In the bustling, often frenetic world of the Indian stock market, few names command as much respect and intellectual authority as Sankaran Naren. As the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) and Executive Director of ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company, one of India's largest and most influential fund houses, Naren is not just a manager of immense public wealth; he is a market philosopher. With a career spanning over three decades, he has navigated numerous bull and bear markets, earning a reputation as a "contrarian investing legend" for his uncanny ability to buy undervalued assets when sentiment is at its lowest and to exercise caution when euphoria grips the street.
Naren's wisdom is sought after by investors and professionals alike, with his views on macroeconomics and market cycles featuring prominently in both national and international media. Yet, his true value lies not in specific stock tips, but in the robust, repeatable, and behaviorally-sound frameworks he has developed and generously shares. He is, in essence, a systems thinker and an educator, dedicated to demystifying the art of investing for the masses. His approach is a masterclass in separating signal from noise, built on the twin pillars of deep cyclical understanding and a patient, contrarian mindset. This guide distills the core tenets of his investment playbook, offering a look into the mind of a market maverick and providing a timeless framework for navigating the complexities of wealth creation.
The Genesis of an Investor: Early Life and Influences
Sankaran Naren's journey into the world of investing began not in a classroom or a corporate training program, but through a deeply personal and formative experience in the 1980s. He entered the stock markets in 1988, a volatile period that quickly taught him about the dual nature of investing: the "thrill" of making money and the "extreme unhappiness" of losing it. At the time, he admits to knowing very little, but the market's dynamics immediately captivated him.
His entry was catalyzed by a profound life event. After his mother passed away when he was 14, the stock market became a "very good way of communication" and a "common interest" that he shared with his father in their two-member household. This shared pursuit became a powerful bonding mechanism. He learned the initial ropes of investing from his father, and together they navigated the IPO lotteries and FERA (Foreign Exchange Regulation Act) dilutions of the era. He fondly recalls this time as one of "shared thrill and shared unhappiness," a phrase that poignantly captures the emotional highs and lows of the market experienced together.
This deeply personal entry was paralleled by an innate, almost obsessive fascination with the analytical side of the world. Naren describes himself as a "100% numbers person" from childhood, captivated by mathematics, train timetables, and anything quantitative. In an age before computers made information ubiquitous, he knew numerous share prices by heart, finding the process of storing and recalling these numbers "really very very fascinating".
This duality—a deeply emotional catalyst combined with a clinical, analytical inclination—is central to understanding the investor Naren would become. The shared experience with his father may have helped him objectify the market's emotional swings from the very beginning. The gains and losses were not just a solitary, personal burden but a shared, observable phenomenon to be analyzed. This early conditioning likely built the psychological foundation for his later professional philosophy of being "unemotional" when managing public money. He learned to separate the rigorous, numbers-driven process of investing from the often-volatile emotional outcome—a critical and rare skill that would define his entire career.
Learning from Wins and Losses: Naren's Best and Worst Investments
An investor's philosophy is forged in the crucible of real-world wins and losses. For Sankaran Naren, two specific experiences—one a painful failure and the other a spectacular success—were pivotal in shaping his core tenets on competitive advantages, market cycles, and the role of management. These stories reveal the evolution of his thinking from a company-specific focus to a broader, more contextual understanding of market dynamics.
The Worst Investment: A Lesson in Misjudging the Moat
Naren identifies his "worst investment" as the time and capital spent on tea plantation companies. His initial investment thesis appeared sound. Having traveled through the tea gardens of South India, he calculated the value of the underlying real estate and found the stocks to be incredibly cheap. Furthermore, he perceived the established gardens as a powerful "moat," an asset that was impossible to replicate, which should have guaranteed long-term value.
The thesis, however, unraveled due to forces beyond the companies' balance sheets. Naren admits he "misjudged the moat". The seemingly unassailable competitive advantage of Indian tea producers was systematically dismantled by the rise of more efficient, lower-cost international competitors, particularly from Kenya and other African nations. This influx of cheaper tea eroded the pricing power and profitability of the Indian companies, rendering their physical "moat" irrelevant. He explicitly compares this experience to Warren Buffett's misjudgment of the once-invincible moat of the print media industry, which was later destroyed by the internet. This failure taught him a crucial lesson, which he links to Theodore Levitt's concept of "Marketing Myopia": a failure to see the bigger picture of what need is being satisfied and how it can be disrupted. The tea investment was a bottom-up, company-focused thesis that failed because of a top-down, macroeconomic shift in global competition.
