Mohnish Pabrai Quotes

102 Mohnish Pabrai Quotes (Pabrai Funds)

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Mistakes are the best teachers. One does not learn from success.
Mohnish Pabrai

It's easier to learn the lessons when you don't take the hits in your own portfolio. But when you take the hits in your own portfolio, those lessons stay with you for a long time.
Mohnish Pabrai

Life is a journey and the journey is the destination.
Mohnish Pabrai

Heads I win; tails, I don’t lose much.
Mohnish Pabrai

If there wasn’t a Warren Buffett, there wouldn’t be a Pabrai Funds… It is hard for me to overstate the influence Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have had on my thinking… I can never repay my debt to them for selflessly sharing priceless wisdom over the decades.
Mohnish Pabrai

Minimizing downside risk while maximizing the upside is a powerful concept.
Mohnish Pabrai

Take advantage of Wall Street’s handicap by seeking out low-risk, high-uncertainty bets.
Mohnish Pabrai

Rapidly changing industries are the enemy of the investor.
Mohnish Pabrai

Margin of Safety – Always!
Mohnish Pabrai

Fear and greed are very much fundamental to the human psyche.
Mohnish Pabrai



Buffett’s rule number one and rule number two are worth keeping front and center at all times. [Rule number 1: Don’t lose money. Rule number 2: don’t forget rule number one.]
Mohnish Pabrai

I have never made a phone call to any management of any of the companies I am an investor in. The way I see it, if they need my help, there is a problem.
Mohnish Pabrai

Investors always overshoot and undershoot.
Mohnish Pabrai

There is no such thing as a value trap. There are investing mistakes.
Mohnish Pabrai

You make money by waiting.
Mohnish Pabrai

The biggest, the single biggest advantage a value investor has is not IQ. It’s patience and waiting. Waiting for the right pitch and waiting many years for the right pitch.
Mohnish Pabrai

I would say, the crossover between entrepreneurship in investing and value investing especially is protect your downside.
Mohnish Pabrai

I think the thing is that every business ought to figure out who their ideal customer is.
Mohnish Pabrai

What is business if not an endeavor to create wealth?
Mohnish Pabrai

We have all been taught that earning high rates of return requires taking on greater risks… If an investor can make virtually risk-free bets with outsized rewards, and keep making the bets over and over, the results are stunning.
Mohnish Pabrai



If you went to a horse race track and you were offered 90 percent odds of a 20 times return and a 10 percent chance of losing your money, would you take that bet? Heck Yes! You’d make that bet all day long, and it would make sense to bet a very large portion of your net worth with those spectacular odds. This is not a risk-free bet, but it is a very low-risk, high-return bet. Heads, I win; tails, I don’t lose much!
Mohnish Pabrai

[On a successful motel investing strategy.] The formula is simple: fixate on keeping costs as low as possible, charge lower rates than all competitors, drive up the occupancy, and maximize the free cash flow.
Mohnish Pabrai

[On Pabrai Funds and potential investors.] I don’t need to do too much due diligence on my investors because I’m getting their money and not vice-versa.
Mohnish Pabrai

His story is all about ‘Few Bets, Big Bets, Infrequent Bets.’ And it’s all about only participating in coin tosses where ‘Heads, I win; tails, I don’t lose much!’
Mohnish Pabrai

My take on Virgin Atlantic is simply this: if you can start a business that requires a $200 million 747 jumbo jet and a boatload of employees in a tightly regulated industry for virtually no capital, then virtually any business that you want to start can be gotten off the ground with minimal capital. All you need to do is replace capital with creative thinking and solutions.
Mohnish Pabrai

We begin by eliminating all businesses that are either not simple businesses or fall squarely outside our circle of competence.
Mohnish Pabrai

Capitalism is greed driven… Capitalists strive hard to capitalize on any opportunity to make outsize profits. The irony is that, in that pursuit, they usually destroy all outsized profits.
Mohnish Pabrai

The Buffett Partnership has never had a down year, in spite of placing large Kelly-type bets. As far as I know, neither has [Joel] Greenblatt or [Edward] Lampert.
Mohnish Pabrai

Anytime we are trying to compute odds for the way the future of a given business is likely to unfold, it is, at best, an approximation. We try to adjust for this by ascribing conservative odds.
Mohnish Pabrai

Investing is just like gambling. It’s all about odds.
Mohnish Pabrai



Looking out for mispriced betting opportunities and betting heavily when the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor is the ticket to wealth.
Mohnish Pabrai

Arbitrage is a powerful construct and a fundamental tool in the arsenal of any value investor. With arbitrage, we get decent returns with virtually no risk.
Mohnish Pabrai

Sniffing out an available arbitrage opportunity is what prompts entrepreneurs to embark on journeys that have lead to the creation of compelling businesses.
Mohnish Pabrai

When Leo Goodwin started GEICO, he probably never thought of it as being an arbitrage-type play. Yet, that’s exactly what GEICO was, and still is, all about. He saw no one was selling auto insurance direct. He thought it make all the sense in the world and started his journey.
Mohnish Pabrai

Most of the top-ranked business schools around the world do not understand the fundamentals of margin of safety…
Mohnish Pabrai

Most of the time, assets trade hands at or above their intrinsic value. The key, however, is to wait patiently for that super-fast pitch down the center.
Mohnish Pabrai

It is during the times of extreme distress and pessimism that rationality goes out the window and prices of certain assets go well below their underlying intrinsic value. Extreme distress can be caused by macro-events like 9/11 or the Cuban missile crisis. Or they can be company specific…
Mohnish Pabrai

We cannot predict which asset classes are likely o get distressed next. However, if we only focus on a single asset class of stocks, that encompasses thousands of businesses.
Mohnish Pabrai

Wall Street could not distinguish between risk and uncertainty, and it got confused between the two. Savvy investors like [Warren] Buffett and [Benjamin] Graham have been taking advantage of Mr. Market’s handicap for decades with spectacular results.
Mohnish Pabrai

For me, any sort of tech investment is a very fast five-second pass as they tend to be unpredictable, rapidly changing businesses.
Mohnish Pabrai



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