Long-term Investment Portfolio - Part 2

In this second part of my investment portfolio blog, I will give you details about my investments in Active mutual funds. Over the last few years, I've been adding and removing a few mutual funds in my portfolio as I wasn't finding the right balance of enough diversification and at the same time, concentrated portfolio because I didn't want to stretch my time to look after 10s of mutual funds regularly. I think I have now completed the construction of my core holdings and will share my ideas here.

My investment philosophy is to buy and hold. And, hence, naturally, I'm drawn to mutual funds where investment managers have a similar style in their investments, either in stocks or in bonds, with a very low turnover rate. Currently, I'm holding good position sizes in each of the below-mentioned funds.

As with any investment decision, it is very likely that I may change my view on these funds in the future and increase or decrease my holdings. It is also possible that these funds may get a new investment manager or a different stratergy that may change my original thesis. And, hence, you should need to do your own research before you decide if any of these funds are a right choice. I have given a percentage allocation recommendation for each of these funds where I have assumed that I have only these assets in my portfolio.

1. Fundsmith Equity Fund
Terry Smith, chief investment manager, and his colleague, Julian Robins, run this fund with 20 to 30 share holdings. Their Annualized Rate of Return since 2010 has been +19.8%, which is exceptional when you compare it to Index funds or return by other active managers in the similar asset class. Of course, there is no guarantee that the return will be repeated for the next 5 or 10 years, however, the investment team is sticking with their investment philosophy and I'm very optimistic that the fund will generate a good rate of return in the future. I would allocate 25% of my investment assets in this fund.

2. Lindsell Train Global Equity
This fund is similar to Fundsmith and investment managers hold 20-35 companies in this mutual fund. The mutual fund company, Lindsell Train, has a few funds in their portfolios, however, this Global Equity Fund combines the best ideas from their other funds and bring US, Japanese, UK and European companies in one fund. The company publishes very detailed monthly reports and annual report is very educational as well. I would allocate 20% of my savings to this fund.

3. Stewart Investors Asia Pacific Leaders
The above two funds invest in the developed market only. For those who are looking to invest their savings in China, India, etc 'emerging market' companies, I found this fund is the best in class. Similar to Fundsmith and Lindsell Train, this fund has very few holdings and invests in large and mid capitalization equities in the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan). I would allocate 20% to this fund.

4. Marlborough Global Bond
Marlborough Fund Managers' founder Geoff Hitchin launched this award-winning Marlborough Global Bond Fund in 1987 and remains at its helm today. The fund invests in bonds issued by governments and companies around the world. Portfolio turnover rate is 20.52% and the fund is unconstrained in its allocations to countries and regions. I would allocate 20% of savings to this fund.

5. MandG Emerging Market Bond

At least 70% of this fund's asset is invested in bonds issued by the governments, government agencies or companies of emerging market nations. The fund is currently offering more than 5% of underlying yield. Compared to the above 4 funds, however, this fund may have wider price fluctuations in a short period but this shouldn't concern a long-term investor. I would allocate the remaining 15% of my asset to this fund.

Important Information:  This is not an investment advice and hence you will need to decide if an investment is suitable for you. If you are unsure whether to invest, you should contact a financial adviser.

Long-term Investment Portfolio - Part 1

In this blogpost, I will go through my Investment Portfolio, focusing on Index Funds. As a long-term investor, my aim is to preserve and grow the real value of my assets. World's most renowned investors, including Howard Marks & Warren Buffett, suggest low-cost tracker (Index) funds as a best for retail investors to invest their money in. These funds should be used for a long-term investment (5-10 years) and not advised to do short term trade in and out.

Most of the below funds are available as an either income or accumulation share class for the UK investors. Furthermore, most of the funds are also available with another layer of discounts as some of the investment platforms have negotiated further discounts on already low-cost ongoing charges (OCF).

1. BlackRock Corporate Bond Tracker Fund

This is a low cost tracker fund which tracks the performance of the Markit iBoxx GBP Non-Gilts Overall TR Index. The OCF for the fund for a retail investor is 0.16%. The fund is currently yielding just above 3% and gives a good exposure to world's corporate bond market.

2. Legal and General European Index

Legal and General Investment Management has done a great job of providing very low cost index funds across the major investment sectors. This is an Equity index fund tracking the performance of the FTSE World Europe (excluding UK) Index. The Index consists of a broad spectrum of European companies and currently advertised at OCF of 0.12%.