The Best Investment: Riding the Commodity Super-Cycle
In stark contrast, Naren's "best investment" was a top-down, cycle-focused bet on metal and commodity stocks in the early 2000s. The context was critical: from 1994 to 2002, the steel and iron ore sectors had endured a brutal, eight-year bear market. This prolonged downturn had pushed company valuations to unimaginable lows, making them "dirt cheap".
The opportunity was not in finding a single great company, but in recognizing that an entire sector was in the doldrums. When the cycle turned, driven by the historic, China-led infrastructure and manufacturing boom, the results were explosive. Between 2002 and 2007, many of these once-forgotten stocks turned into "50-baggers".
This experience was foundational. It taught him that in a deep cyclical business, the power of the cycle itself can be far more important than the specifics of any single company. He famously notes that in such situations, "you sometimes don't need to look at the management," because a powerful cyclical upswing can lift all boats, turning even a poorly managed company into a star performer. The management teams themselves were often unaware of the impending boom; if they had known, they would have bought more of their own stock.
These two episodes represent the twin pillars of Naren's mature investment philosophy. The failure in tea taught him skepticism about static, company-level advantages. The success in metals taught him faith in the powerful, mean-reverting nature of market cycles. The former showed him what not to trust—a perceived moat that can be easily breached. The latter showed him what to trust—a deep, painful, and prolonged cycle that has wrung all optimism out of a sector. This intellectual evolution explains why his frameworks today are so heavily weighted towards understanding context and cycles, rather than simply searching for "great companies" in a vacuum.
A Framework for Evaluating Companies
Before an investor can decide if a stock is a good buy, they must first understand what kind of company they are looking at. Applying the wrong set of expectations or valuation metrics to a business is a common and costly mistake. To prevent this, Sankaran Naren employs a simple yet powerful classification system. This framework is fundamentally a risk management tool, designed to force the investor to ask the right questions from the outset and avoid "category errors"—for instance, expecting steady, linear growth from a deeply cyclical company.
The Five Company Classifications
Naren categorizes companies into five distinct types, each requiring a different analytical lens.
Cyclical Company: The fortunes of these companies are intrinsically linked to the broader economic or industry cycle. For an investor in a cyclical stock, the most important question is not about the long-term earnings potential but, "Where are we in the cycle?". Buying at the bottom of the cycle, when prospects look bleak and valuations are depressed, can lead to extraordinary returns. Conversely, buying at the top of the cycle, when earnings are at their peak and optimism is rampant, is a classic recipe for disaster.
Steady Company: These are businesses with consistent, predictable earnings and stable growth profiles. When evaluating a steady company, the primary consideration is valuation. An investor must ask, "What is the right price to pay for this stability and predictability?".
Turnaround Company: These are companies in distress that are undergoing a significant operational or financial restructuring in an attempt to improve their performance. Investing in turnarounds is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. The key question is, "Can the turnaround be successfully executed?" Naren cautions that many turnarounds fail or take decades to materialize, and some companies simply go bankrupt in the process.
Asset-Backed Company: The value of these companies lies not in their current earnings, but in the underlying assets they hold, such as a large land bank or valuable real estate. For these investments, the return is often contingent on the monetization of those assets. An investor must therefore assess the management's intent and ability, asking, "Will the management unlock this value by selling the assets, and if so, when and how?".
Concept Stock: These are companies built around a new, often unproven, idea or technology, such as e-commerce in its early days, solar technology, or drug discovery. Naren is particularly cautious here, advising that concept stocks are best avoided by most investors. The critical question is, "Is this within my 'circle of competence'?"—a principle famously articulated by Warren Buffett. Unless an investor is a specialist with deep domain knowledge in the specific field, investing in a concept stock is akin to "buying blind," with a very high chance of losing money.
Judging Management Quality
Alongside company classification, evaluating the quality and integrity of management is paramount. Naren’s approach is pragmatic and evidence-based.
Past Performance is the Best Guide: The most reliable way to judge management is to look at their past actions and performance. "The past tells you whether the management quality are good or bad," he states simply.
The Risk of IPOs: This is why he considers Initial Public Offering (IPO) companies to be "inherently risky". With a new company and often a new management team, there is no public track record to assess. It takes a full bull and bear market cycle to truly understand how management will behave under pressure and how they treat minority shareholders. He recalls the 2008 cycle, where many companies that had raised money in the euphoric market of 2007 "behaved very badly" when the downturn hit. The only exception is an IPO from a long-established, reputable group, where one can reasonably assume the group's known culture and governance standards will apply to the new entity.
