During this interview with the Finance Club of IIT Patna, Mohnish Pabrai explained why great investors enjoy the hunt. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Pabrai: So this is the Moody’s manual that Buffett used to use in the 50s.
You can see it’s a very thick book, and if I open it for example it has a lot of numbers and details about different companies. It’s a lot of detail.
So there are a number of these Moody’s manuals that came out. Every year Buffett went through every single page of these manuals more than once.
Some of them he went through two or three times, and after going through like thousand, two thousand companies he would find some company where like market cap is 15 million and last year earnings are 25 million.
Things that make no sense. And then he would research those. Then he would buy those and he did really well. So he’s continuing to do that in his life even more recently. So he enjoyed the hunt.
And so if you have a personality which is very determined and dogged about picking up thousands of these [betting] tickets and finding three tickets that may have twenty dollars or ten dollars or thirty dollars or something in winnings that someone didn’t claim.
And you go through all the work of doing that, or to go through these big thick manuals, and you’re looking for particular anomalies, you will find them.
If you are, like the upanishad say – As is your wish so is your will. As is your will so is your deed. And as is your deed so is your destiny.
And then the punch line, your deepest desire is your destiny. So if you really really are interested in finding needles in haystacks and finding anomalies, and you’re focused on that, don’t let your grades fall at IIT, but you can do that. It’s definitely available for you to do that.
You can watch the entire discussion here:
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