We're so excited to have you here. Um, yeah. to take the time for us to uh to to ask us questions to ask questions for you and um yeah my name is Gaussken I'm speaking on behalf of the CBS investment club at Copenagen Business School um yeah the CBS investment club is a club run by students uh it's an investment fund focus on Nordic equities uh just like gathering students from across the university interesting in markets and capital allocation So yeah, for those of you who don't know Monish, he is um the founder and managing partner of Babai investment funds and uh also the CEO of Dando Funds and the author of the Dando Investor. uh and he's also uh has some philic activities where he um he's the chairman and founder of the Dakshana Foundation where he gives like impoverished children in India opportunities to study at um IIT which is equivalent to MIT in the US. So yeah, Munish, so why don't we start with uh maybe things you have in your mind or we can go to the Q&A session. >> We should go straight to Q&A. >> Okay, cool, cool, cool. Cool. So my first question for you is what advice do you have for students that want to go into the investment management business uh and try to emulate maybe what Buffett has done? >> First thing I would suggest is that you need to have very solid evidence that you are a good investor and that you are likely to be a good steward for other people's hard-earned money. And probably the best way to accomplish that is to have a auditable track record that you've built over a few years with your own funds. So what I would recommend is basically have a brokerage account which is dedicated where you're not writing you know checks here and there but where later at some point that account can be handed over to an audit firm and they can relatively easily come up with an audited record of what the returns and such have been. So I would say the first thing is that there should be some reasonable period of time 5 10 years or something where you've built a record and you convince yourself that you're good at this and then after that if that goes well then you on convincing folks to give you money to manage and on that front you put your energies behind friends family and fools and the most important are the fools. Oh, interesting. Interesting. So, yeah, my next question for you is how do you like manage uh like the impact of management team when you research the companies? Like they're often very good at sales and charismatic people. So, how do you like uh manage that? I think that you can usually understand the nature of management by looking at the historic track record. you know, the track record is public and if that team and CEO has been in that position for a while, then you have some pretty solid data points of kind of how what they've done in the past and that should give you a good indicator of what's going on. You can also talk to competitors to see what they think about the company and the individuals and such. So, you can get a good kind of feel for all of that. You don't necessarily need to be interacting with management to get a view. In fact, I think interactive in management is might create distortions whereas you might get a cleaner view from looking at the history and track record. >> My next question is you have like a very big part of your US uh portfolio in the Micron if I remember correct uh what did you learn from selling Micron early? >> That was an investment I had made with Leelu who's manages some money for Charlie Mer and we also Leelu and I also discussed it with Charlie. So that investment was made around 2017 and we exited in 2023 and I don't really have any regrets about the exit because I think it made sense with the data we were seeing and of course it's gone up a lot since then. The premise of the Micron investment was that there was a rational igopoly of three players SKH Highix, Micron and Samsung that control the memory market and barriers to entry are extremely high for a fourth player to get scale in the memory business. There's a lot of patents and processes and capital and different impediments to a fourth player having any chance of making it. So we had a market with three players and from what we could tell the three players were acting rationally in the sense that they were all profitable making money and they were not trying to beat each other up if you will. And one of the things I had discussed with Charlie is whether these oligopoly situations were stable in terms of cash flows and business prospects and so on or whether there was issues to be concerned about. And Charlie said that Warren Buffett had studied a large number of Coke and Pepsi bottlers all around the world in various US cities and various countries around the world. And that's an igopoly situation with two players. And he said that in probably 95 or 97% of markets, Coke and Pepsi bottlers in a particular geography acted rationally and both companies made money. Both bottlers made money. But he said there were like kind of 3 to 5% of markets where one of the players decided that they wanted to increase market share. So they became more aggressive with promotions and pricing and so on. And of course the second player has to respond to that because even though there's brand loyalty, you know, if I go to pick up 