Simple thesis: Buy well run, well financed, efficient capital allocators, market leaders that are available cheap at the trough of the market cycles. How often do you find this combination? Frequent buying/selling makes very little sense.

PB Fintech: After QIP proposal was shelved following market reaction, founders ended up selling shares worth 665 Cr ;) This is not the first instance. PB Healthcare was incorporated in Jan 2025 as 100% subsidiary, company invested 540 Cr into it. Shortly, external investors and ESOP pool were brought in and PB Fintech ownership fell from 100% to 40%. Shareholders funded the incubation and ended up with less than half of the business.

How does a government EPC business end up with FMCG like profitability? Can someone explain tender level economics?

Jeena Sikho⚠️ 1) 70 Cr acquisition in slump sale to acquire ayurvedic business of Oregano Life Pvt Ltd, amount exceeding entire year's operating cash flow. Net tangible assets acquired are worth 8 Cr and 88% of purchase price is booked as goodwill. Oregano Life Pvt Ltd is the largest public shareholder of the company. Nothing disclosed in related party notes, so an arm's length transaction with zero disclosures on any independent valuation to justify the price tag. On top of that, this entity is systematically liquidating its equity stake in Jeena Sikho. There is more..

I wonder how Anthropic researchers and engineers who aren’t US citizens but were on the Fable team would be feeling right now. They can’t access the very thing they helped create.

Interest payment alone is eating up ~19% of US tax revenue but nobody wants to raise taxes, cut expenses or tolerate higher rates. Easiest way out is to print money, buy bonds and bring yields down. When dollar is weakened by money printing, gold tends to rise. @akshat96jain, something feels familiar from our conversation the other day ;)

If a business grows EPS 3x over 10 years (from 10 to 30, only 11% cagr which most would dismiss right away) and P/E multiple also expands 3x over the same period (from 10 to 30), your stock price return is 9x not 6x. Compounding is multiplicative, not additive.

Tata Steel: Metals have massively outperformed broader market lately. China production cuts should create a floor for Indian flat prices but higher coking coal cost and new capacity additions could also cap spreads. Through cycle EBITDA/tonne ~ 12500 Rs. On ~25 MTPA utilized capacity (including Kalinganagar 5 MTPA ramp, assuming Europe ~0), normalized EBITDA ~ 31250 Cr. Less: Maintenance capex ~ 10000 Cr (3-4% of gross block) Interest ~ 7500 Cr Tax ~ 25-30% Owner's earnings ~ 9500 Cr At 250000 Cr Mcap, that's 3.5-4% yield, not compelling for a levered cyclical. Same theme across sectors, great industry setup but very little margin of safety.

Stay away from hot tips, leverage and unsolicited advice from "ace investors".

HV T&D: Todays earnings embed supernormal pricing from a temporary demand supply mismatch. Forward P/E can be extremely deceptive when normalized earnings are materially lower than peak cycle earnings.

Growth rates required to justify these prices are historically unprecedented. No company has ever grown that fast at that scale. Doesn't mean it's impossible. Its just that you're betting on something that has never happened before.

Math of portfolio construction - Which one is a better bet? Bet A- Flip a coin, heads you win 15 Rs, tails you lose 5 Rs Bet B- Roll a dice, if it shows 6 you win 15 Rs, if not you lose 3 Rs Expected value- Bet A: 50%*15 - 50%*5 = 5 Rs Bet B: 17%*15 - 83%*3 = 0 Rs What mattered here was the base rates. In Bet A one wins 50% of the times, in Bet B one wins 1/6th of the times. Now take this to actual businesses: Higher the return, higher the risk and higher risk means violent downside when you're wrong. So its hard to size a very high upside, high downside bet at 10% of your PF in my view. 40% downside would cost 4% of PF. So generally these high growth bets sit at lower sizing (say ~2%). To achieve same net gain as a 15% compounder, this bet needs to deliver 53% return cagr (and good luck if you're betting on many such 2% bets going right at the same time). Base rates? Roughly half the stocks (with Mcap > 1000 Cr) have delivered 15% cagr over 3 year period. Only about 12.5% of the same universe have delivered over 53% cagr over 3 years.

Watch out for lenders with high microfinance exposure.