Contrarian Quality At Gqg Partners Rajiv Jain

TITLE: Contrarian Quality at GQG Partners – Rajiv Jain | Capital Allocators with Ted Seides CHANNEL: Capital Allocators with Ted Seides URL: https://youtu.be/CNZlSWkIhDk PUBLISHED: 2026-06-08

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The cumulative capex of all these mag companies in their history is $1 half trillion. Think about it. Now they’re talking about three trillion in just three years. So these business are created with not much capital. You’re spending a trillion dollars a year and the revenue on AI talk about maybe 70 80 billion. When Google went public, I remember it was 2004. They were worth 50 billion market cap, but they’re generating 700 million of free cash flow. Very cashated business. 20% plus operating margins. If you look at open air, an entropic, SpaceX, a whole different league. As the numbers start coming out then the realization will happen that how lopsided markets are and positioning. If you look at the profitability of the areas that they’re growing is far lower. Half or more of revenue is coming from OpenAI/anthropic. How in the world open invested trillion dollars when your revenue is maybe 20 billion. X.AI cash losses were give and take double digit billions 12 to 15 and their capacity relation on the colossus was 11%. Now they’re selling the capacity to entropic. Our view is that this is a powerful technology, but the economics are really bad and time is not a friend.

I’m Ted Sides and this is Capital Allocators.

My guest on today’s show is Rajiv Jain, the chairman and CIO of GQG Partners, a global equity manager he founded in 2016 that soared to 160 billion in assets, rebuffing the challenging decade for active managers. Our conversation covers Rajiv’s path from trading in India to his long tenure at Vontobel and founding of GQG. We discussed the periodic crisis lessons that shaped his approach, his definition of quality, team dynamics, and portfolio construction to avoid losses. We then turned to Rajiv’s contrarian views, including current significant positions in energy, utilities, steel, tobacco, and emerging markets, avoidance of hyperscalers and semiconductors, and nimbleness to change his mind.

[Knicks/NBA Finals intro and housekeeping notes: GQG’s “journalists” are former investigative journalists employed as non-traditional analysts who take the opposite view by default; GQG does not permit single-stock personal investing, though employees may invest in certain mutual funds including GQG-managed funds.]

Rajiv, thanks so much for doing this.

Thanks for having me, Ted. I’d love you to take me back on your early influences that got you involved in business. The earliest one was in high school during one of the summers, the 80s. There was a lot of things to keep you busy and I was in India. My dad was trying to keep me busy. In those days you get physical certificates, stock certificates. He had a portfolio and a few names. You get a dividend in mail check. Problem is sometimes they didn’t come in. So how do you match? That’s how I started tracking these things. I start trading in high school. Classic punting basically. Not much thought but trading.

How did you go from that to learning what these things were behind the pieces of paper? In college, I got heavily engaged. Ended up doing my undergrad and grad fairly quickly. I was 20 when I done my masters. I was very busy in trading in college. You had to go physically to a broker. I remember everybody was maybe 55, 60. The broker said, “I need to talk to your dad. What the hell are you doing here? Do you see people around you?” That’s when I started reading and learning the tricks of the trade.

What was the impetus for going through school that quickly? was keen on getting into the business. It almost was a nuisance factor. I need to do this because otherwise nobody would hire me. So that was more the driver rather than anything else.

How did you take that and turn it into a professional career? There was no industry as such in India at that point. I was in Delhi working for an export oriented firm doing the paperwork for them which was interesting experience because if you’re doing documents for exports you learn the drudgery of what proper paperwork means. I mean they’re literally dozens and dozens of bill of lading. He can’t have any mistake and you fill out precisely and the bank may reject for any given reason which was one of the biggest learning experience you forget as an analyst is that things have to be a little more precise manner than simply putting in a model or you grow at 15% next 5 years and we all live happily ever after. That’s when I thought about coming to us because there was no real industry at that point in India.

What was your first break? The first break was after I graduated from University of Miami. I didn’t know anybody in New York in the industry. Nobody in my family had come here to US. In fact, that’s the second time I sat on a plane when I came to US. I picked up the CFA directory and started cold calling people. I used to call senior people because I thought middle folks have no time for this. Answering a 24 25 year old kid was to Malcolm Clinger at Swiss Bank Corporation CIO. He picked up the call and he said, “Nobody calls me. So, what’s your story?” I said, “I’m seeking advice.” He said, “Okay, come over. I’ll meet you.” He said, “Okay, there might be an opportunity.” So that’s for the first break. But I call literally I would call hundreds of people.

What gave you the tenacity to do that? It’s hard to say. When I’m pushed in the corner, I get more fighting spirit. It was difficult. You had to buy a fax machine. You talk to people. Anybody somewhat interested, I have a spreadsheet to say interested chase up next. Not interested route. No point calling again. Difficult circumstances force you into that position. You just need a little bit of grit to keep pushing.

What was your first role in the industry? It was a classic buyside analyst doing modeling, calling up companies to get the annual report because there was no internet, no email in those days. Kind of basic blocking, tackling stuff, then building model and recommending stocks.

What was your path from there to learning how to invest? I’ve always been a very active investor personally. I’ve read enough by that. So literally anything, everything on investing I would read even during college. I knew enough lingo. Now you appreciate you didn’t really know much but you knew the lingo was there for a couple of years then there was this opportunity one of my bosses left and went to Vontobel and he said you want to come over which I thought was interesting in a context of it was much smaller firm nobody knew the place three people investment side and 15 total what I learned once I went there was they didn’t even have a trader it was learning while on the job I became a portfolio manager fairly early in ‘94 within 2 and 1/2 years small pool to be clear.

How would you describe your style back then. It’s evolved multiple times because I did not know where to start. I had a little bit of quantitative inclination. My feeling is that you’re always good to have some guardrails so it keeps you out of stupid stuff. I started with building quant. There was one element which I was young on which was cobbed on models. I used to vouch for that how wonderful those models are the best countries and look at the best stocks quantitatively. Martin Zweig Net Davis type of stuff. Then came 9697 the Asian crisis. I was co-managing EM fund. What I found was the top down didn’t work. The reason why it was okay performance-wise was because the bottom of the balance sheet kept me alive. Fundamentals were fine. But the top down didn’t work at all. I became a 100% bottom up investor after that. One crisis after the other. As I evolved over the years, it’s become where top down is a risk management tool and we use it heavily. It’s a switch off not switch on. It should help you reduce risk but not add risk. In other words, if Chinese growth is good and inflation is good, you don’t buy China because of that. You still need valuations and corporate earnings. If there’s a macro event, the war is a big one today. Maybe you want to be careful about the risk. If interest rates are going up, inflation is going up, what are the implications of that? Back test it. See if there’s any empirical evidence. We do have a heavy reliance on that quantitative development. If you don’t understand that basic math, it’ll be a roadkill. I have a strong belief in that.