Evaluating New Leadership: When a company undergoes a change in leadership, such as a new CEO, the art of judgment becomes more difficult. In such cases, Naren advises looking at the new leader's track record in their previous roles. Did the department or company they ran previously perform well? If so, it's reasonable to assume they can replicate that success.
By combining this five-part classification with a pragmatic assessment of management, Naren builds a robust initial filter. This system moves the analytical focus from static valuation metrics to the more important dynamic context, inoculating the investor against seductive but ultimately flawed narratives.
Mastering Market Cycles
The ability to understand and navigate market cycles is perhaps the most defining feature of Sankaran Naren's investment philosophy. He learned the importance of this from his mentor-in-print, Howard Marks, who taught him to see the market not as a linear progression but as a pendulum swinging between the extremes of euphoria and despair. Naren's genius lies in demystifying this complex art, offering a framework built on simple, observable, and behavior-focused indicators that any investor can use to diagnose the market's temperature.
Three Simple Indicators to Read the Cycle
Instead of relying on complex econometric models, Naren uses a brilliantly simple toolkit to assess where the market stands in its cycle. This approach is powerful because it directly targets the psychological drivers of bubbles: greed, social proof, and recklessness. It is a form of meta-analysis; instead of just analyzing the market's fundamentals, one analyzes the behavior of the market's participants.
Past Returns (Long-Term): "The easiest way to determine a cycle for a person who doesn't know high finance is past returns," Naren asserts. When long-term returns for an asset class have been exceptionally high, it signals that the cycle is advanced and caution is warranted. Conversely, when long-term returns have been very poor or even negative, it often signals that the cycle is at a low point, presenting an attractive entry point. He provides a compelling example: in 2012, his firm launched a US-focused fund. At that time, the 12-year return of the US NASDAQ index was zero. This dismal past performance made it a deeply unpopular idea, yet it signaled that the US market cycle was at a bottom, setting the stage for the massive bull run that followed.
Investor Behavior and Sentiment: Naren pays close attention to anecdotal evidence and the "mood of the moment." A key indicator is the type of questions he gets from investors in meetings. "How many people ask you a question when you go for a meeting... That's a very very good indicator," he explains. In 2025, for example, he notes that in every meeting, people ask what they should do about gold. This is because gold has been the best-performing asset class across one, three, five, and ten-year periods. This widespread fascination, driven by stellar past performance, is a clear sign of high sentiment and suggests that gold may not be the best asset class for the next decade.
The Level of Leverage: The use of borrowed money is a classic indicator of market peaks. "At the top of the cycle, people will take leverage when they should not be taking leverage," and they will do so in a "stupid manner". He vividly recalls the peak of the real estate cycle around 2013. In places like Gurgaon, he would meet people who had bought multiple under-construction houses by paying only a 5% advance, with no intention of taking possession but simply planning to "flip it" for a quick profit. This kind of speculative leverage is a tell-tale sign that a cycle is dangerously advanced. At the bottom of a cycle, the opposite is true: people are terrified of debt, even when interest rates are extremely low.
Applying the Framework to the 2025 Market
Using this framework, Naren assesses the market scenario in 2025 as a "very tough cycle". His analysis reveals that "there is no asset class which is cheap at this point of time in India." Equities are not cheap, gold is not cheap, and Indian real estate is not cheap. The indicators are flashing caution: past returns across many asset classes have been strong, investor sentiment is bullish, and the memory of a significant market fall has faded.
Drawing on a key lesson from Howard Marks, he concludes that 2025 is not a year to try to make a lot of money, but rather a year to focus on avoiding the loss of money. This doesn't imply a bearish view on India's long-term macroeconomic story, but a pragmatic assessment of the current market environment. It is a time for defense, not aggressive offense; a time to prioritize capital preservation over chasing the last bit of return in a market that has already delivered handsomely.
The Art of Contrarian Thinking
Contrarianism is the philosophical core of Sankaran Naren's investment strategy, but his practice of it is far more nuanced than simply buying what others are selling. For Naren, contrarian investing is a patient, systematic, and continuous process built for long-term survival and success. It requires immense psychological fortitude, a deep understanding of time horizons, and a structural approach to managing the inevitable pain of being out of step with the market.
