Podcast | Accidental Investopreneur: How Dhirendra Kumar built his portfolio and business

"It was not an incorporated company. It was not even a proprietary firm then. So, after I got my cheque as compensation for those 10 company reports, published in Economic Times I went to open a bank account in that name," he says.

In a podcast with Moneycontrol, Kumar recounts his journey and learnings as an investor and an entrepreneur.

Below is the edited transcript of Dhirendra Kumar's conversation with Moneycontrol

Hello and welcome to Moneycontrol Podcast. I am Santosh Nair and with me is Dhirendra Kumar, Founder and Chief Executive of Value Research which runs the mutual fund portal valueresearchonline.com. Dhirendra’s foray into the world of mutual funds coincided with the opening up of the sector in the early 90s. He is considered a pioneer in mutual fund research and analysis. In addition, Dhirendra also edits two monthly magazines, and writes columns on financial planning, capital market policies and market trends. Thanks for joining us on this podcast, Dhirendra.

DK: Thank you, Santosh.

SN: So I am hoping that at the end of this conversation, our listeners would get to know about your life’s journey so far as an entrepreneur and investor, understand how the mutual fund industry evolved over the last three odd decades and they could also get some handy tips on mutual fund investing from the expert himself.

DK: Yes, that is the core…

SN: So, Dhirendra tell us what attracted you to Mutual Funds way back in the 90s. At that time, stocks were the big thing. Harshad Mehta was the rock star of the stock market and share prices were shooting through the roof. In comparison, mutual fund as a product was not very well understood. So, what prompted you to take that path?

DK: No, it was not a very planned thing. I graduated in 1990 from a college in Delhi, which was away from the fancy part of the city. I had to spend my time after college. So, I went about organising information. The newspaper which I used to buy, I used to clip them, organise them. So, after three years of graduation, I was sitting on a dossier of companies, information which was organised. This was all pre-internet days. You did not have handy information available resulting from a search query.

Those dossiers, resulting from three years of boredom, turned out to be wonderful assets. So, my starting point was not mutual funds. My starting point was equity research. I was curious about equity. I was just trying to figure out how things work, and this was also pre-Harshad Mehta, pre-securities scam. I was curious and there was no information available. I had a lot of questions and trying to find those answers and information. There was no CNBC and there was no internet.

Those days, all you could do was try and figure out things, try and read things. I was able to put those dossiers and was able to put together a piece which I thought was a little ahead of time. I was able to write stock reports on all the public sector companies, which were likely to go public. The government was thinking of disinvestment. So, that was my early initiative.

As a student, I was alone and that was the start of Value Research, in that sense because the public sector disinvestment was announced. I was still in college. I had just landed up at The Economic Times and those were easy days—pre-terrorism—so access was easy. I just walked into Swaminathan Aiyar’s office. He saw my work and said, “Why don’t we publish it today onward, we will carry it as a series”. Ten companies’ disinvestments were announced. So, that is how Value Research got started. I had to craft a name then and there. Value Research. It was not a well-thought-out thing. It was not an incorporated company. It was not even a proprietary firm then. So, after I got my cheque as compensation for those 10 company reports, published in Economic Times I went to open a bank account in that name. So that was the start of Value Research and then the disinvestment happened and then the mutual fund thing was actually a side thing. In 1990, I persuaded my parents to break their fixed deposit and invest in mutual funds.

SN: That was quite adventurous.

DK: That was adventurous. But they thought that I might be doing something thoughtful. It was actually great value at that time because accessing equity market for individuals was absolutely impossible. You had to be well-heeled. Brokers never used to attend you, and understandably so. It was a very small market. And the broker was actually taking a lot of risk in terms of deliveries (because of fake share certificates), the ability to get the payment or make the payment if you sell something.

Equity mutual funds actually democratised something which was otherwise not accessible to individual investor. Magnum Multiplier Scheme 1990 was the fourth such equity mutual fund. Equity mutual funds were not big then. And the three that were there, the one which existed before that, one was Master Share (UTI) of course. Then we had Canshare and there was another one. And then this MMS 90. So I persuaded my parents to invest in this mutual fund.

SN: If I may ask, how much did you ask them to part with?