Once you had that lens, what did you found you gravitated to bottom up in the late ’90s? Because it came from the quantitative side, what works and doesn’t work. The classic stuff Buffett and Peter Lynch, you sort of grasp that that bottom up understanding of business does matter. That becames the core of it. The top down element became heavy to nothing to maybe it should be a risk off rather than on and off switch.

That trajectory at Vontobel you start it’s 15 people some years later it’s much bigger than that what was your path along the way I became a portfolio manager for emerging markets in 1997 then co-manager for others in 1997 the timing was interesting because this was Jan ‘97 as you know Asian crisis was 6 months later which by the way for some reason I always had that interesting way of starting because when I joined Vontobel as a co-pm for emerging market that was October 31st was 1994. A month and a half later, there was tequila crisis. I didn’t really know what the hell was going on because the banks melted the disappeared and we had exposure. Then came the dot bubble. We didn’t fare well on some of the international and global book. EM did better. My boss left after the com bubble burst. I became CIO in January 2002 and quickly 75% of clients fired us. The quantitative came to my rescue in a way that what fundamentally quantitative look attractive. I remember 2002 we ended up making a big bet on South Korea because there were so many of these companies selling five times earnings like cosmetic companies and Amorepacific and Lotte Confection Lotte Chilsung in beverages because it took four five years after the Asian crisis and the earnings had come through the business had restructured but they were very cheap. They were these kind of bets but the business went down from a billion billion and a half to almost $250 $300 million.

What do you think at that point in time? Your boss leaves, assets are flooding out. Probably doesn’t look very good. That’s an understatement because most of the clients said, “How long will it take to mend the ship?” I remember one specific client out of Pennsylvania. That was the 70% remaining assets. So, it was an important meeting. Peter asked me, “How much time do you need?” I said, “A year and a half, 2 years.” He said, “Look, we don’t have that much time. We probably have 6 months.” I’ve always had this issue that if push in the corner my view is let’s see if there’s something and roll up the sleeves and get more active in that fighting spirits always keeps me going. It was a challenging period.

What did you do in the subsequent couple of years to resurrect the ship? It’s interesting because of the emerging market and far east Japan were the two products at that point. This is the early days of the Asian bull market. They had reasonably good performance which I was running going into that. So we got a lot of traction in those after I became the PM. almost two thirds of business in the next couple years was Asia and energy markets particularly Asia. Asia was more than half of our book that sort of gave the ability to basically pay the bills. Some of the clients would joke around that you have more products than analysts. There were two analysts and we had to restructure the team because we couldn’t afford the prior ones. I remember one instance where we had shortlisted a couple people to replace and one of the other folks who were involved in the hiring process said who would you hire between two? I said answer is simple. Who’s the cheaper one? because that was reality gave us the first leg of growth that gave the first base came from European clients, banks etc fund of fund business then institutions came later in US then slowly international took hold as the performance turned around and global there was one product after the other which had different cycles from 2002 to 2016.

Somewhere along the way you hit 2008 what happened in that particularly difficult period of time you always learn from mistakes we had significant banking exposure from 200 to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG in Europe, Anglo Irish Bank and all the large positions. I got nervous in early 2007. So we had exited all our banking exposure and fin exposure. However, we had a lot of energy. So very bullish on energy and commodity. The whole thesis about decoupling didn’t connect the dots at all. Come September market sold off almost double digits post Lehman. Within two weeks had fully recovered. I had too much energy exposure and that became disaster because that melted by October. I remember Shaj was down more than half in matter of like weeks. I view that at the end of the day relative is fine in an up market but over the long run if you don’t have absolute returns nobody needs you. You don’t pay bills with relative performance. In a bull market everybody thinks of relative but if you want a long-term survival you need an absolute orientation. That was an unhappy setup because I recognized the financial issues but didn’t connect the dots on the energy side that how significant impact would be across everywhere else but okay we obviously lost a lot of assets and we continue to grow from there on it was a huge lesson in terms of how it’ll ripple through for example if you look at today one thing is fascinating is that cyclical parts of markets have done the best I wouldn’t have predicted that Caterpillar would be selling at higher multiples than Intuitive Surgical. Abbott lab is selling at 14 times earnings and SAP is 14 15 times earnings and have Siemens at 28 times earnings. Rising inflation on top of that you have the biggest oil crisis almost ever. How much do you want to connect the dots? You could be very early. It’s better to be early than trying to time it. Once things find a catalyst, it happen. If you’re running any size and scale, you won’t be able to exit in timely manner.

How did the various challenging times impact how you adapted thinking about managing the portfolio? You want to make sure that there’s enough diversity of thinking in the team. You’re never on team that agrees with you 100%. Huge mistake because it simply will cheerlead you. That allows you to at least have the other diversity in my opinion. It’s the uncomfortable other. The biggest lesson 2008 was there plenty of articles in the press about the mortgage crisis. Remember there’s a business week article how toxic is a mortgage a year and a half before the crisis happened there’s a cover business week there plenty of articles of mortgage bubble Wall Street was in complete la land a went under and the lesson was let’s talk to the analyst journalists who were predicting this which was the starting point of hiring journalist now we have a equal amount of journalists and traditional analysts their job is to take the opposite view by default journalists are pretty good at that I’ve learned a lot hanging around with journalists half the team is journalists who basically criticize everything we do and their compensation is structured that way. Otherwise, if you structure the com where they agree, it’s wonderful, it works. Guess what’ll happen? They’ll agree with you. You want to structure the compensation where actually by default they cannot agree with you. They simply measured based on their calls over the long run. That was the biggest lesson. And since 2010 in months or here, we hired a group of people who essentially take the opposite side. By the way, it makes everybody very uncomfortable still to this day. If you’re bullish on a name and the other side says these are the negatives they would operate in context of former employees or regulators, former regulators.

