Vikas Gupta – Always Remember that the Unexpected Can Happen Even with Value Investing

Vikas Gupta founded OmniScience Capital to provide a scientific approach to global and India-listed equity investments. Together with his team, he formulated the Proprietary Scientific Investing Framework which stands on the strong foundations of nearly 100 years of investment research and practice. While his exposure to the capital market can be traced back to the 1990s. He has a long track record of investing since 2003 onwards, based on the value investing philosophy developed by Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett. The practical experience of investing over the various ups and downs of the markets was supplemented by a relentless thirst for learning from other investment greats. Scientific investing is the result of this trial by fire over the decades. Vikas has earlier incubated the global equities vertical at ArthVeda Capital, which won international awards and rankings. Besides, he successfully obtained a US SEC license for the firm with a vision of operating in the US markets. He led advanced discussions and/or inked agreements with leading stock exchanges, asset management firms and research firms across the globe, including from the US and Europe. He has a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and has earned his Masters and Doctorate from an Ivy League University—Columbia University, New York.   “Listen to everyone, even the greats, but make up your mind on your own.” Vikas Gupta   Worst investment ever Imitating the value investing greats Vikas started his investment journey by following the ways of some of the top investment maestros such as Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Franklin Templeton, Peter Lynch, Philip Arthur Fisher, among others. By doing so, he was exposed to different investment philosophies, including value investing, investing in monopolies, concentrated focus investing, diversification and so on. But what attracted him the most was looking for monopolistic growth companies. Vikas decided that he was going to have a 10 stock portfolio and so he went out looking for stocks worth investing in. He would find what was the best stock and then allocate 10%. This is when he landed on his worst investment. Finding the perfect investment As he was looking for investments to fill up his portfolio, he came across a great investment, what he calls a classic Buffett playbook. It was a media company with the only available channel for other companies to reach their target segment. Being a near monopoly, the companies would have to pay whatever the media company asked. And so, this was a classic Buffett investment media company with complete dominance. The company ticked off all the right boxes for the perfect investment. One of the few English speaking media companies in India, in a highly concentrated