3. Legal and General UK 100 Index Trust

It is a well known fact that most of the investors have a home bias when it comes to investing their savings. Being aware of that and also knowing that a few of my individual stock investments are within FTSE 100 companies, I have a minor portfolio holding in this fund.

4. HSBC FTSE 250 Index

Again, this is one of my smaller portfolio holding. This fund provides tracking of FTSE 250 Index and has OCF of 0.18%.

5. Legal and General US Index

This fund replicates the performance of FTSE USA Index. This index has a few more companies compared to SP 500 index. For the UK retail investor, I found that this fund provides the lowest OCF compared to an SP 500 index fund and hence I have selected this fund over an SP fund.

I do not have any emerging market index tracker funds. There are few reasons behind this as I think most of the emerging market indices do not correctly represent emerging or developing markets. The second reason is that I do not believe that those markets are efficient or free from inside trading.

I hope the above list will give you a good starting point to start constructing a balanced portfolio and than add an active investment funds. It is possible to reduce the number of Equity Index funds from four to a single fund by investing in an International Index Trust if you do not want to allocate your funds to these individual funds.

I will write a separate blog featuring my investments in Active Mutual Funds.

Important Information: I do not give investment advice so you need to decide if an investment is suitable for you. If you are unsure whether to invest, you should contact a financial adviser.

Value Investing

Few years ago, while reading an article about various investing methods, I came across the value investment approach, which was first introduced by Benjamin Graham, and made popular by Warren Buffett. Those who are not familiar with either of them, I would recommend these books: 'The Intelligent Investor' by Benjamin Graham, and either 'The Snowball' by Alice Schroeder or 'Buffett' by Roger Lowenstein.

At the heart of the Value Investing, there is a simple concept of buying a share in the company where its shares are selling at considerably less price than company’s total net asset (generally, value of its tangible asset) value and sell the share when it reaches near to that value. Of course, there is a lot more investigation required by an investor to find out a company's valuation and where the other part of the value investment principle, of 'margin of safety', becomes invaluable.

If you would like to start investing in the UK and EU based companies or want to start your research, I found below websites are very useful:

https://www.fidelity.co.uk [Mainly mutual funds]

http://www.hl.co.uk [Mutual funds and shares]

https://www.halifaxmarketwatch.co.uk [Mainly stock markets]

It has never been easier and cheaper to start investing, especially true for the UK residents. One can start investing in the stock market (or in bonds, gold, etc. for that matter) with as little as £25 per month with low management fees.

Some of the UK based Mutual fund managers I follow are:

http://www.lindselltrain.com [Fact sheets & insights]

https://www.fundsmith.co.uk [Annual reports and videos]

http://www.sanford-deland.com [Fund based upon Buffett's investment methods]

https://woodfordfunds.com [Diverse investment although not a value investment]

and US based websites:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com [Annual reports and letters]

https://www.oaktreecapital.com [Memos from Howard Marks]

http://www.theinvestorspodcast.com [Books reviews, interviews & Podcasts]

I leave you with the below quote which caution a potential investor before buying shares in a 'turnaround' company:

"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

- Warren Buffett

Important Information: I do not give investment advice so you need to decide if an investment is suitable for you. If you are unsure whether to invest, you should contact a financial adviser.

Passion for Career, Hobby or for Life

We often see most of our friends are being passionate about their careers. Not all career opportunities give hefty financial returns. Still, most people are very ambitious about their careers. Almost everyone wants to reach to the "highest" position in their career ladder.

Some of us divert this passion to achieve something totally different. Many artists love their skills and sometimes go beyond anyone's imagination to achieve their dreams. They create astonishing art even their career doesn't bring financial or social stability. While others, devote their entire life for the service to others.

I have a passion for day-to-day life. It's certainly not a struggle for me to survive a day. However, I like to make the most out of everyday. For some unknown reason, I "don't" have any dream which I want to achieve in my life. For me, living a life is an ultimate satisfaction. That doesn't mean that I don't think about short term goals. I do. And I'll try my best to fulfil them. My passion is knowledge, I like to know more, want to understand everything there is in the nature to understand, want to live in the present time and enjoy the most out of it. 

