There have been many political, social and historical commentators on India such as Mark Tully, Shashi Tharoor, V S Naipaul and Ramachandra Guha. But very few popular books comment on India from an economic or financial standpoint (One that I can think of offhand is Gurcharan Das's India Unbound (2000) which provides an economic history of post-Independence India).
Rahul Saraogi's Investing in India: A Value Investor's Guide to the Biggest Untapped Opportunity in the World (2014) is a rare surprise that provides insights into the economic. financial and investor-related issues. While it is a book on value investing, it is not about business valuation. It does not talk about intrinsic value, discounted cash flow, financial statements or Excel models. As Saraogi mentions towards the end of the book: "I have seen investors and analysts take a great deal of comfort in their Excel models and their research. Excel models can only set expectations of the future and cannot predict the future. One cannot research the future; by definition, research can only be of the past."
What Saraogi attempts to do is explain why we Indians are "like this only" and use it as a basis to analyze company behaviour. For instance, he writes about Indian family values and the joint family system and sibling rivalry and then states that the feud among the Ambani brothers in 2004-05 was not unexpected. He says that the resulting split in the Reliance Group has been overall a good thing since it has unlocked huge value in the process and those who understood Indian culture well stood to gain.
Saraogi, to my relief, is not a socialist. He says categorically in the Preface: "I am a pure capitalist at heart, and my goal is to succeed and become wealthy in life. I am not ashamed of it and I state it up front. All my study, research, and work had a single motivation - the pursuit of an edge that would help me make more money."
Saraogi provides excellent case studies in governance, economy, finance and value investing which indeed lend insights into workings of various organizations and companies. His remarks on GST, for instance, were eye-opening and provided a new viewpoint for me. I cannot quite figure out what the Congress is trying to prove by opposing the GST bill that has been recently presented in the Rajya Sabha.
Rahul Saraogi's Investing in India: A Value Investor's Guide to the Biggest Untapped Opportunity in the World (2014) is a rare surprise that provides insights into the economic. financial and investor-related issues. While it is a book on value investing, it is not about business valuation. It does not talk about intrinsic value, discounted cash flow, financial statements or Excel models. As Saraogi mentions towards the end of the book: "I have seen investors and analysts take a great deal of comfort in their Excel models and their research. Excel models can only set expectations of the future and cannot predict the future. One cannot research the future; by definition, research can only be of the past."
What Saraogi attempts to do is explain why we Indians are "like this only" and use it as a basis to analyze company behaviour. For instance, he writes about Indian family values and the joint family system and sibling rivalry and then states that the feud among the Ambani brothers in 2004-05 was not unexpected. He says that the resulting split in the Reliance Group has been overall a good thing since it has unlocked huge value in the process and those who understood Indian culture well stood to gain.
Saraogi, to my relief, is not a socialist. He says categorically in the Preface: "I am a pure capitalist at heart, and my goal is to succeed and become wealthy in life. I am not ashamed of it and I state it up front. All my study, research, and work had a single motivation - the pursuit of an edge that would help me make more money."
Saraogi provides excellent case studies in governance, economy, finance and value investing which indeed lend insights into workings of various organizations and companies. His remarks on GST, for instance, were eye-opening and provided a new viewpoint for me. I cannot quite figure out what the Congress is trying to prove by opposing the GST bill that has been recently presented in the Rajya Sabha.
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