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What do evolution and investing have in common? It’s more than you might assume.

Survival of the fittest manifests in both the animal kingdom and also in the business world. Enterprises build competitive advantages, get stronger, and thrive over long periods of time. Meanwhile, their smaller rivals end up going extinct.

So how do we find the best-of-the-best? Are there specific things investors should apply to their process, to avoid making costly mistakes?

https://youtu.be/PDum_dx873Q

To answer those questions, 7investing CEO Simon Erickson recently spoke with Pulak Prasad. Pulak is the CEO of Nalanda Capital, a Singapore-based investment firm who manages nearly $5 billion and invests primarily in Indian-based companies. He is also the author of What I Learned About Investing From Darwin, which is now available to the public.

Simon and Pulak began the conversation by discussing what traditional investment managers are doing wrong. As a whole, active managers typically underperform the broader market — and for a variety of reasons. Similar to 7investing’s seven principles, Nalanda follows three pillars to guide its investing process: 1) Avoid big risks, 2) Demand a fair price, and 3) Don’t sell. By abiding by these straightforward rules, they’ve identified and invested in several of India’s best-in-class companies.

With regard to their first pillar, Pulak describes the nuances of investing in India. India’s financial markets are less developed than the US or Europe, and most of its companies still face corporate governance issues. Pulak believes many of these companies will eventually go extinct, and is willing to say no many times before finally finding the right company.

Regarding the second, Pulak believes that patience and having capital available will reward long-term investors. Across all of their funds, their average position is capturing an incredible 41% return on invested capital (ROIC).

And finally, they hold on to their positions for years or even decades. When they initiate a new position, they “are either pregnant or they are not” — meaning they’re willing to hold a stock for the duration of the fund’s existence. Some of the  larger position sizes have grown to 20% or more of the fund’s total assets.

In the second half of the conversation, the two discuss similarities between Pulak and Warren Buffett. Simon notes that Buffett was often cautious of innovation, which led him to miss opportunities such as Amazon or Google. Pulak’s approach is recognize innovative companies, but never to start a position until they “show me the money” (i.e. have stable and growing cash flows).

In the final segment, Pulak describes the types of companies and sectors they typically are most interested in. They are bottoms-up investors who tend to focus on ROIC as their preferred investing metrics. And they’re not worried, at all, about the current macro. Life will go on, and the strongest companies will continue to strive.

Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include Alphabet, Amazon, Cummins, JP Morgan, P&G, Walmart. 

 

Transcript

Simon Erickson  00:00

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of our 7investing podcast where it’s our mission to empower you to invest in the future, you can learn more about our long term investing approach and see all seven of our favorite stock market opportunities each and every month at 7investing.com/subscribe. For a limited time, we’re giving away a free first month of our Starter Membership with a promo code “madness”.

 

Simon Erickson  00:22

What do investing and evolutionary biology have in common? That’s not a joke or a riddle. It’s actually the topic of our conversation today. I’m very excited to welcome pitlick Prasad. He is an international author who wrote the book what Darwinism taught me about investing, and also the CEO of Nalanda. Capital is a Singapore based firm managing about $5 billion in capital, primarily with Indian equities. I think it’s gonna be a fun conversation. Thanks very much for joining me for the 7investing podcast today.

 

Pulak Prasad  00:48

Thank you, Simon, thanks a lot for inviting me, I really appreciate it. It’s a privilege to be here.

 

Simon Erickson  00:55

Let’s start at the top of this here. Let’s talk about the status quo of the investing industry today. The active management industry is a grinder right? We’ve seen for several years and most active managers cannot outperform the broader based market indices. Perhaps Can you start with kind of giving us an overview of the industry today? Maybe what prompted you to write this book and maybe even perhaps a couple of the things active managers are doing that might lead to their extinction?

 

Pulak Prasad  01:22

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Simon. So my background actually is in private equity, not public equity, we used to do a little bit of public equity investing in my previous form, Warburg Pincus. But I decided to set up Nalanda in 2007, primarily because I thought the right long term investing model for India. Frankly, I think, for most countries, is public market investing in phenomenal businesses. And the one thing that the private equity model did not allow me to do was to stay in businesses permanently, which is what my model Nalanda, behind evergreen fund that basically allows me to stay with a very, very long run in any business.

