The Shipping Man – Book Summary – An entertaining insight into the global shipping business

This book is probably the best book one can read to get an insight into the shipping finance business as well as the over all shipping business. This is a piece of fiction but its loaded with so much investing sense, that it just ought to be read by investors.  If you simply replace “shipping” as “company” almost all of the quotes will make immediate sense, for the rest of them just use your imagination.

• When it comes to buying ships, the best deals have the worst cash flow.
• Pay less for your ships, pay less to operate them or pay less for your capital. In a commodity business like shipping the only thing that really matters is the price.
• When capital has the desire to go into the shipping industry, it will always find a way.
• Look for situations in which financial leverage can be added to operating leverage.
• Ships are just floating real estate.
• Liquidity is nothing more than a function of finding the market clearing price. At the right price there is endless liquidity, and at an unattractive price there is no liquidity at all. Liquidity is always searching for value.
• The simple fact is that is this; he who is the most bullish on the market, or has the lowest cost of capital, or has some personal motivation for doing the deal, or ideally has all the three, wins the ship. Everyone else does nothing but talk about the very good and rational reasons they have for not doing deals.
• When everyone has the same information, it means there is no hidden value, there is only the market.
• You think the ship will work for you, but intact you will work for the ship.
• A life without passion is no life at all.
• The movement of the cargo has a certain intrinsic value, but the cost of moving the cargo is determined almost exclusively by the perception of the direction of the freight rates.
• Here is the thing with industry, even theorist analytical decisions can produce great results when you add a little luck.
• Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
• Everyone knows that a long term investment is just a short term investment gone wrong.
• Someone is always wrong, and very often it is usually the guy who knows the most.
• Real entrepreneurs always have problems. No man is smarter than the industry.
• Growth is a principle preached only by people who have nothing to loose.
  • It means that people who want growth are the same people who are not satisfied with what they have. Governments need growth because they are a giant Ponzi scheme that needs more tax revenue, and people with nothing need growth to get something, and people who feel small think they need to grow to feel big.
• The first time you make money is the best – the problem is that you can have only one first time.
• Once you are really rich, all you can do is loose.
• Buy on the sound of cannons and sell on the sounds of trumpets.
• Valuation of ships is an art and not a science. The answer you get depends on whom you ask the question. To whom you ask depends on what answer you would like to receive.
• Nothing gets an investor as aroused as the possibility that he might be denied the opportunity to make a particular investment.
• The only time you dont need a tax strategy is when you don’t pay any tax.
• If you steer towards the crash, then by the time you get there it would have moved.
• You should never sell when things are bad.
• When you really want to cry, you should buy.
• When it comes to shipping, investors only lose money when they lose patience.
• Everyone who has made a lot of money knows that earning money is a lot more fun that just having money.
• There will always be many good reasons not to do things in life, but people who achieve great things are the ones who believe in themselves and do things even when sometimes they do things that are not so smart.