Has you rebuilt this from these difficult times? What led you to leave and start GQG? You learn a lot in living through one crisis after the other. I didn’t think that way, but I feel that way more now that I was fortunate. I learned live through a lot of crisis in early days. If you’re running a US book in ’90s, it was one way speed till 2000 came along. Even emerging in 90s it’s a one disaster after the other 94 tequila crisis there was a mini Brazilian crisis in ‘95 then Turkish crisis then Russian collapse Asian crisis one after the other you learn a lot and build the team there business is fine but there’s always the desire to do something different number one is what would I do to build something a fresh was not motivated by money nothing wrong with that can I do different something better I’m a classic stock junkie people ask me about hobbies I don’t have any hobbies I don’t golf, never had a boat. It’s just a lot of fun. It’s a puzzle. Can we do something a fresh with a clean slate? Because when we start a client say, “What would you do different?” I said, “These are the positives that I would keep, but these are the negative that I will try to address.”

What were those positive or fine right in terms of core structure of the process? But for example, if you look at on the team side, I build out the team of fresh young folks and train them. Well, there’s one negative of that. If the team has grown just with you, are they going to think like you? What are the chances somebody’s lived with you 15 years is going to disagree with you? None. So when we launch, I said we’re going to hire. That’s why I don’t want to hire the same team again. First of all, I want to preserve their business cuz I felt like I built the cathedral. I don’t want to burn it down. From a client perspective is a little bit unfair cuz why should clients be impacted? And a lot of clients actually thanked. They said like it was poorly separation. So their business did fine for multiple years. I did tell my successor there. You’ll kick my ass or I’ll kick your ass but it’ll be fun competing. I don’t want to bring anybody else. The team side when we hired we hired a lot of folks from the long short world particularly folks who had experienced 10 15 years. Why? Because I thought what is the chance they will agree with me? None. First they’re coming from a hedge fund world. Number two is their 10 15 years experience. That was one of the biggest differences. Second thing was we don’t allow any personal trading here. Everybody has significant skin in the game. And understand people have sometime different views. I have had almost all of my net worth out of value GQG in the products that clients would consume. Same exact vehicles. There were a bunch of other things in terms of alignment. How we thought about fees for example fees. I think what’s the biggest problem in hedge funds if they charge too much. There’s only so much juice in the game. These are efficient market. This is not like ’70s Buffett can do whatever sitting reading Moody’s manual and pick up stock two times earnings. Those are long gone. fee should be below median because that ultimately impacts the net performance which is what determines whether we survive or don’t survive. Focus on performance only and do everything to enhance performance and that means lower the fees because it’s very hard to cut down fees later on because the organization is structured that way. It’s kind of like a Costco model manage with lower income rather than having the income that you can’t cut it afterwards.

on the team side which was the biggest change in terms of structuring the team. I’ll give another example the journalist. What I found was that they were super helpful but once you left the country you need cultural context. You can’t have an American journalist cover Brazil or China. We need to make sure we hire to cover those markets too. Somebody who has left who has lived there but have a American true independent journalism cuz a lot of these countries don’t have independent journalism. So you’re getting kind of nuanced stuff but I think the big thing was building the team up fresh massive alignment no personal trading keep the cost low and keep the team small the last one was separation of management of the business versus managing the investments cuz I was co-CEO at Vontobel at the end and CEO is different job I’m fortunate to have somebody Tim’s caliber I love to say that I have 20 people reporting to me and he has 220 so he runs the whole business which I think is important part of just to make sure so those are some of the lessons.

So you named the firm GQG, Global Quality Growth. What does quality mean to you as an investor? Quality is barriers to entry. If you look at this building here, there’s no real barriers to entry. The restaurant across the street can be taken down and new high-rise can come. But if this building was on the beach here, there are no commercial office space in Fort Lauderdale on the beach. That’ll be extremely valuable. So it becomes a high barrier to entry business. We are happy to own anything which has high barriers to entry. It could be steel in Europe. Cyclicality is not bad quality. Every business kind of has somewhat cyclicality. You go through regular cycles. In our opinion, barriers to entry is what truly differentiates what can you earn over the return on capital over the full cycle. The second part of quality is it should be forward-looking quality not backward-looking quality. If you look at the energy business, it has become far higher barrier to business than it used to be. If you look at the pipelines, how long does it take to get any approvals? You don’t have to go into Keystone but any other pipeline. It’s a much higher barrier to entry business than used to be. The tolls can last a lot longer than it used to be. If you look at software, the barriers to entry generally speaking are very low. Semiconductor industry, the barriers to entry are getting lower, not higher. Chinese are coming in a very aggressive way including into semicap site, equipment side, memory site. They’re ramping up capacity. That’s a far lower barrier to entry business than what people think. One of the big lessons investing is if Chinese are a competitor, be very careful because they will overproduce and kill you.

How do you marry the notion of quality is barriers to entry in something like energy which is also notoriously cyclical depending on the assets. Some of these are irreplaceable assets. If you have a big footprint in Brazil like Petro, those are not replaceable assets. They are profitable at $75 oil with a decent production growth of 2 to 3%. You can’t replicate those assets. Energy and commodities are particularly are those where it doesn’t matter till it matters. If you’re one mineral bell short, that’s the only thing you think of. You don’t think of semiconductor that way. There’s lower barrier to entry business too. In shale, there bunch of companies which don’t have that high quality assets. Shale depletes very rapidly to about 20 to 30%. So not everything would be high barrier to entry. The business that have long enough tail of producing and low enough cost could be attractive proposition versus something which is like software if you look at it. How many companies have survived in software business over 30 plus years? Microsoft is an exception and maybe Oracle it’s a low barrier to business. semiconductors used to be in our opinion it is not as high quality as it used to be because everybody is getting into the game.

How does management factor in to your assessment? If you go back the energy industry even if you have an irreplaceable asset there’s a big price fluctuation and in the boom times you have to trust management to reinvest capital the right way which has created all these booms and busts over time. Over the years, we began to appreciate how difficult it is to assess management quality. I probably meet a lot less management than I used to cuz I found that I’m not very good at it. You sort of were very good, but you riding the tailwind. Let the record talk others meet. So, we sort of differentiate again. And you don’t want to have everybody in the same meeting and everybody the same Kool-Aid. If I’m not met them, chance I’ll be more critical. When people say, “I met the CEO and oh, he’s so wonderful.” Okay, that should be the base. If he’s a good salesperson, you probably should be in agreement with whatever the CEO was saying. Management quality matters, but at the end of the day, numbers should still be the defining factor.