As Gautama Buddha has said,

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."

We can't change what has already happened in the past. In the present moment, we can't do anything to influence our faraway future. Hence, I think the best way to enjoy the life is to be passionate about the life and enjoy the current moment.

Most people have few goals in their life, they may want a managerial post at some point in their career, earn thousands if not millions of pounds, have a luxurious life style, own the costliest technology products, have a big and a beautiful house, etc etc. For me, I have none of these things as goals. I believe that if I can be here, without thinking about the future and planning ahead for 2-5 years, I think I can be a good position with just living a life without targeting any of these so called "goals". Money does bring happiness. More money also brings more happiness and more ownerships of the objects. However, there is no end to this acquisitiveness.

One should feel satisfied with what he or she owns. We should be thankful for the food and shelter. We should be more focussed towards helping family and community. We should share knowledge and have a desire to learn more. By living a simple life, we can achieve more.

Selfishness

I see everything happening in and around the world, always have some resemblance in our personally life, too. The recent volcanic ash incident brought various political, psychological and scientific thoughts in my mind. Until last Thursday night, everything was fine on the ground and in the air in the UK. But, when I tuned into news on Friday morning, I found that due to ash clouds from Icelandic volcano has caused airspace closure and there is no flights to and from UK airports. The situation worsened during the weekend as that ash covered most of the Europe and literally whole Europe was under no fly zone.

The weirdest part of the whole incident was that everything felt very calm and normal on ground level. There wasn’t any single thing I noticed different in day-to-day life. But when I read more about the affects of airports closures, almost no commercial flights services and economic effects of it in almost every parts of the world, I released how severe the problem was.

We all know that we are helpless against nature’s will. We don’t have knowledge to predict such an event neither we have power to stop such a thing happening. But, we are definitely strong enough to help people after this kind of incident. And, I have seen that UK government has helped people and authorities in such events, more recently in earthquake-hit Haiti, Southeast Asia when Tsunami struck, etc. But, I see very less help on this case when hundreds of thousands of British people are stranded all over the world. There has been some development in bringing these people back to home, but it’s a very little effort when you know how much resources British government has. If government really cared about their own people, they just could use their unused military aircrafts, they could use money to hire private aeroplanes so that they can take stranded passengers from UK to their destination country and bring British people back to home. But, they aren’t doing such a thing. I see government is letting commercial Airlines’ to sort this issue out. And, we all know that Airlines are not in business to help people, they are in business to make money.

All these lead to me a typical human behaviour. We do not act very fast and with confidence when our loved ones asks for our help or when they ask us to be there in their side in problem. This is a very common but a bizarre psychology that I have seen in people. Why some of us act very fast to help someone else's issue and why we hesitate to help our own people? When a person or as in above case, government, justify this by giving reason that because they are our own people, they will understand why they have given them second priority while placing something else before them. I strongly disagree with that. How can we expect British people to understand why government is not acting to bring them quickly to home while sending millions of pounds to a country where they do not have direct connection? How can a person understands a reason when his or her loved once put her or him second and gives a priority to a third person?

I believe that if we can take care of our own family first, and if everyone does so, then the whole world will be a far better place. Sadly, most people consider this kind of act as selfish. But, I don’t see that way. I firmly believe that we have to be on the side of our loved ones first before we think about how that decision will affect anybody else. Even if that means that we may not be able to satisfy everyone but at least we will be able to make our loved one happy. And, if we will be able to do so, then I am sure that everything will work out for the best at the end for everyone.

Lisbon visit

Portugal was a second country I visited in mainland Europe. As I was here for a business purpose, I didn’t get chance to visit any other parts of Portugal apart from its main city and capital Lisbon and its surroundings. Lisbon is located on the coast of Atlantic Ocean where river Tagus flows into the ocean. Although it was almost end of November, the weather wasn’t very cold as compared to the UK and apart from 1-2 days of light rain or shower, my 7 days worth of time went good.