12-pack of Coke and the 12-pack of Pepsi is 30% cheaper, I would switch. you know there is brand loyalty but it's not extreme brand loyalty. So in these markets where these players were trying to you know take more market share from the other player and so on nobody made any money because it was a race to the bottom you know the other person also reacted and then pricing went down and just got more aggressive and so on. So you end up with markets where normally having a co-piloter is a license to print money but you would end up with markets in 3 to 5% of the cases where nobody made money and in the micron oligopoly situation it was a similar situation where these three players from what we could tell in 2017 and I met with all three players made several trips to Seoul and met with Heinix and Samsung and also met with the senior management at Micron and so on that they were all understood all that and they not going to be acting irrationally. But then in 2023 there was a change when Samsung which was Samsung basically had half the market 50% and the other two players had 25% each approximately and Samsung decided that they wanted greater market share and so they got more aggressive with pricing to take more market share and of course the other two players SKH and Micron had to react and respond. What happened in 2023 is all three players lost money and what was a rational market suddenly became a irrational unpredictable market and by then the stock we had bought had approximately doubled. It wasn't a great return but it was I would say kind of a low teens annualized return from when we had bought and the future was murky. We couldn't tell we were looking at negative cash flows. So I decided to exit. I think Leelu exited around the same time and then of course 2 three years later we had the AI boom and things went the other way where now it doesn't matter whether the players are rational or not. They're not able to keep up with demand. So they are all trying to produce full out with the AI and such and so it is the way it is. You know, the investing business is an extremely forgiving business and one can and will be wrong the majority of the time and even if one is wrong the majority of the time the results may be more than acceptable if you're following some rules. So I like to give the example that in the late60s and early 1970s in the US there was a concept known as the nifty50 and the nifty50 was approach to investing where basically the idea was that you bought equal amounts invested in the 50 strongest most blue chip companies in the US. So you would take a portfolio and put 2% of the portfolio into American Express, 2% in Coca-Cola, Pepsi, GE, Kodak, Boeing, McDonald's, so on, Polaroid, and so on. And you would just not care about the valuations, not care about anything. Just hold these great businesses and the end result would be good. What ended up happening is that in 1973 and 74 so these companies got bid up to very spectacular levels like 50 60 times trailing earnings they got very expensive in 7374 there was a stock market crash in slow motion where over 2 years the US stock market went down more than 50%. And the Nifty50 went down a lot more than that. It got taken out back and shot. So the Nifty50 was probably down like 60 70%. And by 1975, no one had any interest in the Nifty50. Everyone had sold the Nifty50 position. They had at steep losses. There's some controversy whether Walmart was part of the Nifty50 or not. But to help me make my point, let's make the assumption that Walmart was part of the Nifty50 and that one had put 2% of the portfolio into Walmart. And let's assume that the people who invested in the Nifty50 did not touch it or sell it in the 7374 downturn or from then until now. They just kept the whole thing. Didn't have any trades. And let's also make an extreme assumption that every holding in that Nifty50 went to zero except Walmart. So you made an investment in a portfolio of 50 stocks. 49 stocks have gone to zero and only one stock that you bought which is Walmart just does what it did. And if you looked at the returns from 1972 when Walmart became public to 2026 54 year period including reinvested dividends Walmart has delivered about 15 or 16% a year annualized and the S&P 500 15 or 16% a year starting with 2%. What I'm saying is that with that 98% going to zero and the S&P having the entire 100 cents, the Nifty50 portfolio with a 98% error rate blew out the S&P by about 5% a year with 49 out of 50 stocks going to zero. Now, of course, 49 out of 50 stocks did not go to zero. We still have McDonald's and MX and Coke and a lot of the other businesses, but many of the stocks did go to zero like Xerox and Kodak and Polaroid and Digital Equipment and so on, but it didn't matter. Bottom line was that one holding was enough to offset all the other losses. And if we study stock markets for a very long period of time, let's say over the last 100 years, for example, the US markets, what we find is that all the returns of the equity markets have come from 4% of the stocks. 