DK: They parted with quite a bit of saving because my parents were government servants. My mom is a teacher and my father was a central government officer. All their savings were in fixed deposits.

I was able to persuade them to invest a few lakh rupees and that was quite a remarkable thing because few lakh rupees in those times was quite a bit because we are talking about thirty years ago. That apart, the money actually turned 18 times in flat 18 months. So, this Rs 10 invested became Rs 180, thanks to the great Indian scam and the absolute unawareness about it.

This is when my mutual fund thing came in. I was a believer in fact-led thinking and all I did was put together a scorecard of all mutual funds. There were 80 funds then of which only 7-8 were equity funds; remaining were hybrids and fixed income. I was able to put together their names and found they were all closed-end funds.

So the basic features like when they started, when they will expire, their maturity date, what are the terms of their maturity, any interim liquidity that will be enabled by the fund company because there used to be partial repurchase possible for something like Master Gain and things like that. There will be start of repurchase, and they were all listed. You could buy them at a steep discount or a big premium and get their net asset value.

The disclosure of mutual fund information at that point was absolutely ridiculous. We used to get the NAV of a mutual fund every quarter and that too with a two-month lag and that was also supposed to get published in some hidden newspaper in some back page. You know most of the time it will be appearing in Afternoon Dispatch and Courier or something like that. The cheapest newspaper advertising would be bought by fund companies to do that statutory publishing of those NAVs. I had a piece of information which others didn’t have and putting it all together I was able to make a whole story.

I was able to understand that all the funds are trading at 10 times-20 times their NAV because the Magnum Multiplier scheme which I was telling you which multiplied 18 times, the NAV of that was about Rs 20 and in May 1992 it was trading at Rs 180 in the market.

SN: Quite a big jump.

DK: A big premium to its NAV. It was selling at 9 times its real worth. And that was the time I started reading Peter Lynch, Warren Buffet and the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports which were published here and there. Being in Delhi was a bit advantageous because we had the American Central Library, we had the British Council Library and that was a half-an-hour bus ride from my place.

So we had access to wonderful knowledge repository where we could see how things were done elsewhere because there was a huge information gap. So that was it. Once I did this I persuaded my parents to sell those investments. That Rs 3 lakh becoming 18 times was quite something. But I decoded something else. What I realised was that money gives you freedom and I saw it happening live. Before that, I was studying and it looked like a game; but it is not a game. It makes a difference to the way you think, your plans, your life plans, gives you freedom, gives you choice. I saw that happening in my parents’ life. My father had planned that he will retire and build his house. That’s how it used to happen those days. He was able to prepone that plan.

His plans for my sister’s wedding underwent a change in terms of being a little liberal, or being a little more exploratory and things like that. So, I saw those not life impacting but definitely making impactful changes. It can mean different things to different people at different stages, but it was just not a game. And mutual fund at that point was in a state of infancy.

I thought that this is something which looks very promising. It is accessible to anybody, it is simple and it has the potential and it is making something accessible which is otherwise not accessible, desirable to have.

So, I was able to put together a scorecard of mutual funds. I went back to Swaminathan Aiyar again and he was a ready buyer. That piece of work as well started getting published from that day onwards. So, my mutual fund scorecard appeared in what is now discontinued Investor’s Guide of Economic Times which used to get published every Monday. It continued for the next decade. And that was the start of Value Research. That was my first brush with mutual funds. Personal experience, the commercial experience and the start of the scorecard and for the next five years it carried on.

SN: So as soon as you were out of college you were already in business?

DK: I got into business. It was not a planned implementation of a business plan, it just happened.

SN: So what were the initial days like? What do you recall of it, some bittersweet moments?

DK: They were all sweet, no bitter. Because now with hindsight I can tell you that sometimes a lot of people used to look at me as a liability in terms of somebody who had turned up to seek information. I would ask for the net asset values from fund companies. There were eight companies then - five bank sponsored, one LIC, one GIC and UTI. And the five sponsor banks were Canara Bank, SBI, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Indian Bank. When I turn up at these places to ask for the NAV, I would be made to wait and things like that.

