I am so happy and grateful to God for certain things. One is clarity of thought – which meant I prefer an Internal score card to an External score card. This means I can live in Mumbai – and live without a car. I do not need it. Just one example.

Also when you are alone, there is no ‘peer pressure’. I am also thankful to God for giving me the wisdom to say NO to ‘Independent Directorships’. That position is worse than that of a statutory auditor. Some of the companies that I have said no to are now in some kind of financial / legal trouble – and to me that is not worth it.

I am also happy that I am not a fund manager – either private or as an employee of a fund house. This job I could have got long ago. I am not sure why I did not choose that route – it was the logical route to go from being an analyst and a broker. So in 2001 I could have got into some fund management team..and in 18 years would have become a decent fund manager (I hope!). Anyway i did not.

Institutional Investment management involves 2 things. One is what you think (Investment is a lonely game) and how you convince your team, trustees, directors, sales head, regulator,…that you have done a good job. I am convinced that I could not have handled the second – the political process. As a loner, I prefer making mistakes and deciding when to correct it. For example I have suffered a few years of TaMo underperformance. Since I am not answerable to anybody, I am continuing to hold it. Actually I do not know whether it is good or bad, but it works for me. I do believe one should have an Investment Philosophy statement and an Investment diary, but sometimes you go by gut.

If I were doing PMS – independently, I would not have been able to tackle the clients multiple advisors, media influence, a few years underperformance, staying invested in underpeforming shares, and wrongly selling a share just when it screams it way to the top of the charts. I would have just said “take your money and go” – and this is not a great way to grow your AUM. Btw I would have perhaps not chased AUM, but if I had costs – research, rent, salaries, sales costs, – would I have done closet indexing – just to “protect my a…”? Not sure, but I am a defensive person, so good chance that I would have. I recently told a person with Rs. 100 crores to invest that he would meet all his goals even if he kept it in a savings bank account. He still wanted some action. Honestly I don’t understand such people.

Another worry is when the client’s power equation changes. The father wanted a blue chip, high dividend (over the years) portfolio, now the son wants to fund start ups. How do you deal with this as an Investment advisor? A friend is going through this phase and actually unable to tell the father that given their corpus, his son is taking too much risk. One of the projects funded belongs to the son-in-law. My friend is anti funding family proects. I am so happy I am not handling that relationship.

I have friends in the FM business who say “you can stay in boring scrips like LMW and LGB during so many years of underperformance…our trustees would kill us”. Seriously, Investing process is like hunting like a tiger. Convincing your bosses, clients, colleagues…is like running a government in India with 150 seats. Hats off the P V Narasimha Rao. PV Subramanyam could surely not have done fund management in a public profile. Hats off the Naren, Prashant, Anand Radhakrishnan, Mahesh Patil….aap sab mahaan ho.