“Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.” - Charlie Munger.
This poster hangs in Pabrai’s office. It is a bet.
In October 2018 Mohnish told his friend Guy Spier to sell Mastercard. Guy had made twelve times his money on it. Mohnish thought that was the problem. Everybody knows Mastercard is a great business, so everybody pays up for it.
Sell it, he said. Buy Sunteck Realty, a Mumbai developer nobody had heard of.
Guy politely told him to get lost.
So Mohnish had the poster made. Mastercard at $204.22. Sunteck at 355 rupees. Twelve years. The bell rings on October 13, 2030. Eight years are gone. I looked up the score.
Mastercard closed at $552.26 last Friday. Up 170 percent, dividends not counted.
Sunteck closed at 281.55 rupees. Down 21 percent. The rupee fell too, so in dollars the loss is close to 40 percent.
Put $1 million on each side of the poster. Guy’s side is worth $2.7 million. Mohnish’s side is worth about $610,000.
Guy would be the last person to claim he is the better investor. He has been saying the opposite in public for more than ten years.
“The person who has influenced me most as an investor is Mohnish Pabrai.” - The Education of a Value Investor (2014)
“Mohnish Pabrai is a better investor than I am.” - MOI Global Q&A, summer 2015
“In a certain way, I learned more from Mohnish Pabrai than I learned from Warren Buffett.” - Interview with Tilman Versch, recorded in 2019
Guy also explained why. Mohnish has less fear. He can tell what is truly dangerous from what is only uncertain, and when he sees it, he bets big. In 2019 Guy put him on the short list of people he would trust with his own family’s money. But by Guy’s own account, the better investor is losing. Mohnish showed this poster to a room of students in 2019 and told them his plan for Sunteck.
“We just have to sit for a while and just watch the show.”
I kept coming back to that sentence, because sitting is the one thing I do not find in his SEC filings. A new stock usually stays there for about one year before it disappears. And some of the names that came and went are painful to look at today.
But what would have happened if he had never sold a single share?
Horsehead would still be in there. It went to zero.
So would Berkshire Hathaway, bought in 2011. So would Alphabet, which he owned in 2015. So would Ferrari, handed to him in a spin-off in 2016. So would Micron, bought in 2018.
I rebuilt that account from 69 quarterly filings. Every purchase at the prices of the quarter he bought. Then I let it sit until the end of 2025, zeros included, and put the same dollars into the S&P 500 on the same dates.
Nobody has published this number. I am not sure Mohnish has ever seen it.
