About MBI
MBI is the abbreviation for “Mostly Borrowed Ideas”, which is my pseudonym on Twitter.
Why “Mostly Borrowed Ideas?”
As a generalist, I do not have a background in any particular sector. I enjoy navigating across industries, businesses, and countries to learn, understand, and connect the dots. In any case, most ideas and innovations are incremental in nature. Very few of us are smart enough to come up with truly original or groundbreaking ideas.
I have background of working in the sell-side (outside the US) and in a long-only buy-side (US) shop before starting MBI Deep Dives. I also did my MBA, CFA, and FRM.... yes, people from South Asian background have this strange fascination with credentials and I humbly succumbed to that stereotype. Of course, the market does not care about anyone’s credentials. I could add two more certificates and could still be a terrible investor.
What can you expect from MBI Deep Dives?
You should expect one email everyday on companies I follow or/and content I find interesting. I also publish one Deep Dive on a publicly listed company every month. I will pick a company that I am curious about. I will spend hours on the company going through my research process. I will build financial model to get a better sense of the sensitivity of variables and expectations embedded in the stock price. You can explore my approach to valuation here. Finally, I will write a detailed piece on the business. You can find all the past Deep Dives here.
I disclose my portfolio everyday on my daily emails. But if you want to subscribe to my website to receive just hot stock ideas, I will discourage you to subscribe to my work. My objective is to understand, analyze, and write about businesses. In some cases, after spending weeks on the business, I will conclude I am not comfortable with this business, and I want to write to explain why. Sometimes, the business can be great, but the valuation is perhaps too rich to my taste. I do believe errors of omission is far more expensive than errors of commission. One of the reasons I want to write on ideas I am not bullish about is to document my thought process in detail and then build a Bayesian mindset to track these companies. Perhaps I will change my mind at some point as new information comes along.
I believe it is impossible to find one great stock every month. So it is possible that in the next 12 months, I may only be “long” in 3 out of 12 stocks I will write about. As an individual investor, I do not want to have a portfolio of 40 stocks. Ideally, my ceiling in terms of number of stocks is 20 and the floor can be as low as 10.
If you subscribe, I promise you to provide in-depth research on companies without the typical sell-side biases (e.g. 80-90% “Buy” recommendations). You will also receive the downloadable detailed excel model in which you can change the assumptions to fit your narrative.
As a generalist, I constantly feel I do not know enough. If you have expertise on a company I have already written or will write in future, please feel free to share your opinion.
If you think I am wrong, you are probably right and don’t hesitate to contact me and leave me feedback. Although I have been investing since 2013, I am deeply aware of the fact that I have not experienced any prolonged recession. It takes years and perhaps decades to evaluate an analyst or investor just how good he/she actually is across the market cycle. I will try my absolute best to produce high quality research and ideas that survive the test of time. But only time will tell.