Q1. Hope you are doing good sir, could you please give us a brief about your background. What events led to the beginning of your investing journey?
I grew up on a farm in a small village along the Konkan Coast. My father still farms for living and it was a struggle for him financially to educate us. After 10th standard I came to Mumbai for further education where I studied engineering. Post that I worked with Mahindra & Mahindra for 3 years. Out of sheer luck, I applied to few top 20 MBA schools in the US and ended up getting a scholarship in one. Until this point, I didn’t even know what a share meant forget about investments.When I received my signing bonus, I caught the stock market bug in 1999 at the peak of the dot com bubble when making money had become very easy. This was the time when I followed exactly what is currently in my “what not to do” list as an investment process. I followed analyst recommendations, looked at simple valuation metrics such as PE ratio/PEG ratio, believed in forecasted numbers of analysts, and invested in companies where buy recommendations were the highest. No surprise that as the markets peaked, I started losing money and to recover my losses quicker I used derivatives/margin money and the result was that by 2001 my entire portfolio was wiped off. I cannot describe the agony that I went through in losing all I had earned and especially given my family’s financial struggle during my childhood. The guilt of wasting money, which would have been so valuable for my family back home, left such an indelible mark on me that I took a break from investing to introspect my mistakes and learn before investing again. That was the turning point and blessing in disguise in my investment journey. To further my learning, I decided to enroll for the CFA wherein I really learned the fundamentals and theory behind investing. I read about different investment styles, about experiences and methods used by successful investment gurus and tried to figure out what suits me and my temperament.