Dhando Investor Meeting 2015 – A Day With Mohnish Pabrai

HFA Padded
HFA Staff
Published on
Updated on
Mohnish Pabrai

Dhando Investor Meeting 2015 – A Day With Mohnish Pabrai by Nils Herzing, Frenzel & Herzing Value Investment

[munger]

Back in 2013 we were invited to attend the Pabrai annual fund meeting to speak to Mr. Pabrai in person. Unfortunately it was not possible to meet him until six days ago. Thanks too my employer Fronteris, I was able to attended his annual meeting and a bike ride with him. In addition to this experience, I was able to meet with other great minds like Guy Spier, Rishi Gosalia (from Google), Haricharan Ramachandra (from Linkedin, who also run the great blog BitsBusiness), Adrian Warner (a fund manager from Australia) and many others.

Highlights:

  1. Score keeping is Mr. Pabrai’s most important lesson to achieve success in life and investing. Especially, the track-record is important in investing and gaming. It can help you to track your mistakes and improve your knowledge.
  2. Has read the Poor Charlies Almanac 7 times and still finds new insights.
  3. Self-improvement is the most important thing, he would bet on the guy with less knowledge and less skills if he has a drive to self-improvement, over a lifetime he will bet the guy with more skills.
  4. Pabrai thinks that Fiat is highly undervalued. Minimum margin of safety is 50% and it has the potential to become a +4x. The spinoff of Ferrari will come in less than a month and it is still not considered in the share price.
  5. Pabrai currently holds: Fiat 42% of the fund , GM B Warrents >10% , POSCO ~10% , ~15% Horsehead Holding , ~10% Google
  6. Dhando Holding IPO will be delayed by 2-3 years, they are currently developing a Smart-Beta value ETF and an own direct small businesses Insurance company (GEICO for businesses)
  7. Stone Trust made an underwriting loss of 4 million this year (when the Equity was just 61 million)

Next, I will share my takeaways from the presentation which was attended by approximately 175 guests:

Start of the presentation

In 1920 there were over 100 car manufactures in the US. It came to a bubble, 10 years later only 3 companies survived. The same happened in the 1960s with the electronic industry and in the 2000s with the internet companies.

He speaks about the “Nifty Fifty” and that investors paid any price for good business in the 1950s. At the end of the day the valuation collapsed and the stocks wend down by 75-90% (featured it in “the mosaic theory as well).

According to Pabrai we are currently seeing the “Nifty-Fifty” again. He mentions Amazon, Tesla, Solar Valley, Uber etc. all are good businesses but are valued way to high. Even the CEO of Netflix says that his stock valuation is crazy.

He compares Tesla with GM, which is currently trading at an P/E of 4x according to him.

He then compares Netflix vs. Micron: Only 3 players in the market of Micron. Micron has a market cap of just 20 Bn. And makes 3,6 bn earnings.

[munger]

Full article here  Frenzel & Herzing Value Investment

Mohnish Pabrai

HFA Padded

The post above is drafted by the collaboration of the Hedge Fund Alpha Team.

Leave a Comment