What are some of the areas where you’ve gravitated to as quality growth that other people might not put names in the same bucket? There’s a laundry list of them. It’s fascinating about semiconductors. Who would have predicted that the whole industry would be 12 30 time forward revenue? In 2022, we wrote a paper is software the new shale. In last month, we put almost 10 billion dollars to work in software. If you look at from the lens of what are the barriers to entry and is the outlook improving? If you look at steel, steel has become much more high barrier entry into business everywhere. Try set up a new steel plant in Europe. Good luck. Coal very difficult. You won’t get approval. Your grandkids might get approval. We are a truly equal opportunity investor. Almost everything is fair game unless they have client restrictions depending on the barrier and forward quality. Today for example in 12 months now we have almost nothing in semiconductors. We have almost nothing in tech. In last month or so we begin to get excited about enterprise software. Everybody feels the HR system would be wipe coded. Good luck with that. Significant energy exposure from time to time. And for 10 years we didn’t have any exposure for energy. bit opportunistic in that context in terms of because the barriers to entry some areas are actually going up and some areas are actually gone down dramatically. If you look at capital cycle it tells you where the longer return should be. So we let it drive that.

There are few people with the moniker of quality growth that aren’t invested in some way in some subset of the mag 7 today. would love to hear your rationale for moving away from that in the last couple years and what has been the golden age for AI. It’s been painful last 12 months. We had significant exposure over the years. Nvidia has been the single biggest winner at GQG’s history in terms of apps for profits. The problem we see is that the Mag 7 exception is Apple. I meeting the waterloo number one. They’re forced to invest in capex when they never had to. Google Ascore had $10 billion free cash flow clean that’s it that’s without the share buyback by the way they used to buy 50 $60 billion that’s out of the window they have no free cash to buy the capex is running at higher pace than the cloud revenue and cloud is a very low quality business now they’re 200 plus new cloud providers I’m coming now as a business owner we have checked prices and we begin to shift to other public cloud because it’s cheaper everybody has two cloud public cloud Cloud is 90% plus penetrator for large enterprises. So people say 17 18% which Amazon says like I don’t know what numbers you’re looking at. If you look at developed markets who’s not on cloud. The second thing is the capex is going through the roof. There’s no free cash flow. So the business quality is going lower but you’re forced to invest in capex. Number three is that if you look at the advertising driven model you’re running close to saturation. So you talked to for example a couple of largest consumer staple companies in last few weeks and they said look our digital advertising is almost 95 100% penetrated we’re not going to increase in fact we going to shift to point of sales more like Walmart type stuff advertising this trend has lasted a long time digital is almost 75% plus of the total advertising pool these companies are 90% plus of that and I don’t think so it’s going to go to 100 massive capex no free cash flow free cash flow multiples are like 100 times plus the stockbased compos conversation a huge issue. So they have to buy back stock. If you look at Nvidia, we reported the clean free cash flow was $25 billion. How do we get to that? Well, they invested $25 billion in new startups and other investments. Instead of capex, that is their capex. Nvidia invested over 50 plus of their customers in last 6 9 months. Nothing wrong with that, but the free cash is a lot lower. It’s a fantastic company with great management. That’s a classic. He’s a true visionary. There’s no question about it. And we big fans of Nvidia. However, the free cash flow is now going down because you are forced to spend this money to keep the demand going.

How do you think about the potential for return on those capex investments? It has to be lower than what people think because if you look at the tokens, they’re currently everybody’s bleeding. If you look at the pricing on GPU rentals, it’s barely covers the cost of GPUs by the way, let alone everything else. And everything else has gone up too. The returns will be good, but you have no pricing power, which is completely opposite what used to be the case. Apple is a unique animal. So, let’s leave Apple aside. But if you look at the returns on these, it has to be lower because before they were capitalized businesses, not compute heavy. If you look at Google, if they had not changed the depreciation policy, the margin would be high single digits operating margin. The margin went from 78% 23% after they change depreciation policy 3 years ago. The question is now this is debated how long they last who knows these are far lower return on capital businesses and Amazon for example the return on AI data center is far lower on one side you’re getting maturity on their core businesses on the other side you’re getting much more capital intensive business the cumulative capex of all these mag companies in their history is $1.5 trillion think about it now they’re talking about 3 trillion in just 3 years so these business are created with not much capital you’re spending spending a trillion dollars a year and the revenue on AI talk about maybe 70 80 billion that’s the revenue when Google went public I remember it was 2004 they were worth 50 billion market cap but they’re generating 700 million of free cash flow very cash generated business 20% plus operating margins if you look at open air anthropic spacex a whole different league as the numbers start coming out then the realization happened that how lopsided markets are and positioning if you look at the profitability of the areas that they’re growing is far lower. Half or more of revenue is coming from OpenAI/anthropic. How in the world open have invested trillion dollars when your revenue is maybe 20 billion? X.AI cash losses are give and take double digit billions 12 to 15 and their capacity relation on the Colossus was 11%. Now they’re selling the capacity to entropic. Our view is that this is a powerful technology but the economics are really bad and time is not a friend. So if you’re trading here doesn’t matter but the economics are not good economics.

under the idea of making sure you have diversity of thought on the team. That’s a sufficiently contrarian thought for a quality growth investor. I imagine you have some people on the team that don’t agree with that main thesis. What’s the dialogue like inside? This has been hotly debated and the debate has been around a few different things. Number one is the cloud the data isn’t there is that runway still there or not? Now we getting more clarity that more than half of the backlog hence probably the revenue too is coming from basically anthropic/ openai if you look at Google and Microsoft is more than half open AI. Amazon is more than half. So they invest with open AI but they essentially give them compute credits which are then utilized at Amazon. We don’t know for sure but that’s what we believe is going on. The debate has been around how durable is that and can this become a more profitable business. The third is around as the pricing of tokens begin to go up which it has. Does the demand sustain because the whole issue compute shortage kind of a non-starter. If Starbucks starts selling coffee at 25 cents, there’ll be shortage of Starbucks coffee. When you’re underpricing everything, if you look at Coreweave and Nebius, they’re bleeding heavily. That means they’re not covering the cost. The real test of shortage is when you price appropriately. It’s a capitalistic system. So when you subsidize something there will be shortage. There should be shortage. Those are things that there a lot of debate on. But I don’t think so there’s that much debate on longer term aid from a technology perspective also in context of that would it end tomorrow or last two more years.

