Stable Investor

Recently, I got interviewed by Ravichand of Stock & Ladder. The interview was originally published here (at Investing Chat with Dev Ashish).

It covers my background, investment philosophy (and how it has evolved over the years), how I invest and other related aspects. I thought it would be useful to publish it here as well, for the benefit of existing readers of Stable Investor.

This investing chat is a long one at about 6000 words and may require some time. But I hope you find it useful and worthy of your time.

So here it is…

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Ravichand (S&L):  Hi Dev, Firstly a big thank you for sparing some time to share your thoughts with the readers of Stock and Ladder. First up, please tell us something about yourself especially the part about how you got into the world of investing and Personal finance.

Dev: Thanks Ravi, for considering me worth interviewing.

My story isn’t very inspirational or anything like that. I am just a regular person.

Being born in a family of lawyers and doctors, chances were high that I would take a similar path. But I have been the odd-man-out in my family. Maybe it was because of the powers above which had a very different plan for me and so, I began my journey in a completely different direction.

Currently, I am a practicing SEBI-registered Investment Advisor.

But even though I had a noticeable interest in finance since I can remember, I still went ahead and did my engineering. Later, I joined a government sector oil company and got posted in a remote location.

After working there for a few years, I made a conscious decision to gradually align my life and work towards my area of interest – which was investing in particular and finance in general.

This, however, was not going to be easy as for doing that, I would have to quit my safe government job. It was a tough decision but my family and then-friend-now-wife backed me fully for the decision.

So I quit, did my MBA and then joined a private bank. After a few years, I got a very good job offer from a startup. I was no doubt happy with the offer in my hand.

But I spent some time contemplating whether it was actually what I wanted to do. In the end, it didn’t seem like it. I realized that if I had to do something on my own, I had to take a call sooner or later.

So after having several rounds of discussion with wife, parents and a few people I consider to be my mentors, I quit my job and decided not to join the startup.

I decided to take a plunge into what I really wanted to do. I must mention here that I had sufficient savings by then to make this decision.

I took a license from SEBI to start my Investment Advisory practice and that’s what I am currently doing. After having worked in metros and other cities, I returned back to my hometown Lucknow, where I currently stay with my family.

Though my target eventually is to achieve financial independence, I think I can safely say that I will never actually retire, as is the norm in our family of doctors and lawyers.

As for my interest in investing, it got kindled when I was quite young. My father and grandfather had money invested in shares of a few MNCs. So every now and then, we used to get dividend cheques from these investments.

On enquiring, my father explained that these cheques were dividends – which he was being paid to hold pieces of paper (physical shares then).

This attracted me like anything. I just fell in love with the idea of getting a regular flow of passive income without going to work for somebody else! This was as clear a case of money working for you (rather than the other way around) that there could be.

So you can say that there wasn’t any one single moment when it happened for me. The seed was sown very early on and I tried to gradually align my life towards investing and working for my own self.

Ravichand (S&L):  That’s wonderful Dev. Not everyone can make their passion the means for their paycheck and many usually end up spending their lifetime helping someone else build their dreams.

Mark Twain’s golden words come to my mind “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Let’s get into investing proper. Tell us something about your investing philosophy and how it has evolved over the years?

Dev: I am 33 but have been investing in markets for about 15 years now. But initial few years are a grey area from investment philosophy perspective. Consciously or unconsciously, I was trying out several things then.

And to be honest, I did not even have a philosophy in those initial years. I simply went after ideas where I felt the probability of making money was reasonably high. Luckily, I have had this inherent bias of being a little conservative when it comes to stock picking. So more often than not, I gravitated towards good companies with proven businesses (this is an approach that I am still loyal to).

I am not exactly sure why I have had this conservative bias. Maybe it was due to my family’s history and me as a child having observed that most of the investments were in mature, dividend-paying safe stocks.

But whatever it was, I still made decent money. Maybe I got lucky in several cases. And I cannot ignore that I was amply helped by the rising tide of our great Indian bull run of 2004-07.

Thankfully, I have had an inquisitive mind that tries to look for answers to how things work. Not just in finance but everywhere. And one of the things that I really wanted to understand (after a good experience during the Bull Run) was what actually made the stock markets work and behave as they do.

So this pushed me into reading about markets and investors. Luckily, I got exposed to Warren Buffett and his philosophy at the start itself. And Mr. Buffett led me to Benjamin Graham.

