Hi. My name is Imran Siddiqui, and I’m a portfolio manager. Investing has been my passion since I bought my first stock as a teenager, more than thirty-five years ago. For twelve years I managed the international investment portfolio at Al-Jomaih Holding in Riyadh — multi-asset, and centred on US assets. In 2015 I founded Mosaic Capital Management, where for a decade I ran a concentrated portfolio of the world’s best businesses for a private client.
I have been a student of markets from an early age. I am largely self taught and have read more books on investing than I can count. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett’s letters to his shareholders are by far the best resources for anyone starting out.
I have written up some of my investment ideas on Seeking Alpha and SumZero.
https://seekingalpha.com/author/imran-siddiqui#regular_articles
https://www.sumzero.com/pro/research/ideas/16400
Inspired by Warren Buffett’s teachings I decided to embark on an adventurous venture to discover the virtues of compounding by investing in the world’s best businesses, businesses that by virtue of their superior business model, brand excellence and capable management, possess a demonstrable and durable competitive position allowing them to compound earnings and cash flow per share at an extraordinary rate today and far into the future.
Do bear in mind that these magical companies are not easy to find, nor typically cheap to buy, and the strategy requires a predisposition on behalf of the investor to seek long term alpha as opposed to short term speculative returns. As Buffett says: “Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre”.
In the context of a long term horizon and an industry agnostic basis, I seek out companies that:
- are high quality, easy to understand businesses, with leadership positions in their industry;
- are likely to be around ten or fifteen years from now and not particularly exposed to obsolescence risk;
- have a sizeable moat or sustainable competitive advantages and an ethos that seeks to enhance that advantage over time;
- have margins that are not only better than the average American business but are also stable and/or improving;
- demonstrate a consistent track record of generating high returns on equity and invested capital;
- exhibit sustained operating leverage as well as durable economic goodwill – this is a measure of how capital efficient a business is, and what I believe to be the single most important factor and the secret ingredient behind Buffett’s long term investment success;
- produce copious free cash flow;
- possess a strong balance sheet;
- are preferably owner operated or at the very least run by shareholder friendly management teams with demonstrable capital allocation talent;
- have a strong likelihood of continued growth; and
- the final and perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle is of course price. Companies that fulfill the above criteria are a rare breed and are unsurprisingly seldom priced cheap. Personally I subscribe to a mantra that I call “quality at a reasonable price”. Remember time, not timing is the key to successful long term investing!
Why I started the blog
The blog really was an afterthought. It all started when my son expressed an interest in learning about investing and compounding. So after having him start with the proverbial investing bible “The Intelligent Investor”, I started writing notes on my own investing philosophy, using words that would be easy for my son or any novice investor, for that matter, to understand.
I also started talking to my son about macro factors like economic cycles, credit cycles, economic growth, inflation, deflation, interest rates, currencies, monetary policy, the concept of central bank interventions (Quantitative Easing or Currency management), fiscal policy, tariffs, productivity, and how each of the above could impact corporate earnings, asset prices and market multiples. As some readers will recognize many of the above topics are quite topical and relevant to the global economy and markets today.
The blog is simply a continuation of the above exercise albeit now in a public forum and for anyone to read. The idea is that as more readers join and write in, we all learn more.
The blog is now also a newsletter, Market Meditation: short pieces, most of them under a minute’s read, on how great businesses compound, what really moves markets, and the lessons I have learned along the way, some of them expensively. If you share the interest, I would love you to subscribe.
I plan to share the fundamentals of investing and markets that I have been fortunate enough to absorb over three decades of observing markets and learning from mistakes, at times very costly mistakes.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for your interest. I hope you’ll join me. Please do write to me on imran@marketmeditation.com with a question, a comment or a suggestion.
Thank you.