Mohnish Pabrai

Pure Buffett-Munger cloning. Mohnish doesn't pretend to be original and that's his superpower.

He coined the term "cloning" for his approach: find the best investors in the world, study their moves, understand their reasoning, and copy what makes sense. He runs a concentrated portfolio — typically 10 or fewer positions.

He looks for what he calls "Dhandho" — a Gujarati word meaning "endeavors that create wealth." The Dhandho framework is simple: heads I win big, tails I don't lose much. He wants asymmetric bets where the downside is limited but the upside is massive.

He's willing to go heavily into emerging markets, especially India and Turkey, where he sees mispriced assets that Western investors ignore. He holds for years, trades very rarely, and does almost nothing most of the time.

Anthony Pompliano

Pompliano is a Bitcoin maximalist, full stop. His thesis is simple: Bitcoin is the only crypto asset worth owning because it has the strongest network, the most decentralization, and the best monetary properties.

He is skeptical of most altcoins. He invests in Bitcoin directly, through Morgan Creek funds, and makes early-stage bets in Bitcoin infrastructure companies.

His audience-building strategy — consistent, daily content, simple arguments, no jargon — is itself a form of investing. He built a media company before most people realized finance media was a distribution asset.

Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai's philosophy is built on a few bedrock ideas. First: be a shameless cloner.

If someone smarter has figured it out, copy them. Second: look for low-risk, high-uncertainty situations — the market prices uncertainty as if it were risk, but they're not the same thing.

Third: invest in your circle of competence and expand it slowly. Fourth: compounding is the eighth wonder of the world, so start early and be patient.

Fifth: give back. He takes the Buffett giving pledge seriously — his Dakshana Foundation is the real deal, not a vanity project.

He genuinely believes wealth creation and philanthropy are two sides of the same coin.

Anthony Pompliano

His philosophy in a sentence: Bitcoin is the hardest money ever created, and the dollar is being debased by central banks who print money at will. He argues inflation is a wealth transfer from savers to governments, and Bitcoin is the only asset that protects against it.

He says everyone will eventually figure this out — the only question is whether you figure it out before or after the price is much higher.

Mohnish Pabrai

Moderate to aggressive on individual positions, conservative in structure. Each position can be 10-20% of his portfolio, which is concentrated by any standard.

But he only buys when his downside analysis shows limited risk of permanent loss. He's comfortable with volatility — his fund dropped 60-70% in 2008 and he didn't panic.

He views drawdowns as temporary if the business thesis is intact. He keeps a big cash position when he can't find cheap stocks, sometimes 30-40% in cash.

He's also willing to invest heavily in countries most American investors won't touch.

Anthony Pompliano

Pompliano is openly concentrated — at various points he has said more than half his net worth is in Bitcoin. He does not see this as recklessness.

His framework: if Bitcoin fails, the traditional financial system is likely also in serious trouble, so the downside of being concentrated in BTC is no worse than the downside of being concentrated in dollars. He views conventional diversification as spreading risk across assets that are all denominated in the same thing being debased.

He calls diversification "di-worsification" for people who truly understand what they hold.

Mohnish Pabrai

Mohnish lives simply relative to his wealth. He drives a used car, lives modestly, and has said he spends very little time worrying about material possessions.

He reads voraciously — 3-4 hours a day, mostly annual reports, business biographies, and investor letters. He takes a no-meeting approach to his day: he has no office, no analysts, no team.

He invests alone from his home in Irvine, California. He checks his portfolio rarely and makes maybe 2-3 investment decisions per year.

The rest of the time he reads, thinks, and works on Dakshana. He's also a creature of habit — he follows a similar daily routine year-round.

Anthony Pompliano

Pompliano runs his life like he runs his content: consistent, high-volume, no days off. He wakes up early, exercises, posts daily.

He is famously disciplined about time and output — he has said he treats content creation with the same structure as military training. He holds Bitcoin.

He is vocal about not keeping significant cash.