96% of the stocks have basically done nothing. They've gone to zero or done nothing. And all the returns that 9 10 11% a year that we get has come from 4% of the equities. The important thing was not to buy Walmart. The important thing was not to touch Walmart, to never sell it, no matter what was happening, no matter what the company said and what they reported, etc. You just kept it. And the Walton family, they owned 46% of Walmart when it went public in 1972. And after 54 years, they own more than 46% of Walmart. So the Walton family in 54 years has never sold Walmart. And because Walmart has bought back shares, they actually own a higher percentage of the company. So they followed that principle of just holding. But no institutional investors held Walmart for 54 years. Zero. So important thing with investing is what Charlie Mer said is in a lifetime we're going to get very few trips to the pie counter. And when we get a trip to the pie counter, we have to load up on a lot of pie and then try not to drop that pie till you get back to your table. And someone asked him once, how can one be good at selling? And his response was, don't worry about becoming good at selling. Worry about becoming good at finding Costos. So we can be useless at selling. We can sell nothing. We can have a very high error rate as long as we recognize that something in our portfolio is truly exceptional and it could be a small part of the portfolio like Walmart at 2%. But when we find ourselves in the lucky situation of partial ownership of a great business, don't sell that business because it looks fully priced. Don't sell that business when it looks overpriced. If that business possibly gets egregiously overpriced, one could think about selling it. So in 2018, I had noticed that the Turkish stock market was screening ultra cheap, like the cheapest in the world. And I don't know nothing about Turkey, just like I know nothing about Copenhagen. But I have a friend, a good friend in Istanbul who's I think now the second largest fund manager, equity fund manager in in Turkey and he's a kind of hardcore Ben Graham disciple. And I told him, look, I would love to visit Turkey and I would love to visit the companies in your portfolio and would you be open to that? He said, oh, this would be a lot of fun, Mones, it would be great. And so I made a trip to Turkey with nothing in mind other than just trying to learn a bit more about this alien market and alien place. and he sent me a list of companies that we were going to visit and I never really looked at the companies or studied them. I said that I would look at the businesses after I had met with them. If I met with a company and I saw something that looked interesting, then I would start doing research on them. And usually what I was doing is that when we were driving to the business, I would start asking Haidther, my friend, questions about the business. So I didn't appear total village idiot at the meeting, at least knew something about the business. The second year I visited Turkey in 2019, we were driving to this company and I started asking my friend questions about the company. He said, "Oh, the market cap is $15 million and the liquidation value is $800 million." I asked him if this was a fraud. He said, "No, it's not a fraud. It's a very simple basic company. They rent warehouses and I own the business. I have a stake in the business, etc." So, I asked him why it was so cheap. He said, "Well, everything in Turkey is cheap." And I had visited companies with him where the PE was 0.1, not PE of one, 0.1. The company is trading at 1 month's earnings. So, I had seen extreme stuff in Turkey. So, when he told me everything in Turkey is cheap, I kind of just shrugged. Yeah, he's right. Everything in Turkey is cheap because no one's interested. Currency is very unstable. Inflation is out of control. All of this stuff. I met the company's founders, the father and son who run it. They seemed like very smart business people. I went and visited the warehouses that afternoon. They looked spectacular. They were very prime. And exactly what he was saying, which is he said, "You could go to any commercial real estate broker in Istanbul, show them the portfolio, and they would tell you the portfolio is worth a billion dollars, and there's 200 million of debt, so it's worth 800 million, and the market cap is like 15 million." So then I was concerned because I was managing about 6 or 700 million. Then how much stock can I get? You know, it's such a small company. But Turkey is a market of gamblers with very high trading volume. Everyone buys stocks at 10:00 and they sell at 3:00 and they want to make 10%. That's their business model. Buy at 10:00, sell at 3:00, make 10%. Good luck with that. And Buffett has a quote that the stock market is a mechanism to transfer wealth from the active to the inactive. So when I started buying the RA shares, I saw that the volumes are extremely high. The average public company in Turkey cycles through its float every 17 days. Very high trading volumes because it's all gamblers and day traders. And for $8 million, I got one/ird of the company. And I bought some more. And I think now we have a little over 41% of the company. The market cap of the company now is $1.8 billion. So the 15 million market cap in 2019 is a 1.8 billion market cap in 2026. The Turkish LRA which was 5 L to the dollar in 2019 when I was buying is more than 48 LRA to the dollar. The LRA has collapsed. It's gone down by more than 90%. But in dollars, we have more