Collection: Mohnish Pabrai - #143 'The Key To Successful Investing'
[Transcript]
AUDIENCE MEMBER 00:00
Michael here, undergraduate here at Paul Merage. So you’ve been talking about this for the past hour, but you’ve been stressing a lot about the importance of patience even when the market is down.
But in your experience, have you witnessed like any historical indications that continue to repeat during your career that prompts you to not exercise patience to actually act?
MOHNISH PABRAI 00:24
Well, I think this is a business where you have to combine extreme patience with extreme decisiveness, you know, it’s kind of a weird combo but what you need is an ability to sit there long period do nothing and then when the opportunity is there and it’s obvious, you act in size.
So you really have to have the two together and I think that's why to some extent I think that it may be difficult depending on genetic makeup to completely reprogram someone to some extent someone has to be predisposed to some of these traits and then I think you can build on it from there. So that’s what I would say that you just need a combination of the two, combination of the patience.
And one of the reasons I even like to give talks like this is that it helps reinforce for me the importance of patience as I’m saying it to you, it helps me get better at that and such.
So the patience and decisiveness need to go together and that it’s not easy, I mean I think the thing is that you got to have this, you know, extreme action at one point in time with no action for long period of time and that’s just a difficult combination to put together but that's what is required.
(Source: https://youtu.be/bLjoL5zhBxA)