Insights

Baid’s The Joys of Compounding offers a practitioner-rooted Indian perspective on the craft of value investing that feel both fresh and timeless.

Baid’s dense, encyclopedic work deepens the following themes - becoming a learning machine, avoiding the common traps of cyclical stocks and overconfidence, understanding different types of moats, and embracing the “simple but not easy” nature of the discipline - while providing rich case studies of the greats and practical frameworks for checklists, temperament, and continuous self-improvement. The book reinforces that enduring success belongs to those who stay roughly right rather than precisely wrong, never become slaves to Excel or arrogance, and win by not losing. For institutional value investors, it serves as a reminder of the intellectual honesty, lifelong learning, and long-term temperament required to navigate uncertainty without style drift.

Vishal Khandelwal’s The Long Game offers a practitioner-rooted Indian perspective on the craft of value investing that feel both fresh and timeless. The Long Game is a beautifully written, thoughtfully illustrated, and highly accessible volume of short, multi-author reflections that drives home the essential truths we live by every day: markets are hard, there is no magic formula, intelligence alone does not guarantee success, and the real edge lies in studying losers, maintaining humility through disciplined position sizing, keeping the process simple by focusing on the two or three things that truly matter, reading annual reports cover to cover, and cultivating the patience and judgment that allow compounding of both capital and wisdom.

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Krake’s book is a strong guide to the investment implications of AI. He shows that the old cycle playbook was already broken before AI arrived: years of zero rates did little to speed growth, and the later historic rise in rates did little to slow it, because successive waves of friction reduction had already smoothed the economy. AI then completes the shift by commoditizing intelligence, concentrating gains with capital, lifting margins, and reducing the need for broad hiring. The implication is to own the AI stack and the power behind it, rather than wait for a recession that the old models keep predicting. For value investors positioning around the current build-out, this is the more useful and relevant read.

McWilliams has written an exceptionally clear, engaging history of money that is simply the better book on the subjects 1873 circled. From Babylon and Rome through the gold-standard era, the Wizard of Oz allegory of the 1890s silver fight, and on to Bitcoin and modern monetary theory, he shows why a currency tied to a fixed gold supply is inherently deflationary and favors those who already hold capital. What sounds like a dry title is not: it is a lively account of what money actually is, and of the recurring fight over how much of it a growing economy should have.

We picked up Liaquat Ahamed’s 1873 after Satya Nadella cited it on a recent Microsoft earnings call, hoping it would help frame today’s AI build-out against the last historically large one—the railroads. It is only an okay book. The useful idea is that a historic railroad build-out, financed through the international bond market, collided with a shrinking money supply once the world abandoned silver for gold. That is the part that still rhymes with AI: the constraint may not be rails, compute, or power, but money.

Jean-Marie Eveillard’s Value Investing Makes Sense offers a lucid, firsthand account of a legendary global value practitioner whose disciplined approach generated substantial long-term outperformance at First Eagle by focusing on margin of safety, hidden assets, and high-quality businesses at attractive prices. Eveillard provides rare insight into his contrarian toolkit - including prescient gold exposure, sum-of-the-parts opportunities such as the Bank for International Settlements, and the nuanced art of selling - while candidly reflecting on both successes (long-term holdings like Lindt) and errors (exiting compounders like Richemont too early).Most powerfully, the book recounts the severe test of the late 1990s technology bubble, when refusal to chase overvalued growth stocks produced significant relative underperformance (the flagship fund rose just 29% from early 1997through 1999 while the S&P 500 more than doubled) and sharp asset contraction as AUM fell from over $6 billion to around $2 billion amid widespread redemptions; Eveillard’s famous declaration that he would “rather lose half our shareholders than half our shareholders’ money” exemplifies the intellectual honesty and temperament required to prioritize client capital preservation over short-term asset gathering or style drift.

For institutional allocators and value investors navigating today’s similarly euphoric, concentrated markets - where narrow leadership in high-valuation technology and semiconductor names creates parallel pressures - this concise masterclass reinforces why steadfast adherence to first principles, even when painful, ultimately protects capital and positions portfolios for outsized recovery and growth when the cycle turns, as First Eagle’s own experience demonstrated when assets expanded dramatically in subsequent years. It is essential reading for any practitioner seeking to internalize the courage and patience that separate durable value processes from those that bend under market fashion.

Dr. Bob Rotella’s Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect encourages golfers to cultivate an uncluttered mind and resilient attitude rather than obsessing over technical mechanics or past mistakes. Building on similar themes from The Inner Game of Tennis, Rotella shows that accepting inevitable errors, staying loose and optimistic, trusting one’s process, and even “loving it” when in trouble leads to better performance under pressure. We think many investors would be well served to read this book, let go of perfectionism and self-criticism, embrace the mental side of the game, and approach markets with relaxed concentration so opportunities can unfold as they will.

Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine is a masterfully written, highly engaging chronicle of Demis Hassabis and DeepMind that solidifies Mallaby’s status as a premier chronicler of modern finance and innovation capitalism. Tracing the path from early chess and gaming algorithms to massive deep learning frameworks, the narrative reveals how artificial general intelligence is being actively willed into existence by a remarkably small, elite circle of visionaries. Crucially, Mallaby captures the fundamental tension between human inductive pattern recognition - extracting meaning from noise - and the structural limits of computing, a dynamic that directly mirrors today's critical infrastructure bottlenecks as the industry shifts from training models to high-volume inference. The book expertly documents the massive hardware, semiconductor, and electricity constraints currently dictating the pace of the AI rollout, making it a foundational text for parsing the structural reality of the ongoing capital expenditure wave. Ultimately, reading The Infinity Machine sharpens an investor’s ability to separate speculative hype from genuine economic moats, providing the pattern recognition needed to uncover reasonably priced businesses poised to compound capital through this sweeping technological shift.