Mohnish Pabrai

His bet on Fiat Chrysler (now Stellantis) starting around 2012 was a masterclass. He bought the stock when Sergio Marchionne was restructuring the company and the market was deeply skeptical.

The stock roughly tripled. He also made a killing on Rain Industries, an Indian chemical company that most Western investors had never heard of.

He bought it cheap, the company's fundamentals improved dramatically, and the stock went up several hundred percent. These wins perfectly illustrate his method: find overlooked companies in overlooked markets and let the market catch up.

Anthony Pompliano

Being early and public on Bitcoin. He was bullish on BTC when it was under $10,000, never backed down through the 2018 bear market, and held through the 2020-2021 run to $69,000.

His Morgan Creek Digital fund was among the first institutional vehicles that allowed pension funds and endowments to gain Bitcoin exposure.

Mohnish Pabrai

The 2008 financial crisis was brutal for Pabrai. His funds lost 60-70% of their value.

He was heavily concentrated in financial stocks and housing-related plays going into the crash. He's been completely transparent about this — he calls it a humbling experience that made him a better investor.

He also admits he's made mistakes holding some positions too long after the thesis broke, particularly in some emerging market bets. But his willingness to openly discuss failures is one of the things that makes him credible.

Anthony Pompliano

Being loud enough about Bitcoin that his credibility is permanently attached to its performance. When Bitcoin drops 70%, Pompliano drops with it in public perception — every bear market brings screenshots of his old price predictions.

He has also faced criticism that some of his early crypto venture bets, outside Bitcoin, did not perform.

Mohnish Pabrai

Mohnish Pabrai was born in Mumbai in 1964 and moved to the US for college. He started his career as an IT consultant and founded TransTech Inc., an IT consulting firm, in 1991 with $100,000 in savings and $70,000 on credit cards.

He grew it to $20 million in revenue and sold it. In 1999, he read a book about Buffett and had a revelation: investing was simpler and more profitable than running a business.

He started Pabrai Investment Funds with $1 million — $100,000 of his own money and the rest from friends and family. By 2007, his funds had compounded at over 28% annually.

The 2008 crash hit him hard — his funds dropped 60-70%. But he recovered and kept compounding.

His total assets under management have exceeded $1 billion. In 2007, he and Guy Spier famously paid $650,100 at a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett.

He's also a major philanthropist — his Dakshana Foundation has helped thousands of underprivileged Indian students get into top engineering and medical schools.

Anthony Pompliano

Anthony Pompliano served in the U.S. Army, did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, then came home and built a career in tech.

He worked at Facebook briefly in 2016 — reportedly fired after two weeks for allegedly raising concerns about user metric accuracy. He then co-founded Morgan Creek Digital Assets in 2018, one of the first traditional asset managers to offer crypto funds to institutional investors.

His podcast "The Pomp Podcast" became one of the most downloaded finance shows in the world. He built a Twitter and newsletter following of millions by making simple, direct, bullish arguments for Bitcoin when that was still an edgy position.

Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai Investment Funds — his hedge fund modeled directly after Buffett's original partnership structure. No management fee, just a performance fee above a hurdle rate.

TransTech Inc. — his first company, an IT consulting firm he built from scratch and sold.

Dakshana Foundation — his philanthropy arm that coaches underprivileged Indian students for IIT and medical school entrance exams. Over 15,000 students have gotten into top schools through the program.

Anthony Pompliano

Morgan Creek Digital Assets (co-founder, 2018). The Pomp Podcast / "Best Business Show." Pomp Investments (early-stage venture fund).

Newsletter: "Pomp Letter" (millions of subscribers). Previously: Facebook (briefly), Snapchat (growth team), Earlyshares.

Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Clemson University in South Carolina. He's entirely self-taught as an investor — no MBA, no finance degree, no Wall Street training.

Like Buffett, he learned investing from books, primarily The Intelligent Investor and Buffett's shareholder letters. He considers his engineering background an advantage because it taught him systematic thinking and first-principles analysis.

Anthony Pompliano

West Point graduate (Bachelor's in economics). MBA: Babson College, Olin Graduate School of Business.