It’s a pleasure to share with you an audio program on Mohnish Pabrai, managing partner of Pabrai Investment Funds and chairman of Dhandho Holdings. Each program in our Great Investors podcast series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, drawn from MOI Global’s archive of interviews and conference sessions and from the investor’s published work. We make these programs so that members can learn how a great investor thinks and works, through the decisions he made and what he said about them at the time. Your feedback on what was useful, and on which investors to cover next, shapes what we produce. We start with who he is:
Mohnish Pabrai grew up in a suburb of Mumbai. His father started, grew, sold or shut down well over twenty ventures in forty-two years. He came to the United States around 1983 and took a degree in computer engineering. In 1990 he started TransTech, an information technology services firm, with his retirement savings and credit cards. On July 1, 1999, he started Pabrai Funds with eight friends as its first partners, on a legal structure copied from one book chapter about the Buffett Partnership. Dakshana, the foundation he co-founded in 2005, coaches its scholars for the entrance exam of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
He calls himself a shameless cloner. He watches what Buffett, David Einhorn and Ted Weschler do and tries to reverse-engineer what they saw. He noticed that Berkshire Hathaway owned General Motors and forgot it in about five seconds, because he hated the auto business. Then, flipping through The Manual of Ideas, he saw that Einhorn owned it too, drilled into the company to learn why, and bought GM and then Fiat. At his April 2026 annual meeting a partner said he looked more like a trailblazer. “If you go through my portfolio, it is a trailblazing portfolio, but I am sorry to disappoint you, it is all a cloned portfolio.”
Dhandho, as he applies it to investing, starts with downside protection. He credits the phrase heads I win, tails I don’t lose much to his friend Amar Bhidé. His case is Ipsco, a steel tubing maker whose cash and two years of promised cash flow came to nearly the whole share price. The checklist dates from the fourth quarter of 2008, built the way aviation studies crashes, from other investors’ mistakes and his own. By January 2014 it had about 97 questions, and its first section, on leverage, held the most failures. The big bets are few because the anomalies are few; that January he said it was approaching nineteen months since his last new idea.
The program opens at the Best Ideas conference in January 2014, with his checklist and the three red flags it raises on carmakers. It goes back to his father, who paid an astrologer for a bright picture of the future. It has the silver bubble of about 1980 that paid for his American education. It covers the June 2008 lunch with Warren Buffett, won at auction to say thank you, with Guy Spier at the table. It tells how Dakshana copied Anand Kumar’s Super 30. It ends with the 2020 turn toward compounders, the coal thesis, and the partner who asked whether the cloner label still fit.
Pabrai has spoken at MOI Global’s Best Ideas conference in 2014, 2021, 2023 and 2025, and 2018. MOI Global, which also hosts the Latticework summit, turned its Meet the Author Forum to The Dhandho Investor in 2019. At Best Ideas 2014 he opened with aviation and its checklists. In 2021 he said he was looking for compounding machines. In January 2025 his Best Ideas keynote made the coal case through CONSOL Energy. For more, see Mohnish Pabrai on His Coal Thesis and the Mental Model Behind It, which carries that keynote for Latticework members.
The complete program runs sixty-two minutes.
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Transcript
The transcript is available for download to members only.