My hotel was located in middle of historic old town and commercial district. Hence, it was very convenient for me to go to my work place and sightseeing in the evening and in weekend. From my hotel to the company, the journey was about 15-20 minutes ride by Taxi. And, that was the most weird and shocking part of my daily activity. And, the reason was Taxi drivers. Unlike other rich European countries, Taxi fares were very cheap and I found that most of the Taxi drivers are from poor financial background. And, there was a language issue as well with my conversation with drivers. Hence, each trip to and from company had different experience with drivers’ behaviours, towards me and in general, as well. Later I found out that it was due to shorter trips. As this was very short trip between company and hotel, the average fare I paid was around 5 Euros. And, most of the drivers didn’t like that et al. But by law are required to take these short journeys, they weren’t happy.

  
Lisbon’s old city has a quite a few historic buildings. Most of them were built after 1755 as major earthquake in that year demolished most of the city. New city was built afterwards and due to visionary thoughts from then equivalent to Prime Minister, Marquis of Pombal built the city with larger space between buildings and hence you will find very wide roads and good size pavements, which are very unlikely to see in any other larger city in whole Europe. Portuguese are very proud of the achievements of Vasco de Gama and they have honoured him with creating a fantastic Vasco de Gama sports centre near the coast. In the nutshell, Lisbon is a city with modern architect, nice coastline, cheaper than other European cities and also a great place for shopping.

Honesty

When I created this blog, my purpose was to keep record of my thoughts and my views on various life changing issues. I have to be honest on what I write here because I do not write here for the sake of other people but I write here so that in the future when I read these articles, I can understand who I was at that point and where I have come from there.

Most of us are afraid of change. Some of us are also afraid of expressing our real thoughts on various subjects. When we think about ourselves how we were couple of years ago, then we generally realise how wrong or right we were at that particular instance. We see same thing differently at different stages of life. Due to that, it is obvious that we develop certain feelings towards daily issues that we might not have done so if we weren’t gone through certain changes in our lives. There is nothing wrong with believing something that is totally opposite to what we believed few months or few years ago, as long as it doesn’t contradict with the common sense and our self believe doesn’t harm anyone.

Life teaches us all sorts of things. Each of us is unique and live in different environment, sooner or later; we all go through life altering experiences. Those of us who dare to think about religion, philosophy, science or nature and asks questions on any of these subjects, gets answers at some point in their life. Some people do not bother to think about these basic issues of life while some people do but hesitate to express themselves thinking other people wont understand them. But if we cannot be honest with ourselves, we cannot live the life as we suppose to.

Meaning of a life

One of the most important questions we ask ourselves all the time is that what is a meaning of a life? Life is mysterious with plenty of strange things around us. The complexity of religion and science puzzles most of us, who are capable enough to think about the meaning and seeking for an explanation about the purpose of human life. Why cant we just keep life simple and make our own purpose out of it for living?

When a newborn baby dies after few hours, what should we make of her purpose? Did she do something wrong in her previous life that she even didn’t deserve proper life on earth? Or, was she really so good that god wanted her back to the heavens. It is common in other animals that newborn animals die and we treat these deaths simply as a nature’s survival principle and its result. So, why we have different feelings and perception about life for humans and animals?

Most of us find our own purpose and meaning of life within our work. Doctors want to save people’s lives, and that’s what they think their purpose is. Engineers want to create new instruments and make people’s lives better. And, criminals want to create chaos in the society and that’s what they see as a purpose of their lives. But, is it really what we suppose to do? Shouldn’t we looking for answers to the basic questions, shouldn’t we looking for a purpose and meaning of our lives on earth?

Is it right to be wrong?

In the population of more than 6.7 billion people, the significance of an individual person is very minuscule. Our act and knowledge influence only few people and outside of professional and social network, an individual person is just a stranger to others. What someone has to do so that millions of people can notice him? The act should inspire other people to do better things.

The world is full of bad people. It is still a living place because of hard work done by good people. Yet, those bad people influence our everyday lives and make more impact in the society. Those people who make and try to keep world a better place often do not want any publicity and they are our unsung heroes. However, in order to inspire our new generations, it is also necessary to recognise these people. And, how someone can make a positive impact on people’s mind? What one has to do to influence millions of people to move forward in positive direction?

Career freedom

It is a known fact that most of the people don’t like their work. They are doing it because they do not have any other choice. In order to survive, we need money, and hence most of us end up in the job or business where we make money but don’t generally work in the field that makes us happy. Why this is case for most of the people? Is it because we do not get enough opportunities in our interested field or there is not enough money to be earned to survive from our passion?

