Interviews

Value Investor Interview: Rohit Chauhan

Note: This interview was originally published in the October 2016 issue of our premium newsletter – Value Investing Almanack (VIA). To read more such interviews and other deep thoughts on value investing, business analysis and behavioral finance, click here to subscribe to VIA.

I recently interviewed Rohit Chauhan for our premium newsletter, Value Investing Almanack.

Rohit Chauhan is an Engineer / MBA with 20+ years of experience, working in different functions in large corporations in India and abroad. Rohit was introduced to the value investing philosophy in the mid 90s and has since then followed it in managing money for himself and others who have entrusted their capital to him.

Rohit has been writing on the topic of investing for the last 11 years through his blog.

In his interview with Safal Niveshak, Rohit shares his wide investment experience and how small investors can practice sensible investment decision making.

Value Investor Interview: Rajeev Thakkar – Part 2

Note: This interview was published in the January 2016 issue of our premium newsletter, Value Investing Almanack. To gain instant access to more such interviews and other interesting stuff on value investing and business analysis, click here to subscribe now.

Read Part 1

SN: Is there a mechanism in Mutual Funds where you repay cash to shareholders if you’re not finding opportunities for a long period of time?

RT: Some people do it by the way of dividend payouts. Other mechanism is that you can shut the doors for the inflows. What you can say is that I’m not getting opportunities now so I wouldn’t be buying anymore. Lot of people have done that also. So you shut the door and say I’ll not take any more inflows from this date onwards. And you can open it as and when the opportunity arises. You can keep it shut for may be 3-6 months or 1 year or whatever period you deem fit.

SN: Being a fund manager, what are your thoughts on indexing?

RT: Indexing has a very important role to play but you can’t overemphasize it. People typically fall into two categories. One category of people are completely pro indexers. And the other is people who are completely against indexing. I am someone who is in between. So at one side indexing acts as a huge control on excessive fund management fees. Since indexing is a low cost mechanism for people to participate in equity markets. It’s a fact that if all the money were to be managed by professional managers the aggregate return that they give to investors will be market return minus fees. They can’t outperform themselves as a group. So mathematics is fine and I appreciate indexing from that point of view.

Value Investor Interview: Rajeev Thakkar – Part 1

Rajeev Thakkar possesses over 15 years of experience in various segments of the Capital Markets such as investment banking, corporate finance, securities broking and managing clients’ investments in equities. He is currently the Director and Fund Manager at PPFAS Mutual Fund.

Rajeev’s tenure at PPFAS began in 2001. His passion for researching and analysing the fundamentals of companies was evident from the very beginning and very soon he was heading the Research division at PPFAS. His responsibilities soon expanded as he was appointed the Fund Manager for the flagship scheme of the Portfolio Management Service, titled “Cognito” in 2003.

Rajeev is a strong believer in the school of “value-investing” and is heavily influenced by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s approach. In his interview with Safal Niveshak, Rajeev shares his wide investment experience and how investors can practice sensible investment decision making.

Value Investor Interview: Samit Vartak

Note: This interview was originally published in the March 2016 issue of our premium newsletter – Value Investing Almanack (VIA). To read more such interviews and other deep thoughts on value investing, business analysis and behavioral finance, click here to subscribe to VIA.

I recently interviewed Samit Vartak of SageOne Investment Advisors for my premium newsletter, Value Investing Almanack.

Samit is one of the founding partners and Chief Investment Officer at SageOne, and is responsible for ensuring SageOne’s adherence to its core investment philosophy and discipline of risk management. As you would read in the interview below, Samit believes in risk management not by seeking extreme diversification or buying sub-par businesses at low multiples, but by building a reasonably diversified portfolio of high quality businesses having long term competitive advantages in attractive and high growth industries.

Samit returned to India in 2006 after spending a decade in the US working initially in corporate strategy with Gap Inc. and PwC Consulting, and then with Deloitte and Ernst & Young advising companies on business valuation and M&A. This experience forms the backbone that helps him better understand businesses and their fair value. Samit is a CFA® charter holder, an MBA from Olin School of Business of the Washington University in St. Louis and holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree with Honors from Sardar Patel College of Engineering, Mumbai University.

In his interview with Safal Niveshak, Samit shares his wide investment experience and how small investors can practice sensible investment decision making.

Value Investor Interview: Huzaifa Husain

Note: This interview was originally published in the December 2015 issue of our premium newsletter – Value Investing Almanack (VIA). To read more such interviews and other deep thoughts on value investing, business analysis and behavioral finance, click here to subscribe to VIA.

