick. Suppose you could fold it in two, fifty times in a row. How thick would it be?”
Most people answer around 4 centimeters.
In reality, the sheet would be so thick it would cover the Earth-Sun distance.
Are you trying to tell us you went to Moon with some cryptos? 
Can you fold it more than 11 times? 
Make 13 to make a world record:
If you fold an A4 sheet of paper 103 times its thickness will roughly be the size of the Universe.
Edit: google is fun. Together with that link there are 4-5 links that says it’s “common knowledge” that you can’t fold it more than 7 times.
True, that’s why I formulated the question as “Suppose you could…”
Not really, no. I don’t have a view strong enough on crypto to make it a meaningful part of my portfolio. I’ll pass my turn on this one 
My point was to highlight once again that our brains are just not equipped to grasp what exponential growth means. In this example the average answer is wrong by 12 orders of magnitude (4cm vs 150 million km). This is absolutely nuts and continues to amaze me.
And this is also partly why i still think that quality, long-term compounders are a good long-term investment.
Another example: if you get 1% better every day, in 1 year you will get… 37 times better. But of course, such rate of progress is impossible to maintain, as there are diminishing returns, hence it’s often the famous S curve that can be observed.
I really liked this video about how the ocean shipping industry works, and why there are so many supply chain issues currently:
Love that channel 
Nice video, thanks for sharing.
I also like the insights of Ryan Johnson (a trucker) on the on land situation for the US: I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End | by Ryan JOHNSON | Oct, 2021 | Medium
Hey @Julianek, are you still with us?
I’d be curious to hear an update on your journey.
Still in CH, stuck to your net nets, reached the target, grew your own mini Buffett?
Hoi @dbu,
Indeed I have been very quiet recently. Although i still answer to moderation requests, my participation on the forum has shrinked a lot, sorry for that.
Well, a lot happened in between.
On the good news side:
On the not-so-good side:
On the financial side, as many on this forum, I lost a bit of money in 2022 and more than made up for it in 2023.
Yes, still living in ZRH. Early readers might recall that in the past i was considering doing FIRE abroad -either Poland (my wife’s homeland) , or France (mine).
We spent some time in Poland during winter near Krakow, and quickly figured out that the local air pollution during winter is a big no-no (the smog is reaaaally bad). There is no point in retiring early if that leads to shortening your lifespan.
France was another option and we could probably retire there right now, but frankly as time goes by i am more and more disappointed with the country and its mindset. Not wanting to generalize of course, but anybody familiar with the country knows that people are getting poorer by the month, and the local atmosphere is full of anxiety. I have come to appreciate Switzerland’s piece of mind and everything mostly working. So it looks like we’ll stay there for a bit.
I have stopped doing Net-Net since late 2017/beginning of 2018. At this time the market became a lot more expensive and such stocks became a lot rarer - to such an extent that it was not possible to assemble a statistical basket of net-nets. The point of net-nets is that if you have 20-30 of them, you don’t know which one will work out, but on average you will do more than ok. That’s not so true when suddenly you only have 4-5 of them.
So i have taken another approach, mainly based on quality, i.e mainly stocks with a high return on invested capital, with a long runway to reinvest this capital. Btw thanks @San_Francisco for regularly bumping up the Quality Indexing thread i had made at the time. I was re-reading it today and I don’t think I’d change much to these posts.
So my portfolio is composed of ~15 stocks. Two thirds of them are small-to-medium+ caps with a high return on capital and a big runway for reinvestment at a reasonable price. The last third of the portfolio are positions that are not meant to be permanent, but where there were market dislocations that were temporarily unnoticed with good short-term opportunities.
To give an example, take metallurgical coal. Although people are trying to switch off thermal coal (used to heat), the world still need to make still, and metallurgical coal is thus used to make steel. As a result of the ESG movement, institutions did not make the difference between thermal and met coal, and no coal mining company has received any financing over the last five years. In the current world, no banker wants to be seen lending money to coal companies. As a result, many of these companies went bankrupt (mining is not such a great business, and many operators could not refinance their debt). The net result is that supply of met coal has stayed constant - and will remain constant for years to come. But enter 2022 and the Ukraine war. Coal prices went through the roof, and some operators like $AMR used this windfall to pay entirely back their debt. What happened next is interesting: the market still wanted nothing to do with $AMR stock, and it’s PE was still in the low single digits.
So they started buying back their stock. A lot. Like, really a lot. Last year they bought back 30% of their stock and they are on their path to buy a lot this year as well. At some point the market noticed that $AMR had a $1b market cap and was generating $600-700million of Free cash flows per year. Needless to say, the stock is not a $1b market cap anymore. Since the beginning of 2022, the stock price went from $65 to $300.
So yes, i am still doing mainly quality stocks, with here and there a few special situations where there is either a big imbalance between supply and demand, or something is structurally preventing the market to notice a big anomaly (as was the case with the ESG movement for met coal).
As you may have figured out by now, yes if I want to retire abroad, no if i want to stay in CH.
Good question. Creating a small investment partnership (à la Buffett in the 50s) is something I have considered a lot, but that I finally didn’t do. The first reason is that regulation has become very hard for such a structure, for probably good reasons. Regulators want to protect small investors, so there is a lot of compliance requirements that have built up over the last few years. In particular, FINIG and FIDLEG regulations made sure that you cannot run a one-man-shop investment in Switzerland. I understand the rationale, but it just makes it a lot harder for emerging managers. For instance, Rob Vinall (a famous fund manager based in Kilchberg who used to be a one-man shop) had to hire another director recently for regulatory compliance reasons. Having to pay many salaries means that you need a lot of AUM quickly - below $50 million AUM is going to be very complicated.
The second reason is that i met with many fund managers over the last two years, and the majority told me that if I have the choice between managing other people’s money or my own money (i.e supposing i am FI), I should manage my own money. People skills (having to deal with customers) is a lot more different from analytical skills (i.e spending time in an armchair thinking about what makes a good business).
So here it is, the last two years in a nutshell. Happy to provide more details if there is a part you want more details on.