than 120x return in seven years. What I did not realize when I was buying the business is I my plan was okay, it's worth 800 million. When it gets to 6700 million or something, we'll sell it. You know, from 15 million to 600 million is a pretty nice ride. And I was fully aware that Turkey has very high inflation and Turkey has very high very unstable currency being devalued a lot. But I remembered this story someone had told me once about the Coca-Cola company and someone said that let's say there's a global thermonuclear event. All the nukes owned by all the countries in the world are all set off. And out of 8 billion humans, 99% are dead and gone. And we have 80 million humans left. And everything's been decimated. And someone somewhere creates a coke bottling plant to start producing coke for his fellow 80 million citizens. And there is no currency or there's no currencies that used to exist. But people would be willing to trade 15 minutes of their labor for an 8 oz serving of Coke. So it doesn't matter if the currency is egg seashells or LRA or dollars or cigarettes. There will be a trade available for one cigarette for a Coke or something like that. So the coke business would come back to serve the 80 million regardless of the currencies. They'd figure out the currencies. And so when I looked at the Turkish warehouse business, I said, "What is a warehouse?" A warehouse is land, cement, steel, and concrete and some paint. That's what a warehouse is. Every one of those things is inflation indexed automatically. They can do whatever they want to the LRA. the land will just cost more LARA and the paint is going to cost more. It's going to naturally move because that's just the way the world is. It's going to move with the LRA. So to me, when I'm buying a prime warehouse in prime city of the world like Istanbul, it's automatically inflation indexed and whatever their rents were inflation indexed. So I did not have any concern. I specifically looked at businesses in Turkey where the currency is irrelevant and where the inflation is irrelevant. I said bring it on. Bring on a,000% a year of inflation. I am ready. Bring it on. You bring on whatever inflation you want because I have hard assets that I think will react and adjust accordingly. Now I made the bet and what I did not realize when I made the bet is that the father and son who ran this business were exceptional capital allocators. They do not invest capital if they do not see a return in dollars or euros and that all their money comes back in two or three years. They have a very simple way of think thinking about things. If the return on investment is not more than 25 to 35% a year in dollars or euros, they're not interested. So what was a business that was worth 800 million in 2019 is now worth 3 billion. And again, I can do the same math. I go to a broker in Istanbul, show the portfolio, they're going to say, this portfolio is worth like 3.4 billion and there's 400 million of debt. So the market cap is 1.8 billion. The liquidation value is 3 billion and that 3 billion liquidation value is compounding at let's call it 15 to 25 to 30% a year. So we had a trip to the pie counter. We had the first trip to the pie counter which was micron and on the way back the pie got dropped on the floor and it was no longer eatable. we were only able to get a double return on the money and the rest of the pie was eaten up by, you know, or just kind of swept up in the garbage, whatever. But then there was a second trip to the pie counter. And so what am I supposed to do with RAS in Turkey? What I'm supposed to do is spend all my time talking to the students at the Copenhagen Business School. Leave the RAS position alone. Like Charlie says, do not interrupt compounding unnecessarily. Now I manage a little more than 1.4 billion. The RAS position is like 500 million or something. 500 550 million something like that. And there's a few other irons in the fire that I don't think are going to zero. But my main job description is to not do any trades, to just sit there and watch the pie. And next month I'm going to Istanbul. I go to Istanbul once a year in September or October and I meet with the founders of Rayas. They own 44% of the company. My investors and I own 41% of the company. I tell them this is our family business. Your family and my family. I know we didn't start off as business partners. I know that you are the founder and we have subsequently bought in and I tell them we don't want any board seats. I don't need to tell you anything because anything I tell you about how to run the business would make the business worse because I am so stupid at everything and you are so good at everything. So we go eat bluefish at a Michelin starred restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus. It's a very nice dinner. And I pat them on the back and I say, "Keep doing what you're doing and I'll see you next year." And that's my job description. So basically, we're done. I hope they stay in the saddle and I hope they run that business for 20, 30, 40 years or more. And recently, I've noticed that the son is been bringing his 11year-old son to various business meetings. I said amen. Let's get the next generation ready so that after 40 years the compounding can continue. Next question. >> Interesting. And