A Patient Process with Delayed Gratification
Naren defines contrarianism not as a single bet, but as an ongoing program with deliberately delayed results. "What you do in 2023 will work in 26," he explains. "It is not that it will work immediately, but every year you get the fruits of the contrarian thinking that you have taken some time back". This is a crucial distinction. The goal is not to be right tomorrow, but to be profitable over a multi-year period. This patience is what separates true contrarianism from simple market timing. "People don't want to wait," he notes, which is precisely why the strategy remains effective.
Case Study: The Pain and Reward of the 2018-2020 Bets
His experience between 2018 and 2020 serves as a powerful illustration of this philosophy in action. During this period, he believed that Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs), metals, and telecom stocks were fundamentally cheap and out of favor. He built positions in these sectors. However, for three successive years, the thesis did not play out. The stocks continued to underperform, and with the onset of the COVID-19 crash in early 2020, they fell even further.
The pressure was immense. He recalls how it became "so difficult to hold that position" as clients and observers questioned the strategy. Yet, he stuck with it. The turning point finally came in October 2020, after which the performance of these sectors "became a breeze". In fact, he notes that almost everything they had identified as a contrarian opportunity between 2018 and 2020 delivered spectacular, "bunched up returns" in the subsequent years, particularly in 2023. This experience highlights the central challenge of contrarianism: enduring prolonged periods of underperformance to reap the eventual, often outsized, rewards.
How to Develop a Contrarian Mindset
Developing the psychological resilience to be a successful contrarian is not easy. Naren suggests it is a mindset that becomes ingrained through experience. "It should work for you once, it should work for you second time, it should work for you third time," he advises. "Then after that it gets ingrained in you, then it is like that morning cup of coffee that you cannot get away with". Once an investor has personally experienced the cycle of pain followed by reward a few times, the process becomes natural and the stress diminishes.
Crucially, Naren has designed a structural solution to survive the difficult periods. He explains, "how we solve the problem is by earlier year's investment working, not by this year's investment working". This implies a sophisticated, time-diversified "rolling portfolio" of contrarian bets. The profits maturing from older, successful bets (e.g., the 2018 PSU bet paying off in 2023) provide both the financial and, more importantly, the psychological capital to withstand the pain of new, underperforming bets (e.g., a new contrarian bet made in 2023 that may not work until 2026). This is a brilliant system for managing the emotional volatility of the strategy. It creates a self-funding and self-validating loop that allows the investor to stick with the process, transforming a psychologically taxing approach into a sustainable, long-term engine for wealth creation.
Asset Allocation for the Modern Investor
Sankaran Naren's investment philosophy extends seamlessly from individual stocks to the broader canvas of asset allocation. Here, he applies the same contrarian and cyclical principles, systematically advising investors to lean away from what is popular and well-performing, and toward what is unpopular and underperforming. In an environment like 2025, where he sees no single asset class as being obviously cheap, this disciplined approach to diversification becomes the cornerstone of a sound investment strategy.
An Unpopular View for 2025
Given that equities, gold, and silver have all delivered strong returns in recent years, Naren's outlook for 2025 is one of caution. He believes it is a time to aim for "moderate returns" through intelligent asset allocation, rather than expecting spectacular gains from any single asset class.
Equities, Gold, and Silver: He notes that all these popular asset classes have performed well, which, according to his cyclical framework, suggests that future returns may be more muted. When asked about silver, he maintains the view that it is "better than gold because it has underperformed gold," but clarifies that it is no longer the "super attractive asset class" it was back in 2022.
Real Estate: While many consider real estate a safe haven, Naren is cautious. He points out that in many parts of India, real estate remains "very, very costly" and therefore does not qualify as a contrarian asset class at this juncture.
A Contrarian Portfolio for Young Investors
Naren’s recommendations for asset allocation provide a clear heuristic for any investor: build your portfolio by leaning away from what is currently fashionable. This is a practical application of his core philosophy that protects investors from performance-chasing and herd behavior.
For a young investor in their 20s, who is typically heavily inclined towards equities, Naren offers some pointedly contrarian advice. He urges them to build a diversified portfolio that includes asset classes that are currently out of favor.
Add Debt: His primary recommendation is to "definitely add debt to it, which is today a very very contrarian asset class". He acknowledges that young investors often shun debt instruments like bonds and fixed deposits because their returns of 8-10% seem paltry compared to equities. However, it is precisely this lack of popularity that makes debt an attractive diversifier in a richly valued market.
Consider REITs and InvITs: He also suggests that investors look at Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Infrastructure Investment Trusts (InvITs). His rationale is simple and consistent with his philosophy: "I don't think REIT and InvIT has done that well compared to equities," making them relatively more attractive from a valuation standpoint.