Mr. Huzaifa Husain is the Head of Indian Equities at PineBridge Investments based in Mumbai. Since he joined the asset management company in 2004, Mr. Husain has been a key member of the team advising the PineBridge India Equity Fund (a Dublin domiciled India offshore fund). Prior to this, he was an Equity Analyst at Principal Mutual Fund and SBI Mutual Fund. Mr. Husain received a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore and a B.Tech from the Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University).

In this interview for the Value Investing Almanack, Mr. Husain shared how he found his calling in value investing, and reveals key insights about his investment strategy and the underlying thought process.

Microcap Investing, the Ian Cassel Way

Note: This interview was published in the November 2015 issue of our premium newsletter, Value Investing Almanack. To gain instant access to more such interviews and other interesting stuff on value investing and business analysis, click here to subscribe now.

Ian Cassel is the founder of MicroCapClub.com, which is an exclusive forum for experienced microcap investors focused on microcap companies (sub $300m market cap) trading on the US and Canadian markets.

Ian has been investing in microcaps for 15 years and has been a full time microcap investor since 2008. Ian looks to invest in great management teams running great businesses with a moat. He tries to invest in the best 5-6-7 companies he can find at all times.

Ian founded MicroCapClub in 2011 to be a place for “real” and experienced investors in the microcap space to share ideas and learn from one another. When Ian isn’t researching stocks or administering MicroCapClub, you can find him reading, golfing, or shopping at Costco with his wife.

Let’s now jump straight into the interview.

My Interview with Terrible Mr. X – Lessons on What NOT To Do in Stock Market

Disclaimer: This article is a piece of satire, a figment of my imagination. But it is still an expression of what I see in the real-life stock market and how most people behave when it comes to investing their hard-earned money. Any resemblance to any living person is purely coincidental, though I would love to meet that person and interview him.

Today is January 1, 2045…so happy new year, tribe members. I hope you had a great start to the year, and hope that you manage to take your resolution(s) past the first 30 days of January.

Anyways, I recently got a chance to interview one Mr. X (not his real name), who has been in the stock market for the past 35+ years – starting 2007 – but has NOT been able to create wealth over such a long time. In fact, net-net, he has been a loser after more than three decades of playing the stock market. And he continues to play it, as he believes that there’s no easier way of making quick money.

I love the patience and perseverance that he has shown all these years in losing money and never learning from his mistakes. And that’s why I thought he was a great interview material. Why?

Value Investor Interview: Jae Jun, Old School Value

This interview was part of the May 2015 issue of my premium newsletter on value investing, behavioural finance, and business analysis – Value Investing Almanack (VIA). If you wish to read more interviews with value investors, you can click here to subscribe to VIA now.

Jae Jun is the founder of Old School Value, a deep fundamental analysis tool that helps value investors speed up the analysis process and make better investment decisions.

I’ve admired Jae’s work at OSV and thoughts on investing for long, much before I started Safal Niveshak. So it was great to interview him for Value Investing Almanack. Let’s get straight into Jae’s experience and philosophy on investing.
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My Interview with Niveshak

I recently did an interview with Niveshak (not related to Safal Niveshak), the monthly magazine released by the Finance Club of Indian Institute of Management, Shillong.

Here I present that interview verbatim for the benefit of tribe members.

1. We are aware that you are an avid blogger and some of us are regular readers of Safal Niveshak blog. If we ask you to tell our readers about the 3-5 most vital investing lessons what would they be?
Thanks for reading Safal Niveshak! It’s good that you have a word limit to this interview, because the lessons I have learned as an investor over the years would have run into several pages.

But if I were to list down just 3 of them, they would be –

Have extreme patience
on process, and outcome will take care of itself
that you will make (a lot of) mistakes

Talking about patience, it’s important for investors to understand that ‘t’ or time is the most important variable in the compounding formula, even more important than ‘i’ or rate of return. So, the more patience you have to sit on your investments (assuming they are good investments), the greater is the amount of wealth you can create. In fact, patience – the art of sitting quiet – is the most important skill an investor can have, even more important than knowing what stocks to pick.

Simple Ideas on Wealth Creation, the Subramoney Way – Part 4

Vishal: What’s your view on gold as an asset class? How much allocation one should have of the yellow metal?

Subra: People keep on saying that gold has no value but unless you outperform gold, you have no right to say it. For example, when Warren Buffett says gold has no value, he makes sense because he has outperformed it. But a fund manager who is underperforming gold and says it has not value is in trouble, because he would have to answer his investors on why he is underperforming gold.

So, there will be points in time when gold will do well, like when there’s uncertainty in the market, or due to geo-political reasons, but if you’re an optimist, you’ve to assume that these kinds of skirmishes will not be much. So, over long periods of sustained development, I don’t see gold having a great place in your portfolio.

But let’s face it. If you were in Kuwait in 1980, or in Pakistan in 1947, and you had to run away from your house, the only thing you could’ve carried is gold. To such people, gold has tremendous value.