The more I studied these value investors, the more I felt that value investing was best suited for me. Here I must say that I have nothing against other schools of investing. 3 plus 7 is 10 and so is 5 plus 5. So there are several ways of making money. It was just that value-conscious investing attracted me the most.

So from then on and for many years, most of my investments were based on valuation attractiveness. And I loved investing in dividend plays. Being valuation sensitive, my process was numbers driven.

But slowly I started realizing that just focusing on numbers wasn’t enough. Why? Because I was regularly missing out on other attractive opportunities that were not attractive valuation-wise.

So in due course of time and after having missed many good money making opportunities, I decided to gradually tweak my way of investing.

Valuations still mattered for me. But I was now willing to pay up (more than what I was earlier comfortable with) if I could find businesses that were of high quality, had good conservative (or let’s say non-adventurous) management, predictable growth runway and manageable debts which gave them some ability to suffer for extended periods of time.

So from a pure valuation’s guy, I became a valuation conscious investor who was willing to embrace growth. Not too much but still ready to pay up to an extent.

So instead of focusing on the cheapest stocks available, I was going after comparatively higher quality cos. which were not very cheap.

Along the way, I continued buying good companies when they faced temporary bad events. So in a way, I was and still operate as a virtual bad news investor.

This reminds me of a good analogy about why we should stick to good companies. Tennis balls are costlier than eggs. And both the egg and the tennis ball will fall occasionally. But only the tennis ball will bounce back. As for the egg, you know what fate does to a falling one. So when buying businesses, buy tennis balls. At least they will bounce back when they fall.

As of now, my approach is a little more structured than what it earlier was.

• I run a core portfolio of about 20-25 stocks. But to ensure that I bet convincingly in my main picks, about 80-85% is allocated towards the top 12-15 stocks.
• Remaining are ideas that I am either still working on and/or where I am yet to build full conviction about. I generally try to ensure that none of the stocks hold more than 12-15% of the overall portfolio.
• A majority of the stocks in the core portfolio belong to the top-150 universe. So you can say that I am a conservative investor when it comes to stock picking.
• Many people think that large caps cannot make money. I don’t agree but I don’t try to convince anyone now. Large caps have worked wonders for me over the years. So I stick with them.
• I also run a smaller (call it satellite) portfolio where I enter into short-medium term bets. This is more to take advantage of temporary mispricing and other low hanging fruits.
• Of course, it is easier said than done and chances of being wrong here are immense. But that’s fine. It’s my way to tackling my urge of doing something every now and then and trying to be the next Buffett.
• And luckily, the results haven’t been bad and provide for more money to be pumped into the core portfolio.
• I also maintain a watchlist of stocks where I keep an eye on businesses that I wish to buy but which still aren’t in my portfolio for some reason or the other.
• Over the years I have realized the power and option that cash brings in times of distress. So I ensure that I regularly put aside some money in suitable debt instruments to act as a Market Crash Fund.
• You never know when the market might throw up some interesting opportunity. So better to be prepared. This way, I will not miss having CASH, when there is a CRISIS and I have accumulated enough COURAGE to venture out in tough times.
• The above point, as you might have guessed, refers basically to the idea of sitting on cash. And I swear it is extremely difficult to do. More so when I see people around me making easy money.
• But in the long run, I think restricting the number of bets I make in most convincing ones (in my view) is how a larger part of the wealth will be created. So I try to sit on cash and do nothing if there is nothing to do.
• Apart from direct stocks, I have a goal-specific investment portfolio that has equity funds, debt funds, PPFs, deposits, gold, etc. One of my major life goals is to become financially independent by 40. So these investments are aligned towards that goal.

There is one thing that I have learned over the years. And maybe this is because I still pay my respect to valuations.

A good investor knows that it is only occasionally that he has to do something. And when the time comes, he has to and should do that ‘something’. And then, there is no need to do anything else. Money will be made in most such cases.

Ravichand (S&L):  Dev, that was the most detailed way someone has ever shared their process. That’s a great blueprint on which we can build our own investing framework.

As regarding to the way you have gravitated towards value investing, I remembered what Seth Klarman said “It turns out that value investing is something that is in your blood. There are people who just don’t have the patience and discipline to do it, and there are people who do. So it leads me to think it’s genetic”

From philosophy let’s move on to putting the philosophy into action. Tell us, what are the criteria’s or characteristics you look for in a business for it to be considered investment worthy?