 

Pulak Prasad  02:02

The question around active management. I mean, we’ve, we know, all the reasons why, you know, managers behave the way they do, it is largely related to incentives. It is, as I write in the book that in a paradoxical way, the very fact that managers you know, want to beat the market, ensure that they don’t beat the market. Because one is trying to, in trying to beat the market, one is trying to do things that one would otherwise not do, for example. So let’s, let’s start back, what are the index data, the index is made of the s&p 500 500 best businesses in the country, right, or millions of businesses in the US it is, at some level, it will be extremely hard to beat that index, unless, unless one invest in better than average businesses than the s&p 500. I mean, logical because otherwise, you will repeat the index. And that becomes really tough because that kind of model leads to underperformance over months, or sometimes even years. And active managers may be driven by their clients, maybe not entirely their fault. Really can’t leave it because maybe the clients can’t take it. And we’ve seen as a result, big flow, huge flow to the passive management industry over the past many years in the US and frankly, in India as well. So it is it is an issue. I’m not sure what the solution is, except, as Buffett has said for years, find high quality businesses and stand them forever, which is what we do.

 

Simon Erickson  03:41

And apologies a correction, the name of the book is actually what I learned about investing from Darwin. You know, one of the things that you did say about in this book was that you’d like to prioritize risk first, and then return later explained to me, it kind of aligns with what you just said. But can you explain that a little bit further for me as well?

 

Pulak Prasad  03:56

So I was looking at your seven principles, Simon, and I realized that actually, your first principle is exactly that. Because your first principle says, It’s personal. And what I write in the book, literally in the first chapter is to the asking the fund manager, are you willing to bet your life on this investment? Right, you’re raising, are you putting other people’s money? But are you willing to bet your life? And I think that when you say it’s personally not exactly that, but when I read the the sort of commentary on that, but it’s very similar. Is it your own money, right? Are you really willing to bet your life on it? And the reason we put risk before return? Is that our philosophy that we want to be permanent owners of high quality businesses, that’s the starting point. If you take that as a starting point, then we have to think of risk first because I don’t have an option of exit. Like once I entered, I have to stay there. So as a result, I need to eliminate large, many types of risks that maybe other fund managers would be able to take because they’ll say look, I’ll exit in two years time, double our money and we’ll see So we, as a result of our strategy as a result of philosophy of being a permanent or importing businesses, we start with the current price. When I say we don’t take surplus, we don’t price certain kinds of risks. And we have no sort of FOMO on those kinds of areas. So for example, take governance standard, right. It’s a big issue in emerging markets, and definitely the India goes to a lesser extent, I would say, in a country like the US. And we will never take that risk. We will never say we will invest in someone who’s got a dodgy reputation has not treated minority shareholders well, but you know, it’s available at 10 times p, with a mark market B is 23. So yeah, you know, we don’t do that. I’m not saying it’s the wrong thing to do. Maybe some people, it works. For some people, it will work for us. So that’s what I mean, when I say, risk cost, because it’s sort of like, it’s personal, you know, I’m putting my money to work. And so I need to think of that person.

 

Simon Erickson  05:56

Pulak, this is so refreshing to hear, because we are in the age of high turnover. And you know, getting in and out of positions in a year or less. It certainly is refreshing, like you say when we talk about buy and hold, you know, I think you describe it as as lazy investing, you know, letting things ride for long periods of time, which is exactly what we want to endorse as well. Related to that, I’d like to ask a follow up question, though, is how do you think about position sizing? Right? If you’re finding great companies, you’re letting them ride? Hopefully there’s there’s price appreciation along the way, but like, what is a large position size for you? How long will you let something run? And then also similarly lead related to that, too, is how do you think about selling? Is there anything that you would see that would actually cause you to sell a position?

 

Pulak Prasad  06:36

So up, so the position sizing works? Only the entry for us in two ways. One is that we have a hard rule in India, that we can’t invest more than 10% in a single business 10% on that company, so that the automated so it’s a $3 million company, I can’t invest more than $30 million. Right. That’s one. And the second is with our investors, we have an agreement that we will not put initially going in more than 50% of the fund in a single business. So take our fund, you know, $5 million, we can’t put more than $50 million in a single position without approval from our advisory committee. So we have exceeded that that number to have you caught up to 20% in a couple of situations. But once we’ve done that, then we will not sell, we will not rebalance. So an extreme case, I think one of our funds, we have two funds involved in the first part, the largest position reached 29% of the fund. And we just let it be in in our second fund. as we as we speak, I think close to 20% of the fund is in one position. We don’t we don’t do any rebalancing.

