Swanand Kelkar - Former Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Breaking Investment Stereotypes with Rajkumar Singhal

My guest for today is Swanand Kelkar. Swanand was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley based in Mumbai till may 2021. He was part of the Global Emerging Market equity team, where he oversaw a public equities portfolio of about USD 3 billion. He joined Morgan Stanley as an Analyst in 2007 and rose through the ranks to become Managing Director in 2017. Funds advised by Swanand had top decile performance between 2014 and 2017. The India SICAV fund was nominated for and won the best fund award in Citywire rankings in 2017. Before Morgan Stanley, Swanand has worked with Fidelity International and HSBC Asset Management

He graduated in Commerce from University of Mumbai and is a Chartered Accountant. His love for equities and investing made him follow up his accountant qualification with an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, one of the top business schools in Asia. Swanand has been an op-ed contributor to Mint, Bloomberg, and Open Magazine writing on investing, markets and Indian macro and has also appeared as an expert on Bloomberg TV, CNBC and ET Now. He writes a monthly column for Bloomberg Quint.

In 2020 Swanand took a one-year sabbatical from his corporate job. During that year he became a qualified yoga teacher certified by World Yoga Alliance, published short stories, trained at the Gary Kirsten cricket academy in Cape Town and learnt how to cook a five-course meal.

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Show notes:

0:00: Introduction

5:18: From Gangadhar to Shaktimaan - how did sabbatical change Swanand

6:52: On setting dozens of “No Agenda Meetings”

10:23: Should macro-economy matter for individual investors

12:40: Capex vs consumption cycle - Why L&T can outperform HUL

15:23: Swanand’s mistake of making pure macro call

18:36: Why India has a valuation premium vs. other Emerging Markets?

25:30: Superior returns comes from out-behaving & not out analysing

27:32: Say “I don’t know” more often and focus on process vs khabar

34:12: Swanand's stock and portfolio construction approach

37:30: Concentrating to one sector OR across industries

40:21: Swanand's longest investments

41:43: Active vs. Passive investments

46:23: How to access recent IPOs?

50:57: How to choose: Asset heavy vs. Asset light?

52:44: Hard to fail when you aim high enough

56:33: Attitudinal shift in GenZ

1:01:03: Actionable ideas from GenZ trend

1:05:21: Thoughts on recent China's crackdown

1:07:49: Myth that everyone believes in

1:10:38: Lessons from Vipassana and Cricket

1:16:31: Book recommendations

1:18:10: Advice to Swanand's 20yr old self