Interview with SINLetter's Asif Suria - Part 1

Asif Suria is the founder of SINLetter (Suria Investment Newsletter), which is a free investment newsletter with a focus on international investing. I have been a loyal reader of this newsletter for the past several months, in which he highlights two stocks every month and provides excellent research for the same. His SINLetter picks have handsomely beat S&P, Nasdaq and Dow with total returns of 114.81% since inception in August 2005. You can subscribe to SINLetter here. He has been kind enough to agree to an interview for my blog, so folks, read on ....

Q.Can you tell us a little bit about your investing background - what got you interested, how did you start?

A.I can credit my dad for my interest in investing as some of my earliest memories were of him pouring over annual reports and financial newspapers. I used to deposit dividend checks for him in my teens and more than a decade before he retired, his income investing strategy was so well executed that he could pay for almost all our household expenses with his dividend income. I had been following the market for years and started investing in mid 2001 assuming that the dot com bear market was probably getting ready to go into hibernation. After a great start where I managed to get returns of almost 30% in a six month period (call it beginner's luck), things headed south and I lost a nice chunk of change. Thankfully this experience made me read almost every scrap of material I could find about investing and the markets. I learnt from my mistakes as well as by reading the works of gurus like Benjamin Graham and Peter Lynch.

Q. What was your first stock pick, and why?

A. My first stock pick was Oracle (ORCL). I picked Oracle because I was working as a data warehouse analyst at the time and understood the tech industry and specifically the database sector best. This has been something I have relied on ever since by picking stocks of companies that I have had some personal experience with or understand well. When I bought a Seagate external hard drive, I also bought the stock of Seagate Technologies (STX) since I realized that flash was not going to replace hard drives anytime soon as many on Wall Street feared. Since I used Ameritrade as my discount broker, I also picked up the stock after noticing their fat profit margins and high insider ownership. I often found great travel deals through Priceline.com (PCLN) and in late 2002 at a $1.51 (before the reverse split), I thought the stock was a great deal too. I have since sold all three stocks but they proved to be very profitable trades.


For part 2 click here.