 

Pulak Prasad  07:35

So we are either pregnant or we are not. There is no middle path for us. Which means if you don’t if we conclude that we don’t like the business will fully exit, which gets me the question that second question you asked is do when do we exit we have exited our situations. So under the following situations, number one is when there has been an m&a. So one of our companies got acquired by strategic investors, it’s happened to us twice. Second is when there’s been a bad really, really bad capital allocation, buy the business. And this has happened to us twice in our 16 year history, we’ve been around for 16 years. And the third is when we believe there’s an inevitable damage to the business, which is so so for example, we have gone to the certain pieces in the business. And let’s say it works well for two years. But after that, for whatever reason, it stops working, either because the management is distracted or because they got unlucky or some other reason. Even then we actually don’t sell immediately, we are willing to wait for many, many quarters, eight 910 12 quarters, not just one or two quarters, because nothing goes up in a straight line I found in my 30 years of being in the corporate world, things always go up and down. So be very patient. But if you do conclude that this business is damaged, then we will exit. But other than that, we will also we will not exit on valuation. We just won’t, we’ll just keep getting at whatever whatever price it is. But those are three conditions under which we would exit. So we exited I would say to remove the m&a PS or average exit has been about once every one and a half years, which is obviously very, very small. And that only because we concluded that he made a mistake.

 

Simon Erickson  09:07

Is that a concentrated portfolio? And if you’re talking about 29% positions, 20% position or you’re holding a 10 to 15 in the in the font.

 

Pulak Prasad  09:13

Yeah. So basically, in the first one we have now about level position stockpile contribute about 75% of the font. And the second one about what your position is top five account for about 77 78% of the font. So it’s very concentrated. Yeah, perfect.

 

Simon Erickson  09:25

Appu if you also have a very, very interesting background, you know, you have a diversity of experiences you mentioned 30 years in the corporate world there. I know that you were an engineer at one point, you’re a consultant at one point you went to private equity for what you were doing public equities now, but um, I guess I wanted to ask it, it’s not as it’s not quite as common that I’ll chat with someone who has an interest in evolutionary biology like you do. What got you into this and then kind of what drew the parallels to investing?

 

Pulak Prasad  09:50

So it’s a very it’s very odd. I never I never liked biology when I was in college. I was a math math nerd in some sense, but like, like many people like us as well, I’m sure you read a lot of Charlie Munger and Buffett, right, which which I did as well, Charlie Munger. Wesco financial used to be the Chairman, I think he still is until he got acquired by Berkshire Hathaway. And every year, he talks to the shareholders. And in the year 2001 of the questions he got was, Can you recommend a book, a good book to read, and he recommended The Selfish Gene. And I read that 2000 nodes of exponential in 2002. And I support The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, very famous book, Dawkins is a great writer. And I bought selfish gene, and I completely got hooked on AI. I understood that by reading that book that I did not actually understand Darwinian theory, which I thought I did, but I clearly did. And it was shockingly simple, and very, very difficult for what I thought. And that really got down to me, you know, into evolution, biology. And then the more I read about evolution, and by the time I was an investor, the more I started seeing parallels to investing in some sense. So when I created a calendar, when I started in 2007, I started writing quarterly letters to my investors, which are, which are every quarter I do, my next discovery letter is going to go tomorrow, for example. And then those letters just to make investing interesting. I never write about macro, I don’t write about markets, because my view is no one knows anything. So I write about investing and about diversity biology, and I draw parallels between evolution and investing. And a lot of the investors found that very, very interesting over the years, and a few of them started saying you must write a book. But I didn’t want the book to be a series of essays because that that could be you could have a book like that, what I wanted to create a thread of oran investing philosophy, which is rests on three pillars like it was in seventh, which is don’t take big risks, invest in a great business at a fair price. And third, don’t sell. Right. So but I could put together that with those two evolutionary theory, just because I’ve been doing this for the last 20 years. And I think it gave came together, at least for me, we’ll see what the what the readers think. But it came.

