Archives for May 2022

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Vinod Sethi served as Managing Director of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, until February 2001 and served as its Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager for 12 years. He is a graduate in Chemical Engineering and holds a degree in B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai and an MBA in Finance from Stern School of Business, New York University.

Vinod has maintained a low public profile all these years, but he is a veteran in the Indian equity investment space with an experience of more than three decades. The little I have read and known about him, I find a man who has not been just a multidisciplinary thinker but also a true Karmayogi who has combined his inner voice at a number of times with mindful decisions and rightful efforts.

When I was studying about Vinod’s life and experience, I could remember a 1910 speech delivered by the former US President, Theodore Roosevelt and which was titled The Man in the Arena. Roosevelt said and I quote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

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Radhika Gupta is the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer at Edelweiss Mutual Fund. Radhika started her career with McKinsey and later switched to Wall Street, joining AQR Capital. She then moved to India in 2009 to start Forefront Capital Management, the first registered hedge fund in India, which was acquired by Edelweiss Financial Services Limited in 2014. Radhika is a graduate in Management and Technology programs from the University of Pennsylvania, with joint degrees in Economics from Wharton in addition to Computer Science Engineering from Moore School.

Radhika was born to a diplomat father who was an Indian Foreign Service official. With her family, she moved across continents. She was born in Pakistan, where she had complications at birth, and ended up with a broken neck which she describes is a “weird tilt” to her head.

While researching about Radhika for this conversation, I went back again and again to this beautiful thought from Haruki Murakami’s book Kafka on the Shore, where he wrote and I quote –

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. But once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

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Mohnish Pabrai is the founder and Managing Partner of Pabrai Investment Funds and the author of two amazing books – The Dhandho Investor, and Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing. He is an engineer by training and was running an IT services firm in the 1990s before starting to manage money.

Mohnish is an outlier in the world of investing given that he is a rare investor who has chucked ego out of the door as he calls himself a shameless cloner. He has in fact been quoted as saying, “I’m a shameless copycat. Everything in my life is cloned…I have no original ideas.”

One of his favourite investors is Nick Sleep of Nomad Investment Partnership who, as Mohnish has said, has transformed his investing style. In one of his letters for Nomad Capital, Sleep wrote, and I quote, “Investing is a wonderful, thoughtful, adventure but it can also be self-centered, a tendency that can be reinforced by the wealth that can follow. We think it is true that, once past X-amount, real meaning comes with reinvesting in society through charitable giving, which can also be a thoughtful, challenging, wonderful adventure, but with the added bonus that it feels like the world working properly.”

This description fits Mohnish to the tee, given that he also runs the Dakshana Foundation that provides comprehensive scholarships and support for very impoverished and very bright kids to undergo 1-2 years of intensive coaching before taking the IIT entrance exam in India. In short, he is transforming the lives of countless kids pulling them and their families out of poverty by giving them opportunities that might otherwise be unthinkable.

In today’s show, among other things, we are going to talk about the biggest lessons Mohnish has learned from the people with whom he has been the closest in life – like his father, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Nick Sleep, and Guy Spier.

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Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He is a BA in Economics from the University of Southern California and has won multiple prestigious awards in the field of business and financial journalism.

Morgan is the author of the amazing book The Psychology of Money that contains 19 short stories exploring the strange ways we think about money and teaches us how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters. He has spent a large part of his life being a storyteller to help us explore how we as investors deal with risk and how we can think about risk in a more productive way.

The noted author Stephen King wrote this in his autobiography On Writing, and I quote – “Writing is not about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting happy.”

And I can sense that happiness that Morgan must be enjoying while writing all that brilliant stuff that he publishes week after week. And I must thank him for the happiness he gives to millions of his readers to be able to read such simple yet wonderful stuff. So, thank you Morgan for that.

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Arnold Van Den Berg is the CEO and chairman of Century Management Financial Advisors that he founded in 1974 and has been featured among the best investors in the world. Arnold has no formal college education instead his rigorous self study, tremendous dedication and years of industrial experience are the foundation of his extensive knowledge on the markets.

He began in the industry working for several financial services companies, however he quickly found that he did not always agree with leadership and he wanted to be in a business that he loved at a place that he believed in. Wanting to make his own decisions Arnold formed Century Management in 1974. The noted Austrian neurologist, philosopher and author and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his wonderful book Man’s Search For Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one’s own way.”

Arnold as you will learn in today’s discussion is a perfect testimony to this thought. He’s an extraordinary example of how to win a losing hand and how to construct a wonderful life. He’s a great investor but his life and experiences serve as illuminating guideposts way beyond the world of investing and finance.

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Manish Chokhani is one of India’s most respected financial market experts. Manish is a Director at Enam Holdings and a Governing Board Member at Flame University. A qualified Chartered Accountant, Manish was one of the youngest MBAs to have graduated from the London Business School.

When he is not making decisions about where to invest, or even when he is doing that, you may find him singing, reading, painting, travelling, meditating, or at a Vipassana course, practicing the Buddhist meditation technique.

Manish is one of the wisest people I know of, and the kindest. I experienced his kindness when he offered to help me with his advice while I was working on my book The Sketchbook of Wisdom, and then readily agreed to write a foreword for the same, which I will be grateful for the rest of my life.

His insights and advice are the result of a life of critical thinking, reading, curiosity, and humility. Studying his ideas and thoughts over the years are a proof of how great things are accomplished through small, persistent steps.