At one point, there was a very interesting incident. I went to a fund company to ask for the NAV and they said, “We haven’t calculated it. Why don’t you help us do that?” They gave me the ledger, multiply the number of shares with current price. There used to be a printed bhav copy (daily record of stock prices along with volume of shares traded). So, I was made to write down the prices of closing prices of stocks from the bhav copy into that ledger so that the multiplication got easier. So, I contributed a little bit to the calculation of the NAV at a couple of fund companies. But mostly immediately after the scorecard became popular, I was generally welcomed and I was quite not, I would not say pampered, but surely seen as an acceptable evil. Because I was just putting everything in the public domain and bringing greater transparency. And I saw there were other things. Almost all mutual fund schemes used to trade at a huge premium to NAV around the great Indian scam in 1992. Soon after publication of the scorecard, the premium disappeared. They started trading at a discount. And then I saw the birth and the emergence of the modern mutual fund. Because all what I am telling you is the pre-SEBI days.

SEBI mutual fund regulations became effective in 1993, which coincided with the emergence of the private sector. So, we saw the Kothari Pioneer and Morgan Stanley making an entry. So witnessing that the start of the open-ended funds, the disbelief in the start of open-end mutual fund, Kothari Pioneer, initial focus on creating awareness that you will not get a mutual fund certificate but you will get an account statement from here on, persuading the fund companies to share their portfolio with us, that is a very interesting story.

I went to UTI to seek portfolio information and I was told that it is very secret information and they were not supposed to disclose it and rightly so. There was no law requiring them to share it with me if quarterly NAV disclosure was the norm. I was denied that information. I then threw a carrot that if you share your portfolio, then I will be able to write about it and you will benefit as a result of it and without information what do I say about Master Share. But it did not work. But I was able to derive the portfolio of UTI from Parliament Library and being in Delhi was quite advantageous because it was set up under the Parliamentary statuette and they had to do their annual filing and UTI annual report was filed in Parliament every year. So that was my first discovery that if information is there in the public domain and you create awareness and anything which is based on facts, getting your point across gets easy. I was not giving anything out of my hat. It was not a random thing. It was based on facts, publicly disclosed information. So that was the start of many interesting stories because for the first 10 years I was hands on, I was doing everything. I used to input the NAVs, I used to design the scorecard, I used to deliver the scorecard at Economic Times at midnight every Friday. So it was interesting.

SN: So what are the basic rules that you have followed while running your business and how have they evolved over the years?

DK: There are two basic rules which I follow. One is that produce something which is useful. And the other one is even more straightforward: make more money than you spend. If you have these two things in place—big or small—the definition of big or small, but it creates enough and that does the job.

SN: You have stuck to that all throughout. No additional rules.

DK: I didn’t have the margin of error. If I was ever spending more than I earn, I would pack and go back home. I remember my early three-four years, coming from a conservative traditional family where you get up in the morning, take a bath and light up agarbathi in front of God. I used to have Bhagavat Gita in the room where I used to live alone. So, I will have my emergency money which was a Rs 100 note which if everything goes wrong you buy a ticket and go back home. So, I didn’t have the margin of error. So that second thing was non-negotiable. And first thing was that I did not come from any background which will get me any privilege. I did not have access, I did not have a network. I had no advantage. So, unless you had a belief that you need to produce something useful there was absolutely no choice. That I think has carried on.

SN: And how has your style of management changed? Over the first 10 years, you said you were pretty hands on. After that?

DK: I was always and even now I am hands on. I know everything that goes on. Also that I have done each and every role. I have done the sales job, I have done the data acquisition job, I have written stories, I have written columns, I have written reports, I was always a vendor to other publications. I started writing a column for Business Today in 1993.

I was always producing that scorecard for Economic Times, so I understood the deadline, the need for accuracy. So many of those values were not determined by the policy of the respective companies.

They were my personal values which evolved. You will be out of business if you are not right. Your margin of error is very small if you are a vendor. Nobody is going to excuse you for a mistake. So I was extremely careful. The rigour of work to be done came because of that, it was entirely out of fear that it would be embarrassing. Besides, you would be out of business. You will be unemployed and you will starve to death. That was the primary drive.

