Words matter. These are the best Mohnish Pabrai Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We Americans love original ideas. But truly, there are already plenty of good ones out there, ours for the taking. If I were too proud to copy the ideas of others, I likely wouldn’t have even a fraction of my current success.
The only way one should buy stocks is if you understand the underlying business. You stay within the circle of competence. You buy businesses you understand.
Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.
The good news in investing is there are no HR problems. If there are no humans, there are no problems!
We have to do what I would call anomalies: we have to look for strange things that show up once in a while. They don’t show up all the time. We have to be scanning the horizon, and doing that, once in a while something will show up that makes a lot of sense, and then you act on it.
The stock knows that I bought it, and it decides, ‘Mohnish is done. Now let’s go down.’
The good thing about getting wealthy is we don’t need to understand a lot of things!
The single biggest advantage a value investor has is not IQ. It’s patience and waiting. Waiting for the right pitch, and waiting for many years for the right pitch.
One of the reasons why we can make a lot of money in equity markets is because they’re auction-driven, and auction-driven markets are very different from almost any other kind of market.
There is no such thing as a value trap. There are investing mistakes.
Entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That’s the classic great entrepreneur.
I think investors ought to focus on making sure that the stock is within their circle of competence, that it’s worth a lot more than it’s valued at – and once you have those two things, a stop-loss makes no sense.
One of the first things I tell people is, if you want to learn about investing, you want to open an account and make real investments because that’s when it becomes real.
To the extent societal rules or the wiring of your brains make it easy to acquire a lot of assets, then to the extent you can, you should try to improve the world.
I own a company called Rain Industries.
You know, my degrees are in computer engineering. I spent a lot of time in the tech industry. And I like to say that I don’t invest in tech because I spent time in it. And I saw firsthand that the durability of technology moats is many times an oxymoron.
Talking to people is beneficial if you can identify the right people to share ideas and discuss decisions because everyone has blind spots, and others can sometimes catch yours. I think an investment team is a bad idea, but it is a good idea to talk to trustworthy individuals who do not have biases or interests.
The problem most nonprofits have is that they are run by romantics who are great to hang out with, but they have no clue.
Industries with rapid change are the enemy of the investor. Tech businesses, particularly biotech, is a problem from that point of view. All industries work with change, but you should ideally be investing in businesses with a low rate of change, not a high rate of change.
I used to not talk much to anyone about my investments.