Dev: I don’t have a very long checklist.

But broadly, I check stocks around 3 things – quality of the actual business, quality of the management and price in relation to my view on valuation of the stock.

Obviously, there are several things to check within these 3 broad heads.

Quality of business is all about doing the typical number-oriented analysis like examining sales and profit growths, margins, etc. – for the company and the industry peers.

Analyzing how industry and economy-specific environmental variables have impacted company’s trajectory in the past. And that of its competitors. Cost and capital structures and power that suppliers and customers have on the company or vice versa.

Then a good return on equity and return on capital are no doubt important. A less leveraged balance sheet is preferable as it makes business more robust in trying times.

I prefer sticking with businesses that have some barrier to entry that is not evaporating at least in the medium term. These are just some of the factors that I try to assess the company on.

Then there is that grey area of having a view on future growth of the business and more importantly, longevity of this expected growth. There is a big possibility to get this wrong but you need to have an objective and unbiased view on this to make your bets.

I will be honest that the quality of management is a difficult one to judge. And quality not only means their business sense but also their integrity.

So no matter how deep I go with analyzing these factors (from various sources), there will always be a chance of being completely wrong. But that’s fine. Sticking to what information is available and what signs the management is sending via annual reports and other ways is what I stick to. I really cannot get it right every time.

Even after several years in the market, I regularly end up feeling like an amateur when it comes to picking stocks. I am improving but there is a lot to learn.

I do run excel models but none of them are extremely complex or fancy. That’s because I feel that if I need a very complex model to prove a stock as a worthy of investment, then maybe it’s not that good after all.

Also, businesses are run by people and not excel spreadsheets. An Excel model cannot be an alternative to thinking. And that is where our subjectivity and biases come.

I think that good investment ideas are very simple. And to be fair and acknowledging the limitations of my ability to analyze any and everything, I would say that a stock idea has to be so good on just a few parameters that it should just jump out and find me rather than me trying to find it out.

And last but not the least, and extremely important… there is valuation. It is very subjective and what is undervalued to me might look overvalued to someone else and vice versa. But that’s how it is.

The stock should be in a comfortable valuation range for me to buy it. I generally start buying in small lots and accumulate over a course of time. I am not very comfortable buying large quantities in one go.

Here I will say that I generally avoid talking about the stocks I own or am contemplating owning. It puts unnecessary pressure on me as an investor to defend my position every time there is a news (which may or may not be relevant for me as a long-term investor). The ability to ignore and filter out the short-termism is I think necessary to operate well as a long-term investor. And there is no competition. So I try to reduce the stress to the extent possible.

Generating alphas is in itself so difficult, so why take on additional stress to justify your picks to people who may have different investment horizons or risk taking capacity. Isn’t it?

Remaining silent is all the more important as a valuation-aware investment strategy does not work all the time. Markets don’t and won’t always agree with you.

So going through extended periods of under performance is necessary and fine with me. I am more than willing to have return-holidays if I can get better longer-term returns.  As they say that as a real investor, you should be willing to be misunderstood in short-term to be right in the long-term.

Talking of investment criteria’s I think I should also share my views on the somewhat related and important aspect of cycles.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the importance of mean reversion. Or let’s say how cycles play out. I don’t have any expert advice to offer on this front as this topic tends to tread in the territory of market timing.

But I believe that we can improve our long-term investment returns by adjusting our portfolio in line with cycle requirements.

Talking of cycles, think of it like this – when recent market returns are high, the attitude of the masses towards risk changes. People forget what their real risk tolerance is and get comfortable taking more and more risk in search of better returns.

This is exactly what sows the seed for future declines. And when the time comes and the delicate balance is disturbed by some external event, it pushes the market off the cliff. That is where the cycle turns.  So if one learns from the past data, then there are indicators which highlight when people are getting irrational. The same case can be built around people’s unreasonable fear after the market falls.

It is at such junctures that some level of portfolio adjustment (by re-balancing or taking cash out or bringing it in the portfolio) can improve future returns.

This requires operating against the herd. This is about being contrarian in real sense and not just for the heck of it. Which is easier said than done but with each passing year, it becomes not too difficult.

