Emerging from a Year Long Sabbatical

Silence is the most powerful weapon – To
comprehend, reflect, reminisce, dream, energize and re-emerge.

The last one year was the most dramatically
beautiful and rewarding year for me.

Four of my dreams came true. And in addition a
miracle happened…..

Firstly

After 27 years in the corporate world, having
established some formidable brands in the hospitality industry at the helm of their
operations, I realised my dream to become a full-time finance entrepreneur at
the age of 45 – ‘on time’. Success and failures are the unavoidable crests and
troughs of life and one can live with these, but living with a regret of not
pursuing one’s dream is unpardonable. With this thought, I decided to pursue my
passion of Wealth Management a dream that I have protected and pursued fiercely
since I was 15.

Secondly

For a large part of last 2 decades, I had some
differences of opinion with my Dad. I shifted to Chandigarh – suffered a bit,
because I had to leave my wife and daughter alone in Bangalore, but spent a year with Dad and repaired all the emotional Balance Sheets of life. 2 Fathers
spending time with each other has an entirely different perspective rather than
a father and son. I spent the most beautiful few months with Dad, sharing a
drink, singing, learning to play the flute (he was a master flute player) and sadly
lost him to a sudden heart attack in Feb this year.

If I hadn’t mustered the courage to take
definite steps to spend time with him, and if birth and death are predestined,
I would have been living with the biggest regret for the rest of my life.

He was an exceptional human being and a very
talented craftsman and I have tried to capture his life in this obituary/ode for him.

Thirdly

We opened a new office of our AMC – MRG
Capital, in
Chandigarh in addition to Bangalore and partnered with Capt. Amar Bath. We discovered each other over a chance
coffee. Amar will be the catalyst of our growth in North India. One thing about
business alliances is the essentiality of congruence of aspirations, life
philosophy, speed, definitions of integrity and above all character. I have
rarely come across such a fine, low decibel and remarkably intelligent
professional.

Risk Management is an underappreciated yet
most essential element of Fund Management and while everyone talks about it,
human nature that manifests on the bedrock of greed chooses to ignore it again
and again – In life, in relationships, in investment styles because of an
inherent human nature to win every race. I realised that no one understands
risk management better than the Capt. of a ship – in this case Capt Amar, who
is transporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of gas/oil at cryogenic
temperatures in high seas.

Getting safely from point A to B with cargo
and crew is of far greater importance than to win a race. And that’s how we are
developing the personality of our company where our top priority is Capital
Protection of our clients, over relentless pursuit of generating alpha thereby
throwing caution to wind.

Fourthly

We secured a respectable line of credit /
equity from a US based company that will catalyze the success of our future
growth and help us catapult in the direction that we have always dreamt of
taking.

As a fund manager who has been entrusted to
manage and grow life savings of people, last 12 months have been rather noisy
and tempted me to opine on the narratives of some celebrated Fund Managers who
were professing the charade of BAAP (Buy at any price) and this time its
different, while we were quietly building portfolios for our clients while
sticking to the most commonsensical fundamentals of investing that have
survived the test of time and market cycles over decades.

Clichédly – as
Buffett says over a short period of time markets are voting machines and over a
long period of time they are weighing machines.

Its ironical that almost all fund managers
claim to be the disciples of Munger and Buffett and peddle their philosophies
as their own and end up doing exactly the opposite.

And lastly the miracle

Its was a rather stressful day in July of ’21,
when Gods Own Company, the celebrated ITC filed a defamation suit of 100 Cr
against me for writing a simple blog asking some pertinent questions, drawing
some efficiency comparisons with their peer group. For a middle-class person
who hasn’t had the luxury of working for companies that pay their executives top dollar for destroying shareholder wealth and thrive in inefficiencies, it was indeed stressful, causing a considerable financial and personal stress. 

But the fate and the macrocosm connived in a beautiful
manner that I was able to put up a formidable defense – even though at a huge personal cost. Am doing my best to counter ITC’s habitual and frivolous lawsuit habit (ITC keeps
filing these defamation cases against anyone who asks a difficult question) and all I can say is time is all powerful.

Good to be back – my dear friends. So many of You reached out
to me, checking on my welfare, health, extending help, encouraging me to write
and above all helping me in so many ways.

Will try and write a weekly now——–

And lastly – most of the people in the
financial markets must have absorbed most of the present data points such as –

• Markets have time and value corrected. They can only go up over a long period
  of time. As I post this, markets are already up 2000 points from their lows in
  no time.
• Corporate India has steadily grown during this
  time.
• Companies have stronger healthier Balance
  Sheets.
• Banking is in robust shape.
• NPA’s are declining.
• And we as a nation, are more positive and
  hopeful of the future than ever before.
• Investments must be made during extreme
  despair and misery when the economic indicators or externalities are predicting
  an economic doomsday.

BECAUSE

The world has only progressed, survived,
become more intelligent over generations and homo-sapiens evolve at an alarmingly
fast rate to tide over all the temporary vicissitudes of life to make the world
and species better.

About MRG Capital.

We have only 1 objective at MRG
Capital, Protect our
client’s wealth, avoid stupid mistakes and stick to sound and tested investment
rationales/philosophy. And Our asset management fees is one of the lowest in the
industry.

The real performance or the strength
of the fund/ PMS can only be gauged when the portfolios are compared in terms
of resilience shown by other portfolios during the downtrend.

Below is the snapshot of how our
different portfolios performed during the recent market crash,

Write to me at manu@mrgcapital.in for feedback, free portfolio advice (no
strings attached), suggestions for topics that you would like covered in future
articles or just about anything.

Our Services:

Portfolio Management Services:

We offer discretionary portfolio
management services with an aim to deliver respectable returns to our clients. Our
investment portfolio consists of stocks, fixed income, debt and cash and the
portfolio would be tailored to meet specific investment objectives of the
client.

We
have 3
investment products which are curated keeping client’s Age, Risk
profile and Tenure of Investment.

Note: As per SEBI guidelines the minimum investment amount is Rs
50L.

Advisory Services:

We use Smallcase as a platform to
provide Advisory services to our clients, It is a DIY platform where we
would only suggest investment ideas. The choice as well as the execution of the
investment decisions rest solely with the Investor. You can subscribe to Our
Core portfolios directly through your broker. If you have a broking account
through any one of these 11 brokers, setting up a smallcase account is just a 10 min job. You can buy / sell
multiple stocks with 1 click and the stocks you buy are held in Your existing
demat account. We have curated 3 baskets of stocks by keeping in mind the client’s Age, Risk profile and Tenure of Investment.

If you’d like to receive our newsletter / notes / financial updates,
please send ‘Subscribe Firstname’ to our whatsapp number http://wa.me/917829930000

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Definitions

Standard deviation: Portfolio returns go up or down on daily
basis due to the movements in the prices of their stock holdings. Standard
deviation tells you how much the portfolio returns over a period of time vary
from their average value. If the value is too high, that means the portfolio
returns are very volatile and risky to invest in