Rapid development in science has shown us new and excited fields like synthetic biology, nuclear fusion power, artificial intelligence, etc in recent years. Subjects like art, music, dance, history, philosophy, etc are evergreen. And there plenty of other engineering, medical, and social science related subjects are there to select for our professional life. Yet, most of us end up working in the field, in the company, in the environment or in the city where we don’t like working et al. Life is about grabbing opportunities when they come. May be we are not able to see these opportunities or not brave enough to capture them. Or, it may be just that because of personal and family responsibilities, we are not able to do what we like to do. We live in the society where freedom of an individual exists only on paper and not in practice. And, even someone has that freedom to choose the field he or she likes and even if that person has all resources to start the career, this person still have fear of failure in the future and this failure can be very shameful as this is what he or she really wanted to do and failed.

If every adult person had a job he or she really likes, then obviously world would be a better place to live in. But, that is not possible, not with current social system we have. And, I don’t see things improving in recent future because happiness in our life depends upon money and believe me, money is not a good thing.

Existence of life

The existence of god depends upon us. We human beings are responsible for god and I think without us there is no purpose of god. Millions of years ago when dinosaurs inhabited earth, did they need god for their survival? It is a common idea among us that dinosaurs vanished from earth because they were not capable enough to survive on earth and hence nature decided to demolish the whole species and begin the era of humans. Well, that belief is not true and in fact, dinosaurs lived on earth for around 160 million years while Homo sapiens have been on earth for only around 200,000 years. And, although we have more developed brain than dinosaurs, I see fewer chances of us surviving few millions of years on earth. And, if dinosaurs didn’t needed god for their survival, do we really need to believe in god for our existence and for our survival?

When we compare the age of earth and time of form life being here on earth with time of human being on earth, we are in early stage of evolution. And, when we check the history of religions, we can easily find out that there is no religion exists today which has been here for more than 5000 years. Does it mean that god came to our life since then? Or, is it that we realized about god when we were clever enough to figure it out about him, around 5000 years ago? There is no religion that explains clearly how life came to an existence on earth. Religions teach us how to live a good life and teach us about the practice we should do to go to heaven or for salvation. But I think it is very tough to live a normal life when we do not understand the existence of life and we do not know the purpose of it. The question of existence should have come across to each and every intelligent person into his or her lifetime. And there are chances that none of us will be able to find out the answer in the future. But that doesn’t mean that there is no answer to it. May be we have confined ourselves to logical thinking and that logic cannot go beyond our understanding of current knowledge and hence we will need people who can think beyond the limit and that will be way to find out answers we seek throughout our lifetime.

Visit to North Wales

Recently I visited northern Wales with my friends. I have been to Wales before but those visits were mainly concentrated near southern part. It is a very small country in size but has plenty of varieties in landscapes. While southern Wales has plenty of forests with almost flat countryside, northern part has one of the longest mountain range in Britain and has highest mountain peak in Wales called Snowdon. Our visit was mainly around this mountain region and near the shore of Irish Sea.

Although Wales is incorporated into England since 1500s, it has kept its separate identity from rest of the UK with unique culture including its own language, food, customs, music etc. Welsh language still has significance in local people’s life and it is also one of two official languages in Wales, another being English, of course. It has population of around three million.

Best way to visit northern Wales is by car as public transport is limited. Weather was nice during our visit with few showers here and there and that made landscape look better with light warm Sun light bouncing from water particles. We were surprised by number of sheep we saw in farms and I think there are more sheep in Wales than humans. When you first enter into mountain area, you will notice water stream flowing from mountains, uncountable sheep on grassy lands and vast area with roughly no human presents. If you admire of nature and like mountain walk, I think Wales could be one of the best places to visit.

Errors and precision

Life is full of disorders, malfunctions and errors. And, then also, somehow, most of the things are working correctly in daily life and lives on planet are continuing. Murphy’s law says that if anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Our body is made up of so many different organs, and in total, adult human body consists of around 10 trillion cells. Except few sicknesses once in a while, our body seems to work normally throughout life span, which is typical of around 65 years. Society, as a general, has a multiple parts and even though some parts may create chaos sometimes, life goes on normally for each of us and we are moving ahead for better future. It seems that even though Murphy’s law is undoubtedly right in general sense, error doesn’t happen that often in our lives and somehow we manage to survive in this chaotic world.