We do at Value Research everything. Then the television thing happened, then the internet happened. There is a story at the start of every business. It was a not planned thing. We started our Value Research online which was once again not an implementation of a plan. Just that in 1999, a lot of internet companies came. They all wanted to start a mutual fund website as of yesterday. And they were big companies. GE Capital, go4i—a Hindustan Times company—including Moneycontrol . So, everybody was my customer for information. We had 50 such companies, more than 50 such companies which came into being. And in a matter of one and half years, they all disappeared. We were lucky to get the money. I built the capacity to serve those customers with the technologies arm, which was built from scratch and that was the time when we hurriedly did that because before that Value Research database was a long large number of Excel files because data wasn’t much. And I knew each and every piece of data because I was so hands on. I still remember most of the starting date and end date and terms of the mutual fund schemes. We formulated the classification system, which has now evolved into the SEBI’s classification system because the initial classification system was closed-end funds, hybrids, open for repurchase. The classification system was not objective driven. This is what happened in 1999. The start of Value Research online was entirely an accident because I had to deploy those people who had built the capacity to handle that data and Value Research came into being and all others died. We only have four companies which have existed since then of our customers. ICICI Direct, Economic Times.com and Moneycontrol.

SN: Okay. So retaining talent is key to success of any business doing well. What has been your experience on that front?

DK: Yes, retaining talent is a challenge. And for first 10 years I had no plans of retaining the talent, because I just couldn’t. We did not have margins. We were making a living. For first 8-10 years we had a lot of people who came, learnt and went away to run great businesses, do meaningful things because their financial aspirations were not met or could not be met because the whole business was evolving. There was no business plan and there was no capital. There was no margin. You can't really build things to sustain them.

I think since 1999 I was able to build enough resources so that I can plan medium term and long term, because before that it was living on a day to day basis. Whatever margins, whatever surplus we will create, some of the assets would guzzle it; you needed a 600 DPI printer which would cost you 85,000 rupees which was important or you needed a scanner. So just to give you a perspective of the costs, my first 286 costed about Rs 80,000 in 1990 which was a big capital investment and a Maruti 800 car would cost 45000 rupees then. So, you had to make a choice whether you want a have a car or a 286, and my first computer was 286 - 40 MB with 4 MB RAM which was priced this much or likewise getting a fax machine which was primary source of getting information from fund companies. Otherwise you actually tied up with a STD/PCO centre, you gave that number for getting those faxes.

So it was fun but trying to prioritise these things, the capital guzzling nature of sourcing information, essential stuff, we didn't have the margin. So, 2000 onwards I had enough resources to think medium term, long term and not to live on a day to day basis and after that it was two sets of people I always come across. The people who are able to enjoy what they are doing here and then there are people who look at it as a job. So, you focus on the people who enjoy and I have many employees. In fact of my current strength, the people who have been with me for 10 years I don't think they even think in terms of..they just like me and we like them.

SN: Magazine is a tough business to be in. Very few of them in India make meaningful profits. So, what prompted you to get into this space?

DK: Same principle. But magazines in India are unprofitable, it is other magazines’ problem. We have always been profitable. And the two principles which I had stated earlier that you have to be useful and you have to make more money than you spend.

This actually was a very significant thing in our life. In October 2002, the market was down in the dumps. Market was at 2800 on the Sensex and I designed, devised this magazine. I thought it would be a useful thing. Initially we used to produce something at Value Research which was called mutual fund performance report which was packaged as a research product.

It was a set of performance tables, portfolio aggregates and other things and was priced at around Rs 30,000 and we had 15 subscribers of the twenty-five companies which existed then. 15 of the 25 companies used to subscribe. Even companies would find it difficult to subscribe.

So, I thought it was a very useful thing. People are able to get a comparative statistics on mutual fund performance which can guide them make a choice. And it was priced at a level where it cannot be democratised. So I thought of packaging it in a manner, because consumers won’t pay Rs 18,000-30000 for a research product which would have a daily update or a weekly update by email or a printed version of a 100 page document and it was useful for almost every investor or every intermediary at least.

So, I thought of devising a mechanism of getting that across to people, to intermediaries and investors or mutual fund geeks and getting the price point to Rs 100. So, Rs 100 I was making on cover price. It used to cost around Rs 35-38 to produce the magazine, Rs 20-30 as distributors’ commission. IBH - India Book House was our distributor.