so we have a question from uh V Hansen who's also a member of the investment club. His question is uh one of your most recent investments is Kaspi in Kazakhstan. uh which appears to be an exceptional business with a strong management team, high growth except excellent margins and a monopoly like competitive position. Uh comparable business in the US would or in the western Europe might trade at more like 30 times earning whereas Casp is trading at uh around nine times trailing earnings uh largely reflecting the geographic exposure into Kazakhstan. Um, could you briefly introduce the company for those unfamiliar with it and how do you assess company risk premium embedded in its valuation both in Kazakhstan specifically and what when uh investing in emerging markets like Turkey uh in general? >> We talked about the Nifty50 and we talked about the 50 bets and we talked about being ripped van winkle and just going to sleep for 20 years. So the situation with Caspie is there are two or three Harvard Business School case studies on the founder of Caspie. If you go on the HBS publishing website and you give them like 12 or $13, you can buy those case studies. And I won't tell HBS if you make copies for all of yourself and violate their rules of use. That's just between us girls. So you can download those cases for $102, maybe $40 spent in total. You would get history of the man who is the founder of Caspie and you can also look at the track record of the founder of Caspie from just studying the company what they've done and what they've accomplished is remarkable. It's so such an outlier extreme result and it's a great story actually if you read those HPS cases. is he took a failing bank and he converted it into a happening fintech. They have 15 million or so users in Kazakhstan out of a population of about 20 million. They pretty much are a monopoly dominant player like 10 cent is in China. And there was a recent interview on YouTube. I mean if you go on YouTube or you go to god Google you can pull up some interviews he's given and he wants to get to 100 million users. So he's entered the Turkish market and I think the company he bought they have like 10 million users etc. He also bought a bank in Turkey. So they're trying to kind of replicate the playbook and it seems that when I look at his 100 million number which he may or may not get to he plans to replicate this in multiple countries not just Turkey. So we don't know what the trajectory is. We just know that the guy has a good track record. The guy's got an exceptional track record etc. The company is relatively cheap based on current what's currently in place and there is a moonshot. We don't know whether the moonshot happens or doesn't happen. Doesn't matter. We just throw it in the pie. We have an investment in a company in Turkey which is like the Costco of Turkey. That's almost like a venture investment. They only have two stores. We don't have a lot of treadmarks. But I met the guy who runs it and I was blown away. And I visited the stores that he's running the two stores and I'm blown away and the economics of those stores and how mobbed they are with customers with no parking and everything like they opened the second store. It was just went bananas. I said, "Okay, let's make a bet on this guy because it was really cheap at that time. They had 70 million of extra real estate and the market cap was 70 million. Like the business was free. We own like over 30% of that business now. So I don't know what happens with Caspie and I don't know what happens with Turkish Costco and I also don't know what happens with RAS in the future. But we make these bets they seem to be asymmetric bets. If all of them work then Monish is going to be on different planet but even if some of them work or even one of them works we're okay. So we keep looking for needles and hay stacks and every one or two years 3 years we might find one two or three things and we'll see if it worthwhile to make a bet. So that's the situation. >> Very interesting. My next question is how do you think about uh position sizing? >> Position sizing question is a great question. When we look at the Walton family which had 46% of Walmart when Walmart went public and something like 99% of their net worth in Walmart from then till now a number of helpers went to the Walton family and they told them dear Mr. and Mrs. Walton, all the kids of Sam Walton who own the stock. You are extremely concentrated in one company. It is extremely risky. Let us put together an asset allocation plan for you that will diversify your holdings. The Walton family told them very politely to off and they just kept their shares. And Walmart gives a dividend. you know the dividend might be like six 7 billion a year 5 to 7 billion a year or something I don't know some kind of dividend like that they end up with 2 three billion a year in dividends it's enough to live on you know one can live on about three billion a year if you have three four brothers and sisters if you go to Benton Bentonville Arkansas which I would highly recommend as a place to go on vacation the Walton family has dumped money into various civil projects in Bentonville, Arkansas, in Northwest Arkansas. And they've transformed the place. Amazing bike paths, incredible museums that go