[2024-10-30]

A bit ironic name of the book nowadays - but it’s not ‘how knowing X helps me with B2B sales’ kind of thing.

I’d say it’s quite a deep account on fundamental investing, with some personal stories. “Buy something to own forever” is how I interpreted it.

Starting from the overview - I’d say it’s a more interesting read than Buffet’ interviews/approaches, etc., eventhough fundamentally they’re talking about same things.

There’re probably 3 narratives going on:

• Investment approach that helped the author build a $5bn fund (with better than S&P performance) investing in Indian public markets.
• Excerpts from the evolutionary science - describing major advancements from Darwin himself to the multi-year experiments with foxes/birds/bacteria development.
• Investment-related cases outside the author’ target, mostly to describe crashes.

They’re similar in describing the investment-world, i.e. return-wise absolute majority of funds does worse than an index, while certainly being more expensive. Not a secret, but follows the ‘fundamental’ talking points exactly.

Suggested approach to be better: “Buy something to own forever”

Sounds weird, but it creates a few quite practical implications in the thinking process, main of:

• Macros/Cycles are not forever - one can’t use them for decisions
• Manager’s charisma is also not forever - it’s not useful to rely upon then.
• Good companies are quite rare - it’s ok to wait years finding the right ones, reject everything else.
• Main fundamental benchmark - very high ROCE.
• Non-negotiable red flags: high debt levels, taste in acquisitions, governance/management integrity.