Investing is a Solo Sport

An idea can come from anywhere. What you do with it is the whole game.

This post is a collection of things that have been on my mind for a while, and an attempt to finally put them down on paper. None of it amounts to a unique insight; rather, it is a collection of observations and my thinking around them. I have used “—” to separate distinct thoughts and themes throughout the post.

I have also used “I” and “we” interchangeably. “I” refers to my personal views and experiences, while “we” refers to the