Error has different meanings depending upon the context where it has been used. Error can happen due to lack of knowledge. But nature sometimes introduces these errors in its code to make species different from each other and to form coherent society, and this error generally referred to as mutation. Each of us has DNA that consists of millions of base pairs, and with the help of this DNA, our body is forms our body parts. Now, with only few exceptions, out of billions of people around the world, errors because of genetic mutation are rare. And it is amazing to know that copying of pairs in DNA happens in few seconds and still most of these pairs are free from errors. Is nature very kind to us or there is more order in life than we think? Even human made components, like computer processors, are an example of precision in life and when we see that each processor contains millions of transistors and each transistor holds a few electrons, protons and neutrons, point of failure is not in single or double digits but its in millions, and still, these processors work around the clock. It is in our nature to make mistakes but due to technological advances the rate of failure has been decreased recently in all major fields and work of nature provides us an example to become more accurate in every aspect of our lives.

Multiple personalities

Knowingly or unknowingly, we act differently to different people or to group of people and this creates various images of ourselves to other people. Most of us spend the average day at work with colleagues. Out of all colleagues we work with, each one has distinct perception about us in their minds. Although each of us is unique as a person, we live differently in our parents, friends, colleagues, rivals, etc. mind.

The moment we meet a new person, we start building image about his or her in our mind. At the time when we start our conversation with this individual, this person generally shows his or her positive side and acts civilly. When we get chance to meet or work with this person quite often, then we start adding his or her characteristics in our mind and build a strong image of that person after a few meetings. As we interact with a few friends, relatives, colleagues etc everyday, they get to know ourselves better and learn our different characteristics each time and we also add their traits, their behaviours, and their positive and negative sides into our minds that ultimately alters their image that we used to hold until then.

Although each of us has unique personality, somehow we appear different to each and every other person. And the same way, we have a unique image of each individual in our mind that may be very diverse than that person’s actual personality.

Fact on theories

As an electronic engineering student, I studied most of my undergraduate education studying around electron’s properties and its behaviour. I did so even without actually seeing electron by my eyes and putting faith on university lecturers and scientists who have discovered and studied it before me. The question is, how can we spend whole life on something which we haven’t seen or touched and just putting faith on people and unquestioning whatever they have substantiated a long time ago, is correct? What if someone will discover that the electron that we used to know is not what it is? Will lives of all electronics and computer engineers jeopardise if such thing happens? Or, nothing much will happen as computers and electronics device will work same as they were working before the new discovery.

Most of our educational studies and professional work are based upon some sort of theories. These theories are either established by some facts or verified by other theories on which current theory is based upon. Now, if predictions of any theory are verified by a few different sources, then we can confirm that theory is full proof. But if theory is based upon assumptions that we can’t verify directly but only depends upon indirect evidence, how much can we trust that theory? Most theories in Physical science are based upon such assumptions and those assumptions are, at least most of the times, depends upon indirect evidence. The question arises at this point is that then how can we trust such theories?

For example, all information we have about our Sun is a result of indirect evidence or calculations made on earth by scientists. As it is not possible to actually go to the Sun and collect evidences, is it worth to put blind faith in whatever scientists tell us? Most tests carried out by scientific circles show that Sun will be still there for another 5 billions years. But what if scientists have made some mistakes in their calculations and what if those mistakes were so catastrophic that we misjudged the whole process of chemical reactions in the Sun’s core? As we don’t know the whole secret of physical world yet, what if we haven’t noticed one significant process happening in the Sun that can alter our whole perception about it? What if we found that instead of 5 billion years, Sun’s remaining life is only 50 years? The chance of that happening is very odd, but, still, there is a chance!

In order to expand our knowledge, we always use old scientific notions and expand them further. We generally believe in our predecessors and their work. But, as it has happened before, they might have omitted minor facts that weren’t important to them in the discovery of something but those facts were also not that much negligible as well not consider for the bigger and better result. This may lead us all to the false results and to the future that is different than what we have predicted. There is no point going back to the beginning of scientific and mathematical origin and start verifying everything. But, there always will be a dilemma whether to trust on someone’s work that we can’t verify personally. Hence, I think it is always worth considering the fact that unless theories are based upon pure facts, they are still theories and we shouldn’t put our blind faith on them.