How do you think about when you might reenter some of those names? We exited 2021 extremely underweight technology. Our view is that industry was overrunning. If you look at semiconductor etc. That turned out to be the right call. We reentered as we saw the impact of chat GPT in early days. So in 2023 we started entering some of these names again. So we have no issues getting back into these names. The question is there a true killer app? Number two is would enterprise truly shift to AI? Everybody’s trying it but trying it doesn’t mean there’s a true killer app because the real problem is hallucinations. That is not a small issue. These are probabilistic systems that hence the call language models. In an enterprise world, you can’t use a probabilistic system. As I think Lloyd Blankfein article in fortune, he said at Goldman, they were run parallel systems for years because these are real numbers. You can’t say oh it may be 80%. And they’re still running at 80 85%. You can’t get to that. And we have a whole team on that. And we still find the same thing. It is not as tight. Even on the programming side finding there a lot of hallucination problem. You have to sell a lot of guard rails to make sure you get to it. If you’re not a believer that’s going to destroy the world as much as folks are saying, if you look at the enterprise software, the companies are going fine. They’re trying to sell and position themselves as AI. I get that to to appease Wall Street. Last quarter of 2021, we wrote about Adobe specifically, which is funny now because that’s kind of a poster child of disruption. And we were simply talking about valuations at 50 times earnings or something. And here we are. It’s on a clean adjusted basis 10 times earnings and the business growing double digits. When we do any work, most the enterprise say we can’t get rid of this cuz there’s regulatory issues, there’s compliance issues, there’s socks issues. If somebody can lose their license if there’s a problem, for example, if you’re an architect, you have no choice. You have to use autocad products in the narrow niche. You can’t vibe code that stuff and say it’s out there in public domain. There’s a benefit of hype because it allows you to raise cheap capital to the system, but as an investor, you don’t have to own them. It’s painful, but the lesson always is you’re better off leaving early if you’re running as size because it’s hard to exit on the other side. Particularly when there’s so much of concentration, not only in public equities, private equity, private credit, you name it. Every which way, it’s lumped us together. Our view is that the risk is far greater, but there’s also opened up opportunities in other areas which are absurdly cheap for growing businesses.

What else are you saying you’re excited about? I think energy is a fantastic space because even if Hormuz opens tomorrow, it’s going to take some time. If you look at Qatar, they’ve already said that 20% of thereabouts of their LG facilities are down, they’ll take 3 to 5 years to fix them. That means that you can buy companies at double digit free cash flow yield at $75 $80 oil. We don’t see how it goes back to 70 and stays there. We don’t need $150 oil at $110 120 oil. You’re looking at 15 to 20% free cash yields. There are no management who wants to increase capacity. It is nothing to do with the outcome of the war. But even if you assume their opens tomorrow, most of the models are still assuming 75 bucks. The physical is trading at 110 120. We talked to so many oil companies said our realizations are running $10 to $20 in a lot of cases above what is trading in the futures market. If you look at jet fuel in Singapore is consistently traded at $150. Somebody’s going to make a lot of money.

What are some of the other areas you’re excited about? Utilities. Not simply because the AI, but the world has woefully underinvested in power infrastructure. Unregulated ones they’ve done very well. We used to own them. We don’t own them. But the regular utilities with Brazil, US, Europe, Asia, everybody has excluding China has underinvested. The demand continues surprise on the upside. You’re getting 6 to 8% some cases 9 10%. You can buy utilities in US with giving you 5 to 10 year visibility of 8 to 10% EPS growth. That’s faster than S&P. Last decade S&P grew at 8%. And there’s a very good period. I’m probably excluding the recent spike in memory prices leading to S&P earnings upgrades. That won’t last. Memories as cyclical as they come. Every cycle people say, “Oh, this time is different.” But look at the Chinese plans and the price demand destruction that’s already beginning to take hold. If you can buy 17 18 times with a 3 three and a half% dividend yield, you can compound double digits for a company that has highly visible 8% EPS growth.

when you’re looking at places where the market’s not necessarily agreeing with what you’re seeing. What’s an example of where you’ve done that and made a mistake? In summer of 2022, we started buying semiconductors and we had no exposures. I felt like great job and we walk on water. In October, this whole thing heated up between us and China restrictions and the stocks were in freefall. I got very nervous. We sold out. We must have sold literally at the lows. So we booked a loss and sold out. It was 10 15% of the book was not nothing. Semiconductors were not liked at that point. We went against that and we booked a loss and turned out this was weeks before the chat GPT came along and these talk took off. So we went back into them in March, April and said no no no the data is turning so we need to go back in. That’s one. The second one probably would be that I’ve not been a big fan of airlines. We own a few here and there nothing major at all in a long time. We start buying airlines in December of 2019 and like few percentage points of the company level. I remember one of our analysts who covered China actually said oh there’s this virus in China which is spreading in as dismissive then it spread a little more in Asia. I said look what is this like SARS so we started cutting back and we had to book our loss because it was going to enter in November December and January I said I don’t know how bad this is who knew this is going to be we cut our losses quickly on the airlines Delta specifically we bought energy and airlines because oil stocks we not own for 10 plus years at that point they had begun to show well on screens the cash cost gone down from 100 break even to 30 some of these names they’re selling attractive valuations little they know that was literally 6 months oil would be negative. So, you cut all loss. But that allowed us to flip around quickly in late 2020, early 21 cuz you already done the work. There is a benefit cuz you only learn if you own a stock. We can talk whole day about how wonderful the business is, but once you own it and once you’re underwater in that name, it sharpens your thinking quickly.

How do you counter the difficult behavioral biases that come from endowment effect of things when you own the name, sell it, and then that ability to flip and come back in? Some of this learned behavior in terms of not anchoring to your past as much. If I look at my long-term record, there’s not an area that I’ve not lost money in. You name it, every area over time. You also learn that there’s a benefit of if you lost money before, you’re probably better analyst now on that name. It becomes ingrained over time. So, I don’t have a issue flipping around at all. If I look at the long-term track record, I used to have a higher hit rate. The reason we consciously tried to lower the hit rate in last decade or so in GQG particularly versus Vontobel even on be to change that the reason was because when you have a high hit rate the problem is you have a high bar on what comes in so you also miss a lot of multibaggers for that reason you actually lower the hit rate because then you have a small position you know it is not doesn’t check all the box and everything yeah that’s wonderful but you also would miss the best idea is the one where it is a more doubt that means if I have doubt the world has doubt too. So if you lower the hit rate, that means you’re also taking more chances. Instead, early stage investing. If you’re an angel investor, there’s much more risk, but you probably have more home runs, multi-baggers potential. The payoff would be greater, but you can’t have a large position in that. Look at software today. We feel that it’s a very intriguing area. These established businesses, but 10 times earnings and folks feel they’re completely going out of business. There’s no sign of that. Not only that, they’re growing 20% in some cases and you can’t get rid of them even if you wanted to. We have some of the software companies. I would love to get rid of them. The users hate them, but they keep raising prices. We try to train an analyst. If you feel the data points are changing, bring it up. You can always go back in, which is why you only operate large liquid names. We make too many mistakes. Allows us to change our mind.