 

Simon Erickson  12:03

That is fantastic. What we’re talking about Warren Buffett and Berkshire and Charlie Munger, I know that you’re a huge fan of theirs, just like we are as well. Probably the greatest if not the greatest, one of the greatest investors of our time. And we are all very familiar with with Buffett and Munger and all of them. But perhaps if there’s any criticism of Warren Buffett, it would be around innovation. You know, even Buffett himself has said to the biggest mistakes he’s ever made for his shareholders was missing out on Google and missing out on Amazon. He said specifically that he missed out on Google because it was not at the price that he wanted to buy it it. And with Amazon, I believe he said he was surprised with how quickly Jeff Bezos was able to disrupt the retail industry. Perhaps I want to ask maybe the question is, is what how do you how do you approach innovation with a fund that you know, has got the three pillars like you said, you know, no big risks, you want a fair price? And then never sell? But then is there? Is there a place for kind of the small up and coming innovative companies? Or how do you think about that?

 

Pulak Prasad  13:00

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I would put Google and Amazon and actually two very different buckets. I would do Google, but not Amazon. I would never do Amazon. But I would do because Google is a media business. In my view, it’s a it’s a Yellow Pages business of infinite variety, right. And we do have, we did have three in our portfolio, one of them got acquired by strategic investor, which is think about local Google equalent of Yelp. In India, it was culture style, it is culture style, but but we exited because a strategic investor required it, we have a form called naukri.com, which is equal to a monster.com. It’s by far the leader in India, it’s a phenomenal business. Now the one call matrimony.com, which is a marriage sort of site website, not dating really, but marriage. But that those are countless media businesses. So and they’re very innovative, and we would put money in them.

 

Pulak Prasad  13:00

Our criteria is very simple. Please show me the money. Right. So which means that we would not have invested in Google at an early stage. But when Google started making money, and if it was it had come to a price that we like, we would have bought it. I don’t have the history of Google. So I don’t know whether Google ever came to the price we would have liked like we did by Naukri, the one I talked about. What we buy did by matching me because we consider them video network effect. Winner takes all type businesses, which we can understand. And there are many parallels for those businesses as well, including the erstwhile Yellow Pages businesses, which are phenomenal auto newspaper or newspaper businesses, for example. Amazon falls in a different category. Interesting. You mentioned Buffett and Amazon actually stayed in the endings of one of my chapters where I caught Buffett saying, Oh, I missed Amazon and I say that fine, but I’m I would have missed it and I have no qualms about because Amazon just doesn’t fit the bucket that we want, which is a focus discipline investor, and it is a real oddity. It is a very, very odd animal. And my view is that I’m happy missing out on all animals because I could not tell mistake I miss on one Amazon, but I’ll invest in 50 Joker so far. On Amazon like, but they’ll never be Amazon. So I’m comfortable with that. Right. I think one of the big things that that I’ve learned over the years and that has bought us I think where we are, is this complete lack of formal, complete, you know, I don’t care if you’re making money the way you’re doing good for you. There are lots of parts that lots of roads that lead to Rome as as this one. So yeah, so we will invest in innovative businesses, absolutely. But they need to show me money first. And they need to, I need to be convinced that this advantage will be sustainable to some extent.

 

Simon Erickson  15:30

Could you quantify that a bit more? i It sounds like there’s a very qualitative part of the process? And are you looking at the risks, you’re trying to stay away from bad things with bad governance? Are there specific metrics quantitatively, though, that you look for, as a cash flows? You know, what are some of the things you’re defining a great business fine?

 

Pulak Prasad  15:43

So I start by my second chapter, this this question, right? So you want to be an investor? And you go to website, you open Morningstar, or whatever, gurufocus.com or wherever you get a stock price data. And then what do you do, right? Because there is a bazillion pieces of information, there is revenue code that we picked out wrong, there is margin, there is cash flow, there’s post interviews by management, there is 10k 10. Q balance sheet, I mean, there’s a million things, what do you do right to the store to start, and we have done a very simple thing, which is we’ve taken a quantitative metric is called return on invested capital, which are very well, so our metric is very simple.

 