Ravichand (S&L):  Completely agree on the point of simplicity and thinking of simplicity, Peter Lynch’s famous quote comes to my mind “Never invest in an idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon”.

You also brought up the important topic of market cycles which I believe to be a topic that every aspiring investor should be familiar with. Howard Marks book Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side is an excellent read on market cycles.

From checklist let’s talk rules. If there were to be “Dev’s 5 rules for successful investing” then what would that be?

Dev: I feel there are no perfect rules out there for successful investing. Any day it is possible that the bets we make due to all our successful investing framework (that we are proud of) and where we have the maximum conviction, turns out to be super bad.

But if I had to list down few important realizations that I have had, then here are my rules:

• Stick with good businesses run by capable and trustworthy management, which have the ability to survive bad years comfortably and operate in industries having clearly visible and reasonably long growth trajectory. As simple as it sounds, this I believe is the most effective filter to reduce the number of potential stock ideas.
• Valuation should not be ignored at any cost. But be ready to pay a fair price for good businesses. Every now and then, the markets will surprise by offering unbelievable deals on a platter.
• You may have the courage to go out, but if you don’t have the cash, forget about taking advantage of such few-in-a-lifetime events. So be prepared with surplus funds to the extent possible. It will test your patience. But that is the price that you should be willing to pay.
• There is a time to be brave and there is a time to not be brave. Don’t try to be brave all the time. Protect and secure what you have earned. Remember Buffett’s 2 rules about losing money. Be willing to be laughed at for your investment ideas. But that is when it will work. In investing, you want others to agree with you…but later.

Ravichand (S&L): Great set of rules, Dev. The importance of protecting your investing capital cannot be emphasized enough. When you read the investing rules of super investors, the point that return of money is more important than return on money becomes obvious. 

Next let’s talk mistakes. Mistakes are sometimes referred to as “unexpected learning experiences”. Can you share any investing mistake(s) you have made and what were the learning?

Dev: Let me talk about my mistakes.

One of my major mistakes (and I repeat it) has been to not average up when I entered in a good stock early on. You can say that I got anchored to the price I got in first. The result is obvious. I could have made a lot more money in absolute terms than what I made when you look just at the CAGR figures.

Selling early is also one of the crimes I regularly commit. The reason might range from increasing overvaluation to change in unintended negative signals that the management might be sending. But selling early has cost me in past. It’s like waiting for that elusive 20- or 50-bagger. For that to happen, you need to stay put and go through 5x, 10x, 15x and so on sequentially. You cannot jump straight to the 50x. Isn’t it?

At times, I did not pay attention to valuation when deciding to buy a stock. Very often, it backfired. One thing that we should not forget is that it’s not just what you buy that makes for a good investment.

It is also about what you pay for it. Valuation is something that really cannot be ignored. At least not for me. And you know what the biggest problem apart from these mistakes is?

I keep repeating these 3 all the time. The frequency is reducing. But maybe I can just never eliminate these fully.

Ravichand (S&L): To be honest, I believe that these mistakes you have mentioned would have been committed by every single investor. It’s only with experience and spending time in the market that we can avoid these potential investing landmines.

From Mistakes let’s talk on the skills required to succeed. What do you believe are the skills one need to hone for becoming a better investor?

Dev: I am not too sure about how to answer this question. But I feel that investing is unnecessarily made out to be too complex. It is in essence pretty simple. Some are born great investors. For others, I think they should do/have the following:

• Basic understanding of how businesses work and make money. Before investing, think of how you would be running the business of which you are planning to buy the stock. Have an owner’s mindset.
• A fair idea of finance, accounting and what numbers are telling or what they are ‘forced’ to tell or what they are hiding.
• A growing understanding of how the market works and more importantly, how market participants (and not just investors) behave under different market conditions. This isn’t exactly a skill but for this, there is a need to study market history.
• Reading is essential. To learn about how others have successfully invested and also because you will need to read annual reports, etc. if you are serious about investing.
• Now this isn’t exactly a skill but eventually, one needs to understand that just being right or wrong doesn’t mean anything. As they say, amateurs want to be right but professionals want to make money.
• So allow me to invoke George Soros here who rightly said that it’s not whether you are right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you are right and how much money you lose when you are wrong that’s important.
• You may call it skill, insight or art… whatever. But this is required to grow the portfolio.

Ravichand (S&L): Cannot agree more on the importance of reading in the life of an investor. Munger famously quipped “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time- none, zero” From skills required we move onto lessons learnt.

