Saurabh Mukherjea - Founder and CIO of Marcellus Investment Managers

Breaking Investment Stereotypes with Rajkumar Singhal

My guest for today is one of India’s most celebrated public market investors and educators, given his penchant to share his learnings frequently. Saurabh Mukherjea is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Marcellus Investment Managers. Saurabh was educated at the London School of Economics where he earned a BSc in Economics (with First Class Honours) and an MSc in Economics (with distinction in Macro & Microeconomics). In London, Saurabh was the co-founder of Clear Capital and in 2007 he was rated by the Extel Survey as one of the top small cap analysts in the UK. In India, Saurabh was rated as the leading equity strategist in 2015, 2016 and 2017 by the Asiamoney polls. Prior to setting up Marcellus, Saurabh was the CEO of Ambit Capital.

Saurabh is a CFA charter holder and a SEBI registered investment advisor. In 2017, upon SEBI’s invitation, he joined SEBI’s Mutual Fund Advisory Committee. In 2019, Saurabh was part of the Expert Committee constituted by SEBI to update and upgrade the PMS regulations. Saurabh has written four bestselling books – Gurus of Chaos (2014), The Unusual Billionaires (2016), “Coffee Can Investing: (2018) and ‘The Victory Project: Six Steps to Peak Potential’.

This episode is brought to you by multipie.co where we believe Investing is an ignored life skill. Multipie is building up a platform where people can form communities and learn, share , collaborate on growing their wealth using the right tools. We want your hard earned money to work for you

Show notes:

0:42 - Introduction about Saurabh

2:18 - Saurabh’s “Coffee can” approach; highlights on Asian Paints, Nestle, Bajaj Finance, Divis

6:39 - Tracks less than 30 stocks that meet his criteria.

10:20 - Views on the state of income in India and a parallel with America

12:37 - How to identify a company with a monopoly Deep dive into understanding barriers

18:34 - Discussion on various PMS schemes at Marcellus and selection process

27:38 - Discussion on Rupee vs Dollar and Investing mindsets in India

30:01 - Saurabh’s view on Indian Real Estate as an Investment

35:20 - Saurabh’s thoughts on valuations 3 metrics Saurabh considers before selling a stock

44:00 - Perspective on ITC and why they exited it

46:55 - How can a retail investor conduct basic forensic checks

48:35 - A good business vs a good investment

54:07 - Investing in Nifty index versus Investing in stocks

56:51 - Behavioural aspects of investing

58:33 - Saurabh’s take on “Breaking Investment Stereotypes”

1:00:38 - Saurabh’s advice on writing and journaling along with some book recommendations

1:06:10 - Advice to 20 year old self