Pulak Prasad  16:23

We want historical high return on invested capital, let me break that into two parts, one historical, I don’t want to buy stories, which means that someone comes and says, I’m a highly innovative company. But I’m only 5% Return on capital. And here are the 10 things are doing in including hiring, you know, McKinsey to sort of advise me at this experience, you see all that take my return on capital over the next five years to 35%, we will take that meeting after 10 years, because first they have to recertify percent then have to demonstrate for five years that they have had high return on capital, and then we will have a bomb. So one is historical, we are historical animals. Second, by high, let me give you the number the median return on capital of our portfolio when we invest it is 41%. So these are very, very high quality businesses. Right. And and that we do not operate. So that’s a quantitative measure that we take up front, for shortlisting companies. So the company doesn’t have those kinds of return on capital over the past five to 10 years, of course, you can have two bad years, but you can go down to you know, two, or 3%, because COVID it. But if you remove those situations, then we weren’t very happy to start with other capital, if it doesn’t satisfy that we will not even evaluate it will not touch it. So a result. For example, if it’s a new age business, running huge losses, and has got multibillion dollar market cap, I’m not going to buy it for free, right, I’m not gonna buy that multibillion dollar company, a $10 million market cap because it doesn’t fit. And then of course, we spend many months trying to assess how you got that return on capital. Right? What because it doesn’t make any sense if you think about it. India, like the US is extremely competitive, and he has a small market, but it’s a very, very competitive market. So someone making 40% Return on capital is just at some level nonsense, right? You should say this. So we try and disprove the hypothesis that this is as a company, and it takes us many months to do that. And again, the reject many businesses as a result, but some say yeah, I mean, this seems to make a lot of sense. And that they keep track of because we learn a lot will almost never get the price for it, right? Because the market is pretty efficient market is not an idiot. And we did. As a result, we just wait in our 16 year history, we basically invested three times. That’s it.

 

Simon Erickson  18:39

I’d like to point out for anyone listening to this program, that a 41% average return on invested capital is extremely high. That is fantastic considering that if your return on invested capital is above your weighted average cost of capital, and you’re holding them for long periods of time, you are compounding equity returns for your shareholders, I gratulations. First of all, for finding those companies that are that are so profitable and so successful. My colleague, Matt Cochrane, and I chatted about investing in India a few years ago, was eye opening. You know, there’s several differences that we found then, compared to the American market, at least. But perhaps I’d like to ask you a similar question, which is, could you kind of describe what you just mentioned, about India being a very hyper competitive market? What are some things that perhaps investors should know about about Indian publicly traded equities?

 

Pulak Prasad  19:27

So I would say, broadly, if you’re an American investing in India, there is there is nothing sort of new to know, in some sense. I mean, they’re the same industry, same company. But one big thing that I said, is governance risk is, is that if you throw a dart in the private or the public market, it is likely that it lands on someone that you don’t want to hang out. I’m an Indian, so I can say but that’s unfortunately true. So you have to be extraordinarily careful. In the book, I give the example of a fund manager in the UK Um, it was been Daymond John, John Templeton, I think is the name. He was extremely successful for a very, very long time, over 2425 odd years and beat the market, I think in the UK by six percentage points or more than two decades. Then he launched a 4 million pound fund in China. And basically, he got asked to leave in two years time, essentially, because he didn’t account for the governance risks that China had that UK didn’t have. Number of companies were basically lying on their numbers, were fudging their balance sheets, or their cash flows. And he believed the numbers at face value. That’s the one thing you don’t want to do, as an American in order VESA investor, if you want to come to India, you do want to do a lot of work, trying to figure out not necessarily open the balance sheet and figure it out because you won’t be able to in some sense, because just reported numbers, really the integrity of the founder integrity of the management team. For that there is a qualitative check that one needs to do we do that we’ll never invest in a business unless you’ve done a very thorough qualitative check on the integrity of the management.

 

Simon Erickson  21:11

India also has got some some mega conglomerates out there, right, whether it’s Reliance group or Tata Group, or wherever it is, you know, can you talk a little bit about the competitive nature of the markets? I mean, how do you compete against these, these giant gigantic companies that dominate the nation? Well, we’ve kind of seen some of that, you know, we’ve got some some really big companies here in America as well, but it seems like that’s certainly something you see in India as well.

 

Pulak Prasad  21:30

So I wouldn’t say they are large in the set. Well, they are large in one way they are small in another way. So for example, take Tatas, they have a very large company called TCS, which is, I think, the second largest market cap in India. I forget what it is maybe 160 and $70 billion. There’s one of the successful businesses they have called Titan and the rest of the business are okay, they are not, they’re not as successful as TCS, for example. Reliance is a very successful business in oil and gas. And this is the businesses that come also there. It’s a duopoly, but it doesn’t make hydrogen capitalist yet I think. Similarly, Belarus, and many others have have lots of businesses, conglomerates have lots of businesses, but they’re not necessarily all world beaters. And we don’t we don’t invest in conglomeration results. So so if you are a company independent, focused company, the chances of you succeeding against a conglomerate I think are pretty high, in general. Thesis, of course, is an exception. But maybe that’s the exception that proves the rule, right, in general. So whatever industries conglomerates are in, you will also find very focused, disciplined competitors, who are very good at doing what they do right and have been successful for longer than VIP are looking for that. Because then you’re really putting some money behind someone who’s been there, done that for a long time. And we as investors want to deal with the principal, not the employee. Right. And the principal, by definition, if you’re collaborating, probably don’t have time. For a company that is what we’re one of the 20 businesses.