Explore Unpopular International Equities: He also hints at adding exposure to international equity markets "which has done very badly," again applying the principle of buying into areas of poor past performance.
By systematically identifying the most popular assets as areas for caution and the most unpopular ones as areas of opportunity, Naren provides a powerful and practical framework for constructing a resilient, all-weather portfolio.
Navigating Mutual Funds: Beyond the Star Ratings
In the world of mutual funds, past performance is the undisputed king of marketing. Star ratings, league tables, and advertisements all trumpet the funds that have delivered the highest returns. Sankaran Naren offers a radical and vital counter-narrative, arguing that this reliance on past performance is one of the biggest behavioral traps an investor can fall into. His advice is a multi-pronged strategy designed to disarm this powerful but misleading sales tool.
The Great Deception of Past Performance
Naren's most crucial warning to mutual fund investors is to stop using past returns as the primary selection criterion. "One thing people always think is that past performance is equal to future performance," he says. "That is not the case". He argues that investors who make decisions based solely on past returns "will definitely end up making mistakes".
The reason is a powerful market force known as mean reversion. Styles, sectors, and strategies that have delivered outsized returns for a period often tend to underperform in the subsequent period, and vice-versa. "The best past returns will lead to bad future returns very often," he states bluntly. This is why he holds the deeply contrarian view that "the best time to invest in anything is very very low past returns and the worst time to invest is very very very high past returns". He has even quipped that a good model would be to invest in any fund that has delivered a -40% return on a one-year basis, provided the fund manager sticks to their original style. This is the same logic that led investors to pile into infrastructure funds at the peak in 2007, only to suffer massive losses, and to shun US equities in 2012, just before a historic bull run.
A Smarter Way to Invest
If past performance is a flawed guide, how should an investor choose a mutual fund? Naren proposes a system designed to bypass common cognitive failures.
Seek Professional Advice: Naren is a strong advocate for seeking guidance from qualified professionals. Instead of trying to interpret simplistic and often misleading metrics on their own, investors are better off using the services of "good financial planners, good registered investment advisors, all these people". A good advisor can provide objective counsel, helping an investor to avoid the emotional trap of chasing hot funds and to select strategies that align with their long-term goals and risk tolerance.
Automate Good Behavior with Hybrid Funds: For most retail investors, Naren's preferred tool is the hybrid mutual fund, particularly categories like Balanced Advantage Funds. These funds are his solution to the asset allocation problem. By investing in a mix of assets like equity, debt, REITs, and InvITs, they provide inherent diversification. More importantly, they automate the process of rebalancing—selling assets that have gone up and buying those that have gone down. This makes them "much much more safer" because they enforce the disciplined, counter-cyclical behavior that most investors find difficult to execute on their own. He recommends that an investor could even put 100% of their net worth into hybrid funds, as it ensures they are practicing prudent asset allocation automatically.
By challenging the industry's obsession with past performance and offering a behaviorally-sound alternative, Naren provides a protective framework for mutual fund investors. His approach is designed to shield them from their own worst instincts and to replace emotional decision-making with a disciplined, systematic process.
Wisdom from the Gurus: Influences and Learnings
No great thinker operates in a vacuum. Sankaran Naren's robust investment philosophy is a testament to his commitment to continuous learning and his remarkable ability to synthesize powerful ideas from a diverse set of global intellectual giants. He has constructed what the investor Charlie Munger would call a "latticework of mental models," borrowing the most potent concepts from different domains—investing, decision science, and even medicine—and weaving them into a single, coherent operating system. This interdisciplinary approach makes his philosophy more resilient and adaptable than one based purely on financial theory.
The Core Influences
Naren openly credits several key thinkers for shaping his approach to markets and decision-making.
Howard Marks: The legendary investor and author of Oaktree Capital's memos has had a profound influence on Naren. He credits Marks with teaching him the two most fundamental concepts in his toolkit: cycles and probabilistic thinking. "I did not know the word called cycle till he taught me," Naren admits. Marks also instilled in him the understanding that there is "nothing called certainty in investing," and that every decision is a matter of probabilities. From Marks, he also learned to constantly ask the crucial strategic question: in any given market environment, is the primary goal to "make money" or to "save money" (i.e., avoid loss)?.