When you have as wide of a lens as you could on what constitutes quality that gets you excited, how do you filter into what you want to spend your time looking at? First of all, we don’t have any specialists even in the traditional analyst pool which is a classic buy side and the non-traditional non-traditional journalist basically and they go wherever on the traditional side I’m not a big fan of specialists because specialists at major inflection points are usually wrong if you’re not able to compare you don’t know what good or bad is our view is we look at multiple screens there’s a heavy quant element to that how do we get double digit expected return high single digit double digit 9 to 11% is my rule of thumb if you do the math which is what we did in Adobe at 50 times earnings if at 5 years out multiple is 20 times and be growing at 15% you’re not going to make any money now it’s a double digit free cash flow yield at 10 times earnings if no multiple expansion you’re going to compound at 10 11%. and business probably would be around. We’ve invested in tobacco in a big way. Cigarette volume has been declining at 78% in US and guess for last 5 years Altria has outperformed meta I think now Microsoft and Amazon last 5 years the cash generation matters we go wherever we feel we can get high single low double cumulative return even at the multiple sort of come down to historical normalized levels that’s why we don’t own any US banks large Wall Street money center banks they’re all trading at some of the highest valuations on a price to book or price to revenue in 25 years.

Each of these things you talked about sounds far more contrarian than consensus. I’m curious how you’ve worked with the people on your team to get them to think differently from others. I don’t like contrarism as such. I joke around that contrary is a deer that gets hunted first. It’s overrated. But at extremes, you have to lean away. I think for the team there are number of ways you could do it but one of the ways that are useful for me is allow people to make mistakes allow people to have different views from you. Usually there’s a tendency to clamping down the different views. If folks feel that you’re comfortable with airing different views or almost promoting it’s like yeah that’s fine. Let’s flip the whole argument. Over time people become comfortable. We don’t try to criticize investment mistakes. Most time you can see it. So we don’t penalize too much as long as you recognize and change your mind of whatever different way. You don’t want to speed up people simply because they’re investment law something. I do enough investment mistakes on my own. If you accept how they think particularly they’re thinking differently I think it brings the different opinion otherwise they won’t because people learn quickly by observing it doesn’t matter what I say they’ll observe.

I would love to hear what you go through in your analysis to get conviction in something that the market is telling you is quite different from your view. In a different decision-m perspective, we have a team of four portfolio managers. I have equal vote. I don’t have an extreme super. I have a veto, but I’d really use that veto. We don’t need consensus. One PM likes it and the analyst like it. It could be in the name. Obviously, we have to voice our concerns and gets documented. So, we track anything and everything. Tim would know how’s my stock picking been last 12 18 months versus others. So a lot of transparency in the system. What we try to see is who has a good record in that specific area. For example, somebody be very good at Spanish banks but for some reason have very bad record in Brazilian banks or US banks. There’s a difference. We track with everything and we spend a lot of time and effort building up the whole system and you keep refining that. Then it’s just the debates. We debate debate and more debate is every PM operates like a full-time analyst including me. The analyst has equal weight and we debate the hell out of every name and then see what is the weight of evidence and what the journalists are saying the journalists are extremely bearish on the AI stuff. Their view is there a lot of similarities with the mortgage crisis in terms of the amount of leverage involved even more bearish than traditional analyst and they talked about grassroot complete grassroots. We just debate it out and see, okay, this makes sense to have this name and this name. It’s all one-on-one conversations. There’s only one meeting we have a week. I’m not a big fan of having these big meetings. So, pick up the phone, call me, and I call them.

How do you go about making decisions? The PM we meet and we hash out what makes sense, doesn’t make sense, or on phone call. So, two PM may say, we’re completely out on this name, and the other two may decide, you know what? Okay, we both love this name and the analyst love this name, so it’ll get tracked based on their position. It’ll be this size in the book.

How do you figure out those position sizes? This is a cemented process part. What you talk about is the sizing should be based on how a credit analyst would think. You can’t have very large position in monoline business which operates a very narrow niche can’t do it. So if you think about how does S&P would give AAA it would never give AAA to an ENP company just can no diversity of their asset base geographically business lines but Exxon can get AAA so the small company or even a large company monoline can never be at our position the top sizing always has to be as a credit analyst would look at it can it be AAA so it is not based on purely on the conviction but much more on stability of the business. So you don’t blow up. Everything you try to do is just don’t blow up. What is not acceptable is market down 40 and we down 43 we outperform. It’s like no we think most like long short in a way. We can have very large position Exxon. We can’t have oxy which we really like but we can’t have a same size position because oxy is much more narrow operation much more risk.

How does the concept of thinking like a hedge fund that more absolute than relative return play its way into how you manage the portfolio? We do cut losses quickly. Shorting is difficult to make money off but it’s a good discipline in the long only world and I operate in long only world is to become lazy. This business fine long term we’ll all be okay because you can always find facts that support your opinion at that point. If the market is telling you you’re wrong, you got to think about if you look at last 12 months, argue has been yes, we have underperformed across all the books and I’ve underperformed more than this over my career. So this not the first rodeo as I say, but we haven’t lost money. So we still compound in mid- teens. Real crisis when you start losing money in down markets cuz you need to be able to compound at a higher base. It should permeate everything to reduce the risk of a blow up. Take more relative risk, which we do. We don’t try to take a lot of absolute risk.

How concentrated are the portfolios? There’s a long tale, but if you look at the US book is typically around 30 35 names. The top 10 would make up just about half of the book. That’s true for global and others too.