What has been the most important investing lesson(s) you have learnt from your time in the market?

Dev: You ask tough questions Ravi!

There must have been several important things that I must have learnt along the way. And to be honest, I may be still too young and inexperienced to know which one is the most important one for me.

But in recent years and as the portfolio size grows, I have come to realize that it’s not just important to push portfolio to grow faster. It is also important to start protecting what one has.

This may sound like being conservative at times. But that is what is necessary. As I said earlier, there is a time to be brave and there is a time not to be brave.

Of course when one decides to become aggressive and when one switches over to being conservative is fairly subjective. Mean reversion and how cycles work in the market is something that should be respected here.

We may not feel any urgent need to accept the cyclicity in market behavior when we start investing. But I think cycles are inevitable and more importantly, are heightened by the investor’s inability to remember the past.

Investor’s attitude toward risk also goes through a cycle. Of course the speed and timing of the cycle matters, but I hope you get the drift of what I am trying to say.

You need to position yourself and your portfolio after giving a deep thought to the cycle. Cannot ignore it. And that’s because at the extremes of the cycle, things can get really strange and uncontrollable if you don’t know what hit you or you aren’t positioned correctly.

Ravichand (S&L):  Loved the lessons especially the one on the need to be brave and act decisively when needed. All the bookish knowledge like “Be greedy when other are fearful” or “Buy when there is blood on the streets” etc. are not useful if we are not going to act on this knowledge. Brian Tracy put this beautifully “Think before you act and then act decisively. Fortune favors the brave.”

From lessons let’s move on to advises. What has been the most important investing advice(s) you have received on investing? How has it influenced your investing process?

Dev: I admire a lot of famous investors as they have provided the intellectual base for my investing life. And I am grateful and lucky to be influenced by them early on.

But I think the most important investing advice I received was from someone whom I regularly interact to discuss ideas. He is a not-so-small investor but likes to remain in hiding.

What he told me (and keeps repeating) is that if I wanted to make good money in the long run, I needed to have a thick skin. And I needed to become deaf.

Why?

Because successful investing is all about being contrarian and making people agree with you…but later.

So in between, you will have to listen to all the reasons from others about why you are wrong and why they are right. But assuming you have done your homework before taking the position, you need to ignore all the pressure that is coming to you.

And for that, you need to have a thick skin and turn deaf. If you watch the movie ‘The Big Short’, this is exactly what Christian Bale playing Michael Burry is symbolic of.

Being contrarian isn’t easy. If I see some good opportunity to invest and the market seems to ignore it, then chances are that the particular opportunity exists because the conditions aren’t favorable for it yet. Or else price would have moved up already.

So if you have a thick skin and you are deaf, then you can be comfortable with people misunderstanding you in the short term. Eventually and in long term, you will be right and make money.

I know that there is always a risk of being arrogant if you do so. Who knows and it’s possible that you may be wrong in your judgment and others might actually be right. But that is fine. In investing, even if you are right 4-6 times out of 10, then you can make serious money (depending on your position sizing).

Other important advice is more on the personal finance front. My father has always been of the view that the allure for more wealth is an unhealthy obsession. It’s unnecessary and it’s not worth it.

He has time and again told me that we don’t need a lot of money to feel good. Having enough money and free time is more important. And as I age, I agree with him more and more.

Ravichand (S&L): John Neff described the essence of contrarian investing nicely “It’s not always easy to do what’s not popular, but that’s where you make your money. Buy stocks that look bad to less careful investors and hang on until their real value is recognized”. Indeed a contrarian strategy is highly rewarding as long as we take care of few key things about contrarian investing approach.

Next we move from advice to influencers. Is there any particular investor(s) or author(s) who have had a significant influence in your investment thinking?

Dev: I read a reasonable amount of text (and not just books). But as years pass, the incremental benefit I get from reading new books keeps getting smaller.

Nevertheless, the investors/authors that have had an impact on me are Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Peter Lynch, Howard Marks, Seth Klarman, Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.

But I must say here that one should read a lot. We really don’t know which idea in which book might influence us in ways we can’t even imagine. And who knows what learning we get from any particular book might be used for our life decisions.

And we are always just one decision away from a completely different life. So keep reading. It’s your mind’s software update mechanism.