So, we still used to make 10-20 rupees and I thought that it because it is going to be an opinionated product on mutual fund and if you have too much advertising, we run the risk of not been looked at as independent and the magazine just took off.

We had ready advertisers, every fund company wanted to advertise, every fund company wanted to take the back cover and most fund companies wanted to underwrite that they would like to advertise for years. And when we launched the magazine all I did was I wrote a mail to 30,000 distributors that this magazine has been launched and it might be useful to you and I wrote to all those people who used to write post cards to Value Research seeking some information. So that was our only marketing spend. Writing letters to people who were connected to us, all the business card collected over period in public engagements and other places and we were able to get 10000 subscribers in few months and that was it. Of course, by that time Value Research online was also live, so we could really see the response. We were the first magazine to be a believer of subscription and our first issue onwards we had live subscription available, you could subscribe online and I enabled that and we got ready subscribers. So, this is a very unique magazine. Other magazines - maybe they have to ask both the questions again that are they useful and in the changing context because I find that even we have to re-invent ourselves.

I really wonder if my magazine has the same important role as it played back then in 2003, because in 2003 internet was not that democratised. Reliance Jio wasn’t there. You always needed computer to access that information now that is available on the phone. So my magazine for the information, for the data it may not be that relevant. So, we have to change ourselves and we have changed ourselves in a limited way.

But I think magazines will lose relevance simply. But because it turns out to be a ready reckoner, all the people who love mutual fund or who like mutual fund or they are involved with mutual fund or make a living they carry it in their briefcase till the next month’s issue replaces it, so it’s simply useful. We have nearly about 95% renewal rate and we have never seen a decline over this period.

SN: So how do you manage your investments? Do you put all your money into mutual funds?

DK: Yes, I used to put all my money in mutual funds. But since the last one year I have started putting some money in stocks directly. We launched a service called Value Research stock advisor and lot of our subscribers started complaining that here is Dhirendra Kumar who is running a stock advisory service and he has no investment in stocks. So, I have a deep rooted interest in stocks.

It's just that I don't see mutual funds and investing in stocks directly as any conflicting thing. My primary thing is that my long term money should be in equity and I would say that if you have the time, if you have the inclination and if you enjoy doing it then you should be investing in stocks because besides the return, there is the joy of discovering great stock, finding great companies. In the process you learn all about the crooked companies, all the rejections because for all the stocks that we recommend there will be about 15 to 20 stocks which we don’t, but we learn in the process. So, that became interesting. So, I have decided over the next 4 years I will be putting I will be moving 50% off my networth into stocks but in a fairly methodical way. All my portfolio is public disclosure on my website.

SN: So, what do you look for when deciding on which mutual fund to invest in?

DK: Initially we didn't have a choice. But going by what has happened to my money in mutual fund in the last 25 years, if you invest in equity fund and if you forget about it 20-25 years it works out nicely and I actually find it very amusing that we did not have a choice of which fund to invest in way back in ’91, ’92, ’93, or ’94, ‘95 the whole of ‘90s. And in those days, there used to be a section called section 88 which is a predecessor of section 80C. The maximum investment that was possible was Rs 10,000 in a mutual fund and that was of the Rs 60,000 that was available in section 88. So, I invested Rs 10,000 in the tax saving funds. Some of those investments are up 20 times, 30 times sometimes 40 times and those are investments which is pre-PAN days, which is pre-email days simply because they are not available online, so they are valid investments and they have just turned out to be blockbusters. You need time and you need to be invested in equity and you need to be entrusting that money to a reasonable fund manager and if you are able to do your SIP nothing like it. You will be able to average better; which was not a possibility in the closed-end era. So that’s basic: long term money, investing in equity regularly that takes care.

But that apart, if you have to choose the funds from fund manager I would say that look at a fund with a five year history, a fund which has been through at least one down cycle and one up cycle and a fund which has done a little better in a down cycle and a little less worse than others in a down cycle and an up cycle, that’s good enough. It’s hard to predict which one will do best, but if a fund manager has demonstrated this in a full market cycle you have hope.

SN: So, if one is looking to build a portfolio mutual fund scheme, what is the optimal number of schemes that he should be investing in?