Would love your perspective on emerging markets where you started out. I’m probably one of the longest surviving managers now because I became copium in 1994. So it’s 30 plus years. Emerging markets are a massive category which is underappreciated. The indices are completely lopsided. I mean the four names now make up almost third of the index. If you look at emerging market index that’s like a leveraged version of semiconductor. You would not have 20% in memory names in US but you do have that in emerging market index. This is fascinating what’s happening. Otherwise if you look at some of these markets they become large economies on their own. If you look at Brazil is larger than Italy. These are huge systems now. So there’s a more G7 focused but the action in the other markets if you look at from a G20 versus a G7 is shifted away to G13 and not just China but India it’s a almost 4.5 trillion dollar GDP it’s a large system Indonesia large system and some of the larger banks in Indonesia are larger than European banks now nobody talks about them anymore but there’s a lot of action if you take a long-term view there’s quite attractive set of stuff very bullish in Brazil I can still find names like it is still 78 times earning the 7% dividend deal and that’s the only bank I know which has not earned 15% real return equity for 30 years I don’t know of any other bank family owned it’s almost 100 billion market cap it’s not a micro cap so you still find these kind of opportunities Petro which we owned in a big way in last 5 years when we bought it was 35% dividend deal it today 12% dividend deal $75 oil it’s six times earnings Why would you own Samsung which is as classic as it gets now everybody’s ramping up capacity? They never ring a bell in semiconductor industry and China is adding capacity in a big way. Just to be clear in August everybody thought there’s a massive blood. So in 6 months gone from massive blood to we sold out for years. We’ll find out there’s a lot of stuff in emerging markets which is quite interesting. Outside of these tech world there’s a real alpha opportunity and absolute compounding that can take place in emerging markets.

What’s changed in how you think about investing from your early days in the business? The biggest thing is that you begin to appreciate how little you know. You become humbler because the conviction level actually goes down. You begin to appreciate a lot more of having making sure that folks are constantly poking holes and have different opinion and debate. That’s a must if you want to survive. anybody in the business if you can’t internally that’s part of risk management if you ask me that’s probably the biggest realization avoid deep ideologies we had a biggest AI maybe we’ll have it again the valuations don’t make any sense plus there are far better risk return opportunities Exxon is almost similar market cap as AMD depending on the oil prices this year they generate probably 50 billion of clean free cash flow AMD will be lucky if they generate nine I’m sure it’s going to change the world but this guy would do 9 and That’s assumes oil at 75 bucks not 120 bucks at 120 bucks be careful AMD AMD is a fantastic business management and everything else but the math is just not working some of these be dogmatic about the math rather than dogmatic about our views as such but with a forward quality deep embedded ideologies is what is the most dangerous to think that big teams and super specialists is what is needed and they’ll do better 180 degree opposite view we are told PMS M/in invest everybody included is like 17 teams and we’re earning $160 billion. We want some turnover. Stability is fine but you want some turnover. You want fresh thinking from time to time. Small teams is where alpha is going to be. No PM should outsource oh super specialist. It’s a bad idea if you have too many specialism. Large teams it’s just not conducive to good alphas.

You mentioned being 160 billion today 10 years in from launching this. I’d love to learn about how you did that in a world where active management generally speaking has been under pressure to go from a new launch to significant scale in such a short period of time. It’s been a complete surprise. People used to ask me I said we have enough cash to survive for 3 to 4 years. So who knew a few things that have helped us quite a bit. We do have a fairly performance oriented culture. There’s quite a bit of passion everywhere you look at. We spend quite a bit of time building distribution which is to Tim’s credit from Australia to Europe to other places because the whole notion that we have great track record and people will come that doesn’t work that way a lot of money managers don’t have client servicing aspect in that we bend our back buttons from a client servicing perspective that’s just part of what we do all of that probably help besides the performance and core ethos of alignment etc the absolute orientation it doesn’t appeal to everybody we don’t launch multiple products four core products same process same team. It’s tight-knit group. All those things have help. It’s hard to say what exactly.

I’d love you to take me through what that distribution path looked like. We got a lot of support from consultants. I was pleasantly surprised because a lot of them had not underwritten before. They were the early adopters particularly endowments foundations and some of the consultants got new clients not the former clients that built the business initially. Then our wholesale/ retail business took over. If you look at historically over my career the periods of crisis have helped propelled us to the next level cuz that helps us differentiate. Covid helped us quite a bit because we navigated covid okay the differentiated positioning allowed us to stand out from the crowd from time to time there was a lot of client servicing that is essential ingredient of can the clients reach out and talk to us talk to me I do that all the time within months some of the young analysts would have client meetings why because it force them to learn this is who we are servicing it’s not some sitting on a high horse and we outperform and that’s wonderful and when performance is not good they get beaten up that’s part of the learning that they need to have too.

Somewhere along the way you decided to go public. Love to hear that story and the benefits and drawbacks. The obvious negatives of going public, but I thought when you’re in private partnership, there’s one tool missing of having a good structure on terms of compensation. If you look at the negatives of larger listed pairs is because there’s little insider ownership. So you held hostage to whatever the flavor is in Wall Street. That is not true in our case. 75% owned by insiders. Number one. Number two is that it gave us a effective tools for structuring compensation because if you look at the long only world one of the drawbacks of having private partnership is the senior partners who were the rain makers don’t leave how to infuse new blood cuz the income goes to zero as soon as you partners right you can structure different ways but this allows us to have our cake can eat it too because if somebody leaves they take their equity they can sell it to market if they want to or not in the meantime it allows us structure composition in so many meaningful ways so transition to the next generation if We have to transition according next generation is easy to structure this way. So I thought it solved a lot of different things. Why Australia? It funny because we had a good familiarity with Australia. Some of the earliest clients came from Australia. They were the same institutions. One of the reasons was they only report twice a year. I said that’ll be a lot less work. It’s going over here now. But I actually like that quarterly reporting doesn’t do much good. Transparency is fine but multiplies the work. Six month reporting is good enough in my opinion. I’m talking about as an investor cuz most of the world has 6 months anyway. Australia made it easy because we knew a lot of client base who are also possible investors. So we listed in 2021.

How’s that gone relative to your expectations? It’s done its job because it gave us a currency. Stock will do what it’ll do. But what we didn’t want to do was give a lot of equity at every level. Senior level, yes, but not at younger levels or folks who just joined the company cuz you don’t want everybody looking at stock price. Cash, which is cash. We were pretty thoughtful in terms of not making equity oriented then if the stock price goes down then we say oh what’s happening in the business it shouldn’t move the needle it has been super helpful in structuring compositions over the long run.

how have you thought about the benefits and drawbacks of the size of your asset base managing capital first of all size is always an anchor there’s no reason to believe otherwise however we have a wide open space if you look at the peers underperformance it wasn’t because we couldn’t move. It’s a conscious decision to not own tech. It’s not we ended up being underperforming. There’s a big difference. It’s a conscious decision to avoid semiconductors after being very big. 40% plus was tech not that long ago. So size is always an anchor but it’s ability to find right spots and we operate in large cap space. These are large liquid names. Mostly growth managers would not operate with that sort of wide landscape. Question is are you moving enough on right space where the alpha opportunity is? If you’ve narrowly pegged in one area, you just can’t outperform the full cycles. Cuz what if this is like ’70s? What if you get a 10-year bull market in energy and commodities, you have no game left? There was big hedge fund boom in the late ’60s. Most of them didn’t survive in the 70s because the game was on electronics and tech world and nifty50s that didn’t survive. Our view is that we need to have enough tools in the toolkit because the question is, do you want to move and maybe you make the wrong moves, but do you have the ability and the willingness to move?