toe-to-toe with the best museums in the world, you know, walking paths, all this, you know, infrastructure for the community to enjoy, parks, soccer fields, whatever else. They've transformed the place. The billions of dollars have gone into Bentville, Arkansas. I wish I lived there. When I grow up, hopefully I'll be living in Bentonville, Arkansas without ever having ever having owned a share of Walmart stock. So basically, the Walton family decided we don't need to diversify. Now we come to Babry Funds and we have like three stocks in Turkey that make up like 65 or 70% of the funds I manage. And these are not my funds. I have investors. So I tell my investors, dear investors, Monish is not going to sell any of these things. He is not going to diversify. In the end, if things work out properly, 95% may be RAS. Raas may be a 20 billion market cap and we may have 8 billion in RAS out of 9 or 10 billion in assets at some point. Maybe hopefully. So we're not going to be selling an undervalued asset just so that we are kind of diversified. So I said you're dealing with a nut case and let me explain to you how you should deal with the nutcase. So I said if you have less than 20% of your total net worth with me, you have nothing to worry about because what that means is you have no more than 10% of your net worth in one particular company and 80% is outside of me. So, I can't make you poor. Even if I tried, I can't. And if you have more than 20% with me, you can sell, you can redeem some of your interest and take it down to 20%. And I send this note to them every quarter just in case they forgot to read it one quarter. And I have like 300 families invested with me. I get no phone calls. I get no emails. I get no pulse. They all seem to be extremely happy. and I get no redemption requests. This is the way life is. If you go into the investment business and after 20 or 30 years in the investment business, if 90% of your portfolio is not in one stock, you have badly up. Let's continue. >> I see that uh a very big part of your public ETF as a large bet on constellation software companies, the spin-offs also. So, what do you see in those companies that you think the market is missing? Again, these are just like the Caspie and other bets in the sense that we don't know what's going to happen. Okay, we like the DNA. Constellation has a long track record one can look at. Mark Leonard is a one-of-a-kind leader who's transferred his DNA to the companies. They are exceptional capital allocators. I think that will continue in the future. After the AI threat, the stock got taken out back and shot. And when it got taken out back and shot, I got interested because now it was relatively cheap versus where it had been historically trading. So we make the bet just like we make the Caspie bet and the Turkish Costco bet. And we don't know, you know, we make these bets which ones work, how well they work, which ones don't work. The most important thing is set it and forget it. Don't make any changes. just sit there and let them do their thing and that's it. >> I see we have a question from Jakob Wil. >> Yeah. So I'm joining you here from Frankfurt and I wanted to ask you about the RA RA. So I see that you in last quarter you actually sold around 21 million shares and you have spoken a lot about it now. So I really wanted to hear now that you are an established investor. So when people see you invest in a in a company in an emerging market, do you not think that part of the difference in the gain afterwards is also other investors thinking that you have a good like history? So they will also put the money into the stock that you have chosen and then maybe why you decided to sell a bit of your position here now. >> Well, Raas has two companies. There's a holding company Raas Logistics and there is a REIT called Raas REIT. We used to own almost 33% of REAS Logistics, the holding company. And the founding family kind of very subtly gave us a hint saying that look, we can't really officially tell you anything about your holdings, but we would be more comfortable if your stake in the holding company was kept to a maximum of 30%. And I said, "Do you care how much of the REIT we own?" They said, "Not at all. The holding company owns 62% of the REIT." So, whoever controls the holding company controls the REIT. So, we used to have about 33% of the holding company and a little less than 5% of the REIT. So, collectively, let's say 38%. And now we have 30% of the holding company and 11 odd% of the REIT. We actually increased our overall stake and tailgating that takes place that you're referring to. In the long run, stocks are weighing machines. They are not voting machines. We also have investments in other positions in Turkey and elsewhere where we don't have tailgating. So somehow the people think that this manager is good on investment A but maybe not so good on investment B. In my opinion, the RAS position going from 15 million to 1.8 billion is not tailgating. I think it is weighing machine. And it is weighing machine because now they can sell the business in 5 minutes at 3 billion if they want to. And that 3 billion is compounding at 15, 20, 25% a year. So in fact, from my point of view, the weighing machine hasn't fully kicked in. So I believe that a business like Raas