Interviews

Jason Zweig is the investing and personal-finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal.  He is the author of The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, a satirical glossary of Wall Street (PublicAffairs Books, 2015), and Your Money and Your Brain, on the neuroscience of investing (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

 Zweig edited the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor (HarperCollins, 2003), the classic text that Warren Buffett has described as “by far the best book about investing ever written.” Zweig also wrote The Little Book of Safe Money (Wiley, 2009); co-edited Benjamin Graham: Building a Profession, an anthology of Graham’s essays (McGraw Hill, 2010); and assisted the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman in writing his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. From 1995 through 2008 Zweig was a senior writer for Money magazine; before joining Money, he was the mutual funds editor at Forbes.

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Kuntal Shah is one of the founding partners of SageOne Investment Advisors and has an opportunistic inclination towards value-oriented and risk-controlled approach to investments. He has been an extremely successful investor over the past two decades and his success has come from exploiting the inefficiencies inherent in the markets.

Kuntal has in-depth understanding of value investing with focus on risk identification and mitigation, emerging trends and opportunities in key growth sectors in India, taxation and accounting. He also loves to teach on these subjects and in the past has lectured at UTI Institute of Capital Markets, IIM (Ahmedabad), IIT (Mumbai), Symbiosis, FLAME and Chartered Accountants Institute. Kuntal is an Electronics Engineer from Pune University.

Safal Niveshak (SN): Could you tell us a little about your background, and how you got interested in value investing?

Kuntal Shah (KS): I was brought up in a middle-class family in Mumbai. I am an engineer by qualification. Early life was a constant struggle to make ends meet for our family of five siblings given our father’s limited earnings. I was lucky to be brought up in an environment where there was no compromise on education and was fortunate to be inculcated with middle class working ethos, frugality and conservatism of living within one’s means without recourse to borrowing to prepone consumption.

I was always fascinated with the capital markets. Hence, a career in the same seemed like an excellent opportunity to develop a perspective on different businesses and figure out how their fortunes played out in long run and how stock prices got set in the short and long run. The initial phase of your career is spent learning the intricacies but the benefits flow all your life as learning and compounding of capital are both cumulative and a good means to attain financial independence.

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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 via his blog valueinvestorindia.blogspot.com.

Safal Niveshak (SN): You’ve’ widely covered your journey on your blog, but let me still start with the customary question. How did you get into value investing, and how has your process evolved over the years?

Rohit Chauhan (RC): I got interested in investing as I had to manage my family’s finances after I finished my MBA. I started learning the basics by reading newspapers and books as this was the only way prior to the internet.

I came across a book The Warren Buffett Way in a public library and the book spoke about this billionaire in Omaha who had become rich by investing in stocks using some very common-sense principles. I was hooked.

Over the years, I read as much as I could find on Buffett, which lead me deeper into value investing and to the teachings of Benjamin Graham, Philip Fisher and other greats in this field. So you can say that I have learnt mainly through books and the internet just accelerated the process.

As I was exposed to Buffett at the start of my journey, his philosophy and teachings have formed the bedrock of my approach. Over the years, I have studied other great investors and have dabbled in deep value investments, arbitrage and other opportunities. However, my core philosophy of buying good companies at reasonable prices remains the same.

My process has evolved to become more qualitative and focused on aspects such as the competitive advantage of businesses, industry dynamics and management as these factors finally drive the numbers. This evolution has also happened due to the fact that markets have become much more competitive over the years and it is difficult to find obvious quantitative bargains now.

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Ninad Kunder majored in finance and after a brief stint in the corporate world, moved on to entrepreneurship. He currently runs a venture in the HR staffing space and manages family money. Shuffling between these two hats has helped him both in business and value investing.

Safal Niveshak (SN): How did you get into value investing, and how has your process evolved over the years?

 Ninad Kunder (NK): Lottery tickets! That’s what the 10 buck equity IPOs were like, when I started dabbling into investing in my engineering days. Those early years I tracked the markets without any framework or thought process.

Luckily I didn’t lose too much money because we were a growing economy in which it didn’t take too much intelligence to stay afloat, if one didn’t indulge in stupidity. Guess my innate conservative self kept me away from stupidity which helped me survive. It’s really in 2006 that I encountered Charlie Munger, Prof Bakshi’s blog and other value investing resources.  It was a eureka moment and there has been no looking back since.

SN: Great! So how has your investment process evolved over these years? I mean, like many value investors who start with a Grahamian (cheap stocks) approach, did you also begin that way? Or was it a Fisher kind of approach of sticking only to high quality businesses? Please take us through the evolution of your investment process over these years.
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This month, we’ve interviewed one of the leading value investors in India who describes himself as an “old fashioned Graham style value investor who has taken a lot of knocks in his 30+ years investment experience.” He has requested anonymity – and thus we have named him Anonymous Value Investor or AVI – but we are sure you would realize after reading this interview how his amazing insights fit his above-mentioned description. Let’s start right away.

SN: What are the key factors that shaped your life as a value investor? What inspired you because I believe there would not be many value investors in India when you started, no Internet, no people to guide, not much research etc.?

AVI: I didn’t start out as a value investor. I started out analyzing bonds and businesses. And that continues to have a huge imprint on all my investment behaviour and thinking. As I see it, there’s absolutely no difference between a bond and an equity. The only difference is that in one there is no maturity and second the coupon rate has growth. Whereas in bond the coupon rate is fixed. But the method of looking at either a bond or an equity share is absolutely identical. There’s no difference. This is what John Burr Williams said way back in 1930s. And I think it’s incredibly relevant today.
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