Where do you want to take it all from here? Long-term vision is only one thing. Kickass performance. That’s what makes this fun. We want to attract people who are passionate about investing. If we deliver that, I think you’ll find fine. If you don’t deliver that, we have no reason to exist. This is the only business where you don’t need an average. Somebody needs an average phone. Somebody needs an average car. You do not need an average manager. Vanguard is happy to do for two base is above average. Anyway, if he can’t deliver above average performance, he’s not needed. It should permeate everywhere. Everything you do is simply on performance. It’s exciting because you’re setting up an environment where you know that long-terms will not be good. Maybe one year is good, two years, but the math is very powerful. The longer you go out, the return profile from these valuations and where interest rates are and people forget in 2010 you start with 10 times earnings from 25 times earnings maybe 30 depending on what values you look at 2000 2010 you lost 2/3 of Microsoft. It’s getting into fertile ground because everybody owns the same stuff from index to private equity to private credit mostly hedge funds too. private world is worse in a way and if you look at the valuation in some of those and I’ll give you the example of Figma which was hotly contested asset Adobe wanted it if you look at the chart gone straight line down 80 90% decline once it’s listed SpaceX is wonderful but 18 billion revenue and 5 billion loss the val trillion more power to you.

when you’re having conversations with your clients and have a view so different from the market that for at least a period of time now hasn’t hasn’t been in sync with what’s been moving. Where do you feel the pressures from those conversations both on you and the organization? There’s no question that stress builds up and maybe the stress is not a bad thing. Sometimes you need a little bit of stress. Vast majority of our clients understand what they’re buying into and it’s our job to ensure that they understand that they do take a lot of relative risk. We try not to take absolute risk. In last six odd months, we’ve had some redemptions. We still had net new money last year for ninth year. But we don’t measure success by asset growth. When we went public in my first letter as the largest shareholder of the company, I specifically wrote two things. We will never have AUM targets and we never have margin targets so that nobody’s confused. You can grow in the short run by doing other things, but you also start reducing the alpha opportunity in terms of how people think and behave. It’s my job to make sure that we stick to our core ethos which is why we doing what we’re doing that somebody’s retirement is at stake. Somebody’s kids are not going to college. I’ll tell you a story. There was a firm I knew. I went to see them in 2003 and they would let me go up to the fifth floor. I said like I can go up. Said no no you have to wait. They said armed guards. I asked the guards. Why do you armed guards? He said during the com they lost so much money they get death threats. There’s an element of not blowing up somebody’s retirement. As long as we stick to that, we’re fine. We’ll have asset outflows, inflows, all of that. That’s ebb and flow of any business. There’s cycles in everything. Hopefully, we attract the right kind of clients who think about the same way and we should be able to explain what we do, too. That binds the organization together. Quite a bit of camaraderie in terms of fighting spirits because this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. This is what we feel the markets are missing. This is what we’ve done and this is why we’ll do okay if the bad times do happen. Flip side is we’ll underperform. underperform is less of a problem than losing a shirt. The odds are stacking up of when cyclical businesses are selling at valuations which are even difficult to sustain from compounders. If I go back to the biggest lesson was some of the biggest losses that came in my book were the names that were cyclical and we paid high multiples on peak margins. I remember Japanese names which went from 5% operating margin to 25% margin and we paid 50 times earnings for that. Guess what? They went back to 5% margins and market want to pay 8, nine times for that. You lose their shirt. There’s a laundry list of names which are selling at high multiples. Good businesses, but they’re cyclical and the cycles are always there.

[Closing questions.]

What was your first paid job and what did you learn from it? My first paid job was working for a textile company which used to export in New Delhi. I used to help doing the export documentation. Oh boy, that is drudgery because you have dozens of documents and this is India. So complexity increases but I think just sitting down filling out the documents taking you to the bank and who criticizes you there’s a lot to be learned from doing those early days versus doing something which is exciting obviously I hated it then just to be clear trying to implement that in some of the early folks who come here making sure they go through a little bit of drudgery it’s just a context of how the world operates it’s not simply build a model of 20% growth forever and be all happy ever after.

what’s one thing you find interesting about you that most people don’t know. I’m happy to see counsel of almost anybody. I do feel that folks usually underappreciate wisdom that comes with age. For example, I talked to my dad who’s 87 at least two to three times a week. He doesn’t understand a business. But some of the obvious stuff, he gets it with age. For example, he was completely unhappy with me starting this business. Why would he start that? Perfect job, perfect everything, good record. Why would you do that? So, we don’t agree with all the time, but there’s a quite a bit of setup senior council. I would highly recommend anybody to talk to somebody who has some gray hair. Some things you only learn with age. You do not learn with anything else.

What’s your biggest investment pet peeve? Dogmatism. Deep ideologies. Growth will always work. Cheap being always work. Deep ideologies of dangers. I try to avoid those people because I know they’ll convince me with facts, right? Because they know all the facts. So you got to be careful. We try not to hire folks who are dogmatic. One things we like folk to say oh you know what this is where I wrong and I changed my mind year and review we always ask okay what are the areas where you change your mind obviously good thing to say change your mind and made money admitting mistakes this is where I change my mind it’s critical for long-term survival.

last one how’s your life turned out differently from how you expected it to I’ve been extremely fortunate I didn’t expect that not just financially but I get to paint the picture the way I wanted even at I had freedom to paint the picture I enjoy this game to be able to do something that you truly enjoy and have fun with it’s quite a privilege. It comes with the trials and tribulation, frustration and underperformance and all of that. It comes with territory. But if there was no stress, life would be too dull. If there’s nothing that pushes you, it’s actually not a good life cuz your failures would define you ultimately in terms of making strife or something. I feel very fortunate that I’ve had the ability to do this which I truly enjoy and spend the time with which is unusual and uncommon. So I’m grateful that I had that ability. I wouldn’t have predicted in a million years.

Rajiv, thanks so much for spending the time. We appreciate it. Thank you. It was great fun.