should not be valued at liquidation value of 3 billion. It should be valued at a premium to liquidation value because there is a compounding engine built in. If business is compounding has shown historic compounding at you know 15 20 25% a year for a very long period of time and the asset is worth 3 billion an investor coming in should be willing to come in at 3.5 billion if they believe that compounding will continue or 4 billion so in my opinion rayas is deeply undervalued and also one of the things I'm I'm very grateful about is that I mentioned that a business should not be sold hold until it is egregiously overvalued and I hope and pray that RSAS never gets egregiously overvalued because what would happen then is compounding would get interrupted which is terrible. So for example, let's say for example RSAS has a 3 billion value and let's say the market value tomorrow goes to 8 billion for example. In my opinion that is egregious. Okay, that is clearly in egregious territory. But I also know that if the son is 41 years old, if he's allowed to run this thing for 30 or 40 years compounding at 15 20% a year, the value of that business may be well beyond 8 billion in that period of time. It's possible to be 20 30 40 billion and we sell at 8 billion, we pay taxes and then we got to find something else. Okay? So I think it would be a terrible outcome. So actually with RAS what has happened is it has become very clear to me that God truly loves me because what God has done is he's kept the value below liquidation value. When it's below liquidation value is the easiest stock to hold. Right? I think the Walton family holding Walmart has a difficult job because they look at a stock that it's at trailing earnings of 25. Is that undervalued? I'm not sure. Is it overvalued? Maybe. Is it fairly valued? Maybe. I don't know where it is. You know what I'm saying? It's a harder thing to value. This has been so easy to hold for 7 years because it's always been below liquidation value. And I hope it always stays there because if it's liquidation value goes to 5 billion, the market cap is 3 billion. What do I do? Oh, just keep it. Liquidation value 10 billion, market cap 7 billion. Oh, just keep it. Okay. So, I hope it doesn't go the other way because it's the easiest thing to keep. So, that's how I think about the business and I don't think the market is really driven by the cailers and all that. In the end, it's a weighing machine. Thank you Mish. Uh we have one last question from Anthony. >> First thank you for taking uh your time to speak with us. I think uh my question is basically predicated as you say the long run returns should equate the return to the business earns itself and to get better at you know finding these cost codes. I think it goes to also getting better at understanding these return dynamics. So we could be quite interesting to hear your perspective on how you look at return on capital especially on the incremental level. I think in a good example is uh one of my good friends here as well Miguel would be looking at this company that we think is doing about 50% return on the capital has deployed and they're reinvesting about half of that. So so that math they should be growing at maybe 20%. But when we look at the hub business itself we think it's growing probably closer to high single digits or low low double digits. uh and that obviously you know creates a difference in you know expected growth rate compared to what they're doing indicating that either we have overestimated the returns or that the incremental level is much lower but we don't see a clear business reason for why that should be occurring. So be quite interesting to hear how you think about and how you approach you know understanding the underlying business economics and also how you try to look at it from an incremental perspective which is really where the you know the compounding aspect kicks in. Well, I think that if a business is within your circle of competence, then it should be very obvious to you how that business works and it should also be very obvious to you what kind of returns are coming out of the capital that's going into the business like the retained earnings are being redeployed. What is the end result of those retained earnings on the business? And of course, things don't go in a straight line and there can be mistakes and things. So, you have to look at this over some period of time. When I look at a company like Graas, I look at individual deals they've done and individual things they've done and how they think about it. It's been truly exceptional in the sense that the error rates they've had are almost close to zero. Like I've really not been able to find situations where they've outright lost a lot of money or made a dumb bet or whatever else. And on the other hand, there deal after deal after deal where the returns on equity are 25 to 35%. And we've also seen how the business has compounded value like the value of the business has gone from 800 million to three billion over a period of seven years. So that is a healthy rate of compounding over that period. So I would say that when we look at a business like Caspie, you know it's a digital business. The founders they own like 45% of the company something 43 44%. They've created a lot of value. They're