CIO: Thank you for giving us the time to talk to you.

Prof. Sanjay Bakshi: It's a pleasure to meet you here in my office. We are meeting after more than four years and I remember very fondly what happened on the previous occasion! Indeed I still get fan mails from people about the talk I delivered at your invitation at the Oxford Bookstore in 2002. I don't talk to the media. I talk to my students in the classroom at MDI (six months in a year) and I frequently talk to some value-oriented friends. You are the only one whom I have met from the media in the last four years!

CIO: Many thanks.

Prof. Sanjay Bakshi: So it's a pleasure to have you here and I just want to open up the presentation, which I had given to the invitees at Oxford Bookstore in 2002. This presentation was titled, "Value Investing - a Conservative Way to Invest." I had started by describing what is value investing and why the focus of conservative investor is first one not losing money than on making it (downside risk more important than upside potential) and then I gone on to the better part of the presentation, which essentially dealt with three value investing themes. These were: (1) Cash bargains; (2) Debt-capacity bargains; (3) Debt pay-down.

I only focused on these three themes in that presentation and gave a number of examples. Some were past examples whereas some others were current examples at the time of that talk. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now tell you that things have worked out pretty well for me professionally using those three themes.

But knowledge is incremental, especially in the profession of security analysis, and experience is a good teacher – so I have evolved over the years and there have been many changes in the way I think about investing. In my early years I was very influenced by Mr. Buffett. But over the last few years, I have become more influenced by Mr. Graham. Hopefully, today we will interpret Graham’s bible for this profession, the Security Analysis and of course the Intelligent Investor.

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