Ravichand (S&L):  Reading is a theme which gets emphasized by all the guests I chat with. Munger put it best “I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading.” Next up is one of my favorite question.

Let us say a bunch of enthusiastic beginners approached you for advice on how to be a better investor then what would your advice for them be?

Dev:

• It is very important to study great investors and also about companies that survived and ones that did not survive.
• The market does not reward activity. Others will tell and push you to do something or the other at all times. But money is made by not doing anything most of the times. So be ready to do nothing 95% of the time.
• Since you will have a lot of time, be willing to read a lot. And I mean a lot. And use this time to upgrade yourself with core knowledge as well as practical insights about how various industries actually work and make money.
• Market cycles and investment behavior influence each other. Spend time learning about this aspect. For this read up on market history across cycles.
• As you keep investing and learning, slowly build up your checklist of factors that you should judge a business and its stock on. No book or no one can teach you what comes from putting your money on the line.
• So begin investing and learn in parallel. Losing hard earned money on your bets is the best teacher. It gives you a perspective that nothing else can.
• Luck plays a lot bigger role in investing than you may attribute it to. Be humble and grateful and more importantly, acknowledge (at least privately) if you made money due to luck and not skill.
• Have a thick skin but don’t be arrogant. This won’t come easy. So give yourself time to go through the process of growing a thick skin. Jokes apart, what I am trying to say is that be ready to take a contrarian stand and be ready to take brickbats for it.
• But also be willing to acknowledge and backtrack if you have made a mistake. You are here to make money and not prove whether you are right or wrong. Bury that ego in a flowerpot.
• This is difficult – as the years pass, try to be unemotional about investing. I don’t know how as there is no perfect recipe. But you have to gradually and intentionally reduce the role of emotions in your investing life.
• If you are a beginner then you will not understand the gravity of this advice. But it is far more important than what people will ever realize.
• You will only appreciate a good market when you have been through a bad one. So be ready to face the bad one sooner or later. It will humble you and help later in life when your portfolio is larger.
• On a personal front, realize that time and health matter more than your wealth. And please do remember that you always know how much money you have, but you never know how much time you have. So act accordingly.

Ravichand (S&L): I think that’s a great set of advice for beginners. On studying great investors, that is precisely what Stock and Ladder is focused on. I also think your point on time and health is very important but we rarely bother about it when we are beginners. On health, I like what Jim Rohn said “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live” Next question is on my favorite activity – reading. If you have to recommend 5 books that every investor must read then which ones would that be?

Dev: To answer your question specifically, here are the 5 books:

• The Intelligent Investor
• The Most Important Thing
• One Up on Wall Street
• The Little book that beats the market
• Value investing by James Montier

Also, re-read these books (or ones you respect) every few years. You will gain new insights from the same books as by then, you would have gained more experience. Also because you could relate the information in these books to various other texts that you must have read elsewhere in between your re-readings. I must mention here that reading is fine. And necessary and there is no substitute for it.

But reading alone is not enough. Don’t expect to be rich and happy just by reading a lot of books. You need to read, adapt and use the understanding to invest and live well.

Ravichand (S&L): Wonderful reading list and a great point on applying the knowledge as Aristotle put it “The mind is not only knowledge but also the ability to apply that knowledge in practice”. Even good things need to come to an end like this wonderful conversation and here’s the last question: Outside your passion for stock market and investing, are there any other interests / activities which are close to your heart?

Dev: I like to travel. And I am lucky my wife shares this interest too. We try to visit a new place every 6 months or so.

Also, I believe that I am an ancient mountain soul! So every year, I just have to spend at least a couple of weeks in the hills or mountains. That you can say is my indulgence.

As you might have already guessed, I also like to read. Not just books on money but a lot of other stuff as well. My interests lie in space science, science fiction, aerodynamics, ancient civilizations, etc.

Walking is something that I do a lot. No particular reason for it. I just like it.

Formula 1 is my longtime favorite sports. So almost 20+ weekends a year (that’s the approx. number of races) are booked to watch it. My wife hates F1 as they take up the weekends at odd hours.

Other obvious sports interest is watching cricket. I don’t play but spend a lot of time reading up on cricket records now.  Socializing a lot is not my cup of tea. But I am lucky to have a few good friends and we meet often. That’s it.

Thanks Dev, it was a very enlightening, interesting and insightful conversation. Wishing you the very best in your career and life.

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