pumping out high dividends. They're investing in growth all of that. I think those guys are very smart operators and I think that if the bets work the returns are going to come out and all fine. So I think that at the end of the day when you look at these companies you cannot take what the company is saying that we generate X return Y return. You have to do your own analysis based on the trailing numbers and seeing what you are seeing. I think what you are seeing in those financials will give you a real view. Now if you look at a business like Amazon what Jeff Bezos was doing right from the beginning and even now reinvesting ahead of the curve in a very major way. So the Amazon financials and he wasn't very forthcoming about what he was doing you know his partially for comparative reasons etc. So what you would see with Amazon was almost no net income. You know for more than the 10 first 10 15 20 years they had almost no net income and the company Jeff knew was making money but he was reinvesting at a very aggressive rate and he was also making a lot of small bets where if the bet didn't work it was irrelevant but it would work it was a big deal. So when you looked at financials for a company like Amazon from the financials you would not be able to figure out that this is a truly exceptional business. It became visible over time when those bets started paying off and he couldn't keep them under the radar. So eventually AWS came out over the radar and started to go but they're continuing to invest. So I think we're not always going to be able to look at the financials of a business and be able to figure out what's going on if that business is prudently carefully investing ahead of the curve and they're investing in a my rate of businesses outside their core business. But you know it's a good journey and the good news is we in a business with high error rate. So you know if you make each bet a 10% bet and you make 10 bets at the end of the day you just need one of them to work really well. That's a great place to be. >> Cool. Thank you, Mish. Uh I can see that we are running out of time. I know you've spent a lot of time with Charlie Mer. I would like to know like um what is the mo lesson you've learned from him that has has the most impact on your life? >> Well, I think both Charlie and Warren are friends. Charlie is a much closer friend than Warren or was a much closer friend than Warren is because we were in the same city. And I think with both men, the body of work that they have in the public domain is so vast that we can learn tremendous amounts from them without ever interacting with them, which is awesome, you know. So, we don't need to have a relationship with him. The things I learned from Charlie, most of the things I learned from Charlie were not things he said to me. They were things I learned from observing him. observing how he was interacting with his kids, his grandkids, his daughter-in-law, his manservant, his business partners, his friends, and so on. And just seeing how he lived his life, you know, on a day-to-day basis, kind of I'd go to his place and just see how he's kind of living his life. And there were tremendous amounts of lessons that I learned from Charlie on that. I mean, like I would notice, for example, the belt, the belt that Charlie wore on his waist had been worn out more than 10 or 15 years ago. It was a very worn out belt. It had gone well past its life. The guy is a multi-billionaire. He could easily buy another belt, but it was not relevant to him. You know, I'd go see him and he's wearing a Costco flannel shirt. You can buy those shirts at Costco for $10. Okay? And I'd ask him about that. He loved those shirts. Okay. So, I saw a person who was very wealthy who didn't see any reason to frivolously use his wealth. And you know, Buffett said that eventually they were able to convince Charlie to get a share of netjets. He said Buffett said it was a very tough sale to get Charlie to buy into NetJets, okay, for private private flying. And I talked to Charlie about that. And I said, "Charlie, you know, you've talked to me about how you love being in Southwest Airlines middle seat and coach in the back of the plane. Doesn't bother him at all." And he's a big guy. He says, "You know, Monish, I was fishing in Costa Rica and at the end of the trip, I was going to fly back and I had commercial flight tickets and I had a headache. I had a bad headache." So he said, "I called NetJets." He said, $80,000 later, I was home. So he decided that it would be higher quality of life for him at that point to ignore the commercial flying he was going to do and just take that jet straight home because he was just had a headache and so on. So I thought that was a very prudent use of money by him and not buying the belt was also a very prudent use of money. It didn't make any difference to him. So I it was interesting just to calibrate kind of how he thought about expenditures and money and so on. >> Cool. Thank you Mish. Uh >> all right we I wish you all the best and I hope you have a good time and please pursue looking for needles in haststacks. If you find the right needle your entire life trajectory of you and your entire future gene pool is changed permanently. All the bulls. >> You too. >> Yeah. See you. All right.