Mr. Gerard Colaco's Insights & Wisdom

"The aim of MARKETING is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself..." - Peter Drucker

Mr. Gerard Colaco's Insights & Wisdom

Why people come to 'Colaco & Aranha (C&A)' for Investing ?

The first reason is Expertise

They can handle virtually all investment issues that a normal investor faces. If there is an issue which they cannot resolve, then they have a panel of professional like Chartered Accountants and Lawyers who can tackle these issues. They are constantly upgrading their levels of expertise. (For example, over Saturday and Sunday,, Mr. Colaco put in not less than 10 hours of reading. He tried to read for a minimum of two hours a day on weekdays.)

So the first reason why people come to them is definitely expertise. In fact, these days, low quality outfits are actually referring complicated matters to C&A. In his reading, he sticks only to the top quality authors. He does not read even the second level stuff. In fact, he read the same books many times, generally at intervals of one year. This gives him fresh insights. For example, last week he just finished his sixth reading of William Bernstein's " The Four Pillars of Investing" in six years! He will be reading it seventh time next year.

The second reason why people would come to C&A would be Ethics.

At the back of their minds, client of C&A know that they will put client's interests first, and they will get advice that is not only competent, but also honest.

Third, their office will not cause an investor irritation by making sales calls.

Fourth, they try to maintain a very high level of service.

Mr. Gerard Colaco's Insights & Wisdom

Our school of thought...!

"We come from a school of financial advisers which believes that no more than a dozen really good books on investments have even been written and no more than a dozen really good investment authors/ advisers / money managers/ academicians have ever lived".

Mr. Gerard Colaco's Insights & Wisdom

Question: I need one more small clarification from your side. One of friend has read the contents of Personal Financial Planning (PFP) published in our website. He said, the deepest insights and wisdom on PFP is provided in our website free of cost in the most simplest way! The one who read the contents of PFP in our website, would understand the concept of PFP and does investment on their own. Don't we lose our business by disclosing everything about PFP in our website?

Mr. Gerard Colaco: For 25 years, I have gone out of the way to educate investors, whether by cyclostyled or photocopied articles or presentations, or emails or speeches/ workshops/ courses. My business has only grown because of it. I have not come across any investor who has tried to do things on his own.



If you are quality, people look up to you and want to come to your for their investments. It is not the other way round. If on the other hand you are low quality, it is then that people will have a bad experience and run away!

Mr. Gerard Colaco's Insights & Wisdom

Question: The contents of Personal Financial Planning (PFP) published in our website is entirely given by you. Please write a few lines about yourself to introduce the writer of PFP in our website. PFP is your asset and you must get the credit for your work for the last 30 years.

Mr. Gerard Colaco: My examples, literature, presentations and style of advising were all conceptualized to aid me in advising clients effectively. They were based on a little common sense and relied a great deal on the ideas of the few masters that there are in the world of investment.

So I take no credit for originality. Even most of the examples given are from the experiences of investors I have advised, or from my own experience as a long-term investor. Therefore, I would not be comfortable about taking credit for all this work at all.

If you find such things useful, you can freely use them on your website. My permission is not required. No credit need be given to me. I have no problem with sharing my knowledge and expertise with very few 'quality advisers' like you. But I would not like to prepare any write-up about myself.

In fact, I do not even have a bio data prepared in my computer! I consider myself to be only a student of investment and will probably remain so until I quit this world!

Insights & Wisdom of Mr. Gerard Colaco

Question: The contents of Personal Financial Planning (PFP) published in our website are entirely given by you. Please write a few lines about you since PFP is your asset and you must get the credit for your hard work for the last 30 years?

Mr. Gerard Colaco: My examples, literature, presentations and style of advising were all conceptualised to aid me in advising clients effectively. They were based on a little common sense and relied a great deal on the ideas of the few masters that are in the world of investment.

So I take no credit for originality. Even most of the examples given are from the experiences of investors I have advised, or from my own experince as a long - term investor. Therefore, I would not be comfortable about taking credit for all this work.

If you fund such things usful, you can freely use them on your website. My permission is not required. No credit need be given to me. I have no problem with sharing my knowledge and expertise with a very few quality advisers like you. But I would not like to prepare any write.

Insights & Wisdom of Mr. Gerard Colaco

Question : One of the Mutual Fund is empanelling me with a condition to procure Rs. X crores of equity investments as target in a year. Kindly advice me on the issue?

Mr. Gerard Colaco : I am happy you got empanelled with this particular Mutual Fund. Right now they are nothing great, but they may be coming out with certain good investment options in the future. When we were being empanelled we were also told that we would have to procure Rs. X crores of equity investments per annum.

I bluntly told that mutual fund people that we do not accept any targets. I told them that we had been in business for 22 years without you and we would continue to be in business in future also, without you.

If this target becomes an issue, I will drop that Mutual Fund without hesitations and with cold blood ruthlessness.

INSIGHTS & WISDOM

Stock Broker's Offer : In our endeavour to provide better services we at the beginning of the New Fiscal Year offer Market Analysis a premium service to your Top Ten Clients for a period of one month for free. This will allow them to take informed decisions which are backed by our strong research, which shall be mutually beneficial. We request you to send the name and mobile numbers of your Top Ten Clients thus we can start the service for them. Also note client wanting to subscribe the service can do so by submitting the attached form.

Mr. Gerard Colaco : We thank you for your offer of market analysis for our top ten clients for a period of one month for free. We regret to inform you that we will not be availing of your offer for a minute, let alone a month! Our client would much rather pursue simple buy and hold strategies in well diversified portfolios of blue chip stocks for a period of at least five years.

From what I have seen in my 23 years in the investment advisory services business, investors who have used simple common sense and thoroughly disregarded research, have performed far better than investors who have depended on brokers "research".

Warren Buffett puts it quite well. He says, "We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good".

Burton G Malkiel, who heads the department of economics at Princeton University and who is a director of Vanguard Mutual Fund, puts it equally well. He says, "There are only three kinds of financial prognosticators - those who don't know, those who don't know they don't know, and those who know they don't know, but get paid big bucks to pretend they know".

Certainly, I wish your research ventures all the very best. As far as using your research for our clients, whether they are 'top ten clients' or not, it is strictly thanks, but no thanks!

Question : What are the reasons for CONFLICT OF INTEREST in financial advisory and services industry?

Mr. Gerard Colaco : Following are the reasons for CONFLICT OF INTEREST in the financial advisory and services industry;

1. Commission
2. Target
3. Rebate
4. Pestering
5. Pity Selling

The GAP in today's Financial Advisory & Services Industry

Question : What is the GAP you found in today's financial advisory and services industry?

Mr. Gerard Colaco : " Today, the world's financial advisory and services industry suffers from a frightening complexity, dangerous lack of ethics, high pressure selling and grave disregard for investor interest".

Investing in Challenging Times by Mr.Gerard Colaco at ARTHA Investor Meet held on 11-04-2010