Michael Mauboussin: From the acclaimed decision-science expert and author, Naren adopted the powerful tool of "pre-mortem" analysis. While most people conduct a "post-mortem" after a mistake to figure out what went wrong, a pre-mortem involves imagining a future failure before making a decision and working backward to identify all the potential reasons for that failure. Naren explains that his team uses this technique to think about how they will react to various scenarios, like an unexpected election result or budget announcement. This process allows for calmer, more balanced, and less emotional decision-making.
Dr. Atul Gawande: Looking outside the world of finance, Naren drew inspiration from the surgeon and author Dr. Atul Gawande's book, The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande demonstrated how simple checklists dramatically reduce errors in complex fields like aviation and surgery. Naren applied this directly to investing. He advocates creating and maintaining a simple checklist (no more than 10 points) of the factors that have historically led to your best and worst investment decisions. Before making any new investment, one should review the decision against this personalized checklist to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger: Naren acknowledges that the "great Warren Buffett" and his partner Charlie Munger were his foundational gurus, the people he learned from in the 1990s. From them, he absorbed the overarching philosophy that investing should be kept simple and the profound importance of long-term thinking to harness the power of compounding. He admires Buffett for sticking to his core principles for over 90 years, proving that one doesn't need to chase "newer and newer theories" to succeed.
By integrating the macro framework of cycles from Marks, the micro decision process of pre-mortems from Mauboussin, the risk management tool of checklists from Gawande, and the guiding philosophy of simplicity from Buffett, Naren has built a uniquely robust and practical investment engine.
Personal Philosophy and the Road Ahead
An investment strategy is ultimately an extension of a life philosophy. For Sankaran Naren, the principles that guide his professional decisions—detachment, discipline, and continuous learning—are deeply rooted in his personal worldview. This concluding section reveals the philosophical underpinnings of his approach, his cautious outlook on the Indian market, and his evolved, unemotional relationship with money.
The Indian Growth Story: Priced In?
Naren is unequivocally optimistic about India's long-term economic trajectory. He sees a 20 to 30-year growth story ahead, driven by consumption, infrastructure, and manufacturing. He marvels at the transformative power of India's technology sector and digital stack, which have created immense opportunities for the country's educated population.
However, his optimism is tempered by a pragmatist's assessment of market valuations. The critical question for an investor, he argues, is not whether India will grow, but "is it already priced in?". His answer is a nuanced yes. He believes that "India's growth is kind of priced in," making it one of the "costliest markets in the world today" alongside parts of the US market. The opportunity, he suggests, may not be in the immediate growth, which the market has already anticipated, but in the long-term compounding of that growth over many decades, which may not be fully reflected in current prices.
An Unemotional Relationship with Money
When managing vast sums of public money, emotional attachment is a liability. Naren states that over his career, his relationship with money has become "unemotional," a lesson he also credits to Howard Marks. This detachment is not a sign of carelessness, but a prerequisite for making rational, large-scale decisions under pressure.
He provides a powerful example: in the chaotic month of March 2020, as the world panicked about the COVID-19 pandemic and markets crashed, his team deployed over 10,000 crores into equities. "What gave us the confidence?" he asks. "It was being unemotional. Because if we were emotional in that month, it would have been very difficult, because people said that the end of the world is near".
This ability to act decisively amidst fear is not merely a professional tactic; it is anchored in a deep philosophical belief. He explicitly links this unemotional stance to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita on Karma Yoga—the principle of focusing on one's duty and process without being attached to the results. "You have to do your karma," he explains, "and then what you get out of it, you can't be very much bothered about it. You have to follow your process". This focus on process over outcome is the ultimate source of his ability to remain rational in irrational markets.
The Unending Journey of Learning and Introspection
Naren's journey is a testament to the power of lifelong learning. He emphasizes the importance of "periodic introspection"—regularly analyzing what went right and what went wrong to refine one's approach. He candidly admits that he knew very little about macroeconomics until the 2008 global financial crisis. The painful experience of being "hurt by macro" forced him to learn and integrate a top-down view into his previously micro-focused process. This humility and willingness to adapt are the hallmarks of a true master.
Ultimately, Sankaran Naren's investment playbook is more than a set of financial rules. It is a holistic approach to decision-making under uncertainty, grounded in a powerful synthesis of modern behavioral finance, timeless investment wisdom, and ancient philosophy. It teaches us that the path to long-term wealth is paved not with brilliant predictions, but with humility, discipline, and a relentless commitment to learning from the market and from ourselves.
Disclaimer: I am not a certified financial planner. The information provided in this blog post is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The content is based on the provided transcript about Sankaran Naren's publicly shared views and is not a substitute for professional financial guidance. Please consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
