What I Learned About Investing from Darwin

by Pulak Prasad

We want our businesses to mimic the robustness of the living world: to survive and prosper in a dynamic external environment, withstand internal strategic and organizational upheavals, and evolve by taking calculated risks. 5. Hence, we choose to invest only in businesses that are robust at multiple levels. A robust business has high ROCE, minimal or zero debt, a strong competitive advantage, fragmented customer and supplier bases, a stable management team, and is in a slow-changing industry. 6. Just because a business is robust today does not mean it will continue to be so. Our only protection against the loss of robustness of a business is to be price sensitive. We do not invest unless the market offers us an attractive valuation, which happens rarely.