Contrarian Quality at GQG Partners – Rajiv Jain (EP.505)
Episode publishedPodcast: Capital Allocators – Inside th...Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
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The cumulative capex of all these mag companies in their history is 1 and a half trillion dollars. Think about it. Now they're talking about 3,000,000,000,000 in just three years. So these businesses are created with not much capital. You're spending $1,000,000,000,000 a year and the revenue on AI talk about maybe $7,080,000,000,000? When Google went public, I remember it was 2004, they were worth $50,000,000,000 market cap, but they are generating $700,000,000 of free cash flow. Very cash generative business. 20% plus operating margins. If you look at OpenAI Anthropic, SpaceX is a whole diffe
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Rajeev Jain, the chairman and CIO of GQG Partners, a global equity manager he founded in 2016 that soared to $160,000,000,000 in assets, rebuffing the challenging decade for active managers. Our conversation covers Rajiv's path from trading in India to his long tenure at Vontable and founding of GQG. We discussed the periodic crisis lessons that shaped his approach, his definition of quality, team dynamics, and portfolio construction to avoid losses. We then turned to Rajeev's contrarian views, including current signif
Thanks for having me, Ted.
I'd love you to take me back on your early influences that got you involved in business.
The earliest one was in high school, During one of the summers, the eighties, there was a lot of those things to keep you busy, and I was in India. My dad was trying to keep me busy. In those days, you got physical certificates, stock certificates. He had his portfolio and a few names. He got a dividend in mail, check. Problem is sometimes they didn't come in, so how do you match? That's how I started tracking these things. I started trading in high school, classic punting basically. Not for start, but trading.
How'd you go from that to learning what these things were behind the pieces of paper?
In college, I got heavily engaged. Ended up doing my undergrad and grad fairly quickly. I was 20 when I'd done my masters. I was very busy in trading in college. You had to go physically to a broker. I remember everybody was maybe 55, 60. The broker said, I need to talk to your dad. What the hell are you doing here? Do you see people around you? That's when I started reading and learning the tricks of the trade.
What was the impetus for going through school that quickly?
I was keen on getting into the business. It almost was a nuisance factor. I need to do this because otherwise nobody would hire me. So that was more the driver rather than anything else.
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