DK: It means different things for different people, you can build great portfolio with just one fund if you have Rs 5,000 to invest. One balanced fund and it does it all. Look at the benefits, you are investing in equity, it will have embedded rebalancing. You will not be liable for any taxes till you realise that money. You can make Rs 500 investment and you can increase it by 10% every year and your 75% money can be in equity, 25% in fixed income and all the money will be treated as equity investment. So, look at the multiple advantages and now a days if you are a little thoughtful and if you are investing in the direct plan it will come at very low cost because now from April 1, the cost of mutual fund is going to be streamlined even more. So you just might at 1% or less than 1% and as it gets bigger it will cost even lower.

So, it could be one fund, it could be more than one fund if you want to spread your risk but I would say that for most people one fund to five funds will fulfil most of your needs, very complex investment needs because all you need is at best two or three multi-cap funds, one tax saving fund for sake of getting that Rs 150,000 which is your tax exemption limit. You can consider that fund also as you multi-cap allocation and that takes care of it. That apart, one liquid fund for any money which you want it to be on call and any medium-term need, money which you like need to anywhere between 1 to 4 years and you don't want to take chances with that. For example, if your child is getting into college and you want to move a part of equity money into fixed income so you are sure that you are not struggling with that money, not taking any chance with that money, for first year college fee and admission fee, that money should be an ultra-short-term bond fund or a short-term bond fund. So, 3-5 funds can fulfil most people’s needs.

SN: And should investor book profits in their mutual fund from time to time? What should be the approach?

DK: Two reasons when you should book your profit, one is that fund has turned bad. If you thought that you have chosen a good fund and it is not proving to be one, by all means book profit and move that money, invest in some better fund immediately.

The other reason is need-based. When you need the money you need the money and just take it out and it is important that how you take the money out from any market linked investment because everybody has been told about, do SIP. Nobody has told you that how to take your money out, how long before you need it. So, you do your SIP to reduce the risk of catching the market high, even if you have lump sum money you are definitely going to need lump sum money when you need it if you are planning for a goal.

And make sure that you are not dependent on madness of the market for such critical needs. So, do your systematic withdrawal plan, withdraw your money methodically well before you need it because if you are going to depend on the market, markets can be crazy on occasions and it is very likely to be crazy entirely when you need it, going by Moore’s law. So, just be little thoughtful and methodical about averaging things.

SN: So how much time do you devote to reading? What are the kind of books that you read? Could you name some that left a lasting impression on you?

DK: Of course my first investment book which I had read, which still I think is a must read for any investor—I encourage my staff to read it— is “One Up on Wall Street”. It's an easy read, it helps you comprehend things, it a nice story being told, which helps you comprehend the basics of fundamental investing what works in investing or in stocks.

I have read all the investment books and all the informational stuff but that is more of a need to read because one writes a column and one is looking for interesting ideas and opportunities. Beyond that, very unrelated things, things on psychology or this is one book which I discovered after 15 years of running Value Research which is the ‘Up the Organization’ by Robert Townsend. I wish when I was getting started in 1990, I would have read this. This is one book which I keep on my desk and which I also buy a copy of this for all the line managers because this is a guideline, it is a one page guideline on anything that you do in the business, how to conduct meetings, how to organize party, how to hire, how to advertise, how to write copies. I like this, and this is a very direct book. It very much aligns with my line of thinking that useful, profitable and direct and very straight forward. But then there is lot more to learn. Of late, I have been reading a lot on something like the base camp founders’ book, 37 Signals, things like that and what I enjoy reading of late for couple of years now is history and history of varied kind.

SN: And have you been teaching your children how to manage their finances, do you discuss your work with them?

DK: I discuss my work with them but they have their own interests and I have two daughters, the younger one seems little more interested. But what I find is it is hard to teach them, it is hard to tell them, it hard to sit in a session where you start teaching them but they see you, they observe you. They learn things not while you are teaching, the way you are conducting yourself, how we make our buying decision, what we spend on, how we think when we are buying something, how much hard we think before we do things so I think they figure out that I think is a good lesson. That apart, they are still not extravagant so that is coming in handy.

SN: Thank you for your time Dhirendra. It was an interesting conversation and I am sure our listeners would have gained some useful insights on investing as well as entrepreneurship

DK: Thank you for this opportunity, Santosh.