GuruFocus is excited to welcome Mohnish Pabrai (Trades, Portfolio) for an upcoming interview on March 21.
The interview will include questions from readers. To ask yours, submit it in the comments section below, and look out for Mr. Pabrai’s answer when we post the talk next month.
Mr. Pabrai is a celebrated investor who manages about $1 billion through Pabrai Investment Funds and Dhandho Funds. He also wrote two award-winning books on value investing, “The Dhandho Investor” and “Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing.” Mr. Pabrai came to value investing largely by way of Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio)’s biography and shareholder letters, and in 2007 he, along with fellow investor Guy Spier, placed a winning $650,000 bid in a charity auction for lunch with Buffett, whom he counts as a friend.
The most notable aspect of Mr. Pabrai’s Dalal Street portfolio that GuruFocus covers is its lack of investments at fourth quarter-end. Viewing the U.S. stock market as overpriced, Mr. Pabrai has moved 40% of his overall assets in India-listed securities, with only 0.1% invested domestically.
“In fact, I am bullish on the U.S. in general, it is just that things are not heavily mispriced and under priced,” he told The Economic Times in an interview. “At the same time, India has increased quite dramatically. It has gone from basically less than a $100 million two-three years ago, to over $400 million and so all of that has happened because I am able to find opportunity here and I am not able to find opportunity in U.S.”
(He discusses more about his preference for India’s market with CNBC here and here.)
One of his two remaining U.S.-listed holdings is a long-standing investment in luxury carmaker Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCAU, Financial), a stock that ascended 147% over the past five years. Mr. Pabrai has highlighted the company’s management, undervaluation and potential for a sale as integral to his thesis for the investment (read more here).
In the fourth quarter, he made waves when he disclosed a stake in memory chipmaker Micron Technology (MU, Financial), also known for taking the largest place in hedge fund manager David Tepper (Trades, Portfolio)’s portfolio, as it plunged in the latter half of the year. Already rebounding, its stock price has soared more than 30% year to date.
Mr. Pabrai left behind a stake in Ferrari (RACE, Financial) in the third quarter of 2018, and exited Alphabet (GOOGL, Financial) and Southwest Airlines (LUV, Financial) in the first.
A much sought-after speaker, Mr. Pabrai has expounded on his investment approach in universities and publications worldwide. Often discussed is his famous investing checklist, which ranks three criteria as most important for a company: leverage, moat and management. He also closely studies other great investors, following in their footsteps and avoiding their mistakes.
"The checklist that I created came out of looking at mistakes made by great investors. The single biggest reason why investments don’t work out for investors is leverage,” he has said. “The second biggest reason has to do with a misunderstanding of the comparative advantage of the moat. Then you get to management and ownership and other issues.”
Read more about Mr. Pabrai here:
· Mohnish Pabrai Talks About the 10 Commandments of Investing
· Mohnish Pabrai on His Top Checklist Criterion
· Mohnish Pabrai on Fiat Chrysler
· Mohnish Pabrai Buys Shares of Tepper Stock Micron Technology
The GuruFocus interview will cover all of these topics and more. To ask your question for Mr. Pabrai, don’t forget to post it in the comments section below.
