InvestorInsights: Kuntal Shah

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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