 

Simon Erickson  23:04

As someone who worked for conglomerates, I can certainly say it’s very challenging to try to have so many wheels spinning at the same time sometimes.

 

Simon Erickson  23:10

And then maybe my last question is, you know it, can you talk a little bit about some of the companies that you like, that you’re invested in, or perhaps the sectors that you’re most drawn to for the funds.

 

Pulak Prasad  23:19

So when we look back, we are very bottoms up sort of folks in the sense that we don’t really look at macro, we don’t really look at industries, but when I look back now, at our portfolio, there are basically three broad areas in which it is in India, one is consumers, consumer, so they have company that make paints that make you know, fans, bulbs that make soaps, for example. So a lot of the plastic pipes that get installed in homes. So there’s a paint obviously. So there’s a bunch of consumer focused businesses that they’re investors in, then there are a bunch of what a part of what am I call a specialist engineering businesses. So people who make turbines or generator sets or specialty steel pipes, or what are called Federico militants. These are highly specialized material that cement companies or mining companies use. There’s a company that makes boilers for example. So these are all the folks that use old technology, they’re not semiconductor technology, you know, 50 100 year old technologies, but they made it extremely efficient, number one, number two, they’ve actually competed with the global giants in India on equal footing. So example Criminy turbine competes with Siemens of company used to own close call engines competes with Cummins, there’s a company called Ratna money that beyond that makes specialty steel pipes competes with Sandvik right? So all these businesses, there’s a company called ag compressor that competes with Atlas Copco, which is the world’s largest compressor company. So all these guys have been competing with them for many, many decades. And they are all please there are in each of these industries sub segments there are very few that allows them to on their own capital and have very, very defensive business goals. So that’s the second piece. The third is really services exports. So whether it’s IT services or whether it is called process services. So for example, it could be outsourcing of a mortgage application processing, or outsourcing of travel, ticketing, for example, or cancellation of ticketing, those kinds of things that outsource to India, just because it’s much, much lower cost. So you have two businesses that and also IT services, we used to our business combined treat that again, got sold because it got acquired. So those are the three broad buckets in which we’ve invested out because we wanted to purchase because the businesses we found attractive.

 

Simon Erickson  25:42

Yeah, and we’re lucky, I know that you said that your your bottoms up investor. But I still have to ask you about the macro anyway, you know, when you especially with regard to your first pillar, right, no big risks we have seen certainly in America, rising inflation, rising interest rates, a lot of macro economic stuff that’s impacting certainly a lot of the tech industry and a lot of other industries as well here. Is it similar in India? Are there similar macro concerns that are on your radar, as you’re as you’re trying to figure out the risks inherent with any of these companies?

 

Pulak Prasad  26:08

So the honest answer is somebody that spent zero time on macro, macro effects everything. So but but again, if I look back, so I started my career in 1982, and 30 years. And if I look back at that time, what we used to think are great businesses, and they’ve continued to be so you know, there have been ups and downs and sideways in the recession in India. And, you know, the, as you said, they’ve been high inflation and the low inflation is high interest rate. All kinds of up to obviously, the global financial crisis. Some sort of small, small little Ward, maybe some terrorist attacks, all kinds of things. But frankly, the great businesses take great and they go through all of this stuff. And in the US in whether they JP Morgan, or PNG, or any of these great businesses in Walmart and Amazon, they’ve all gone through ups and downs of these. So the the honest answer is, I spent zero time. Literally we don’t talk about it. We don’t talk to economists. I don’t write about it in my letters. We don’t take advice from anyone. We just look at businesses.

 

Simon Erickson  27:06

Pulak Prasad is the author of what I learned about investing from Darwin. His three pillars again are avoid big risks, get a fair price and never sell i Very refreshing long term investing approach. It’s really a real pleasure having you on the seventh investing podcast. Thanks very much for today. Thank you. So thanks, everybody, for tuning in to this edition of our 7investing podcast where it’s our mission to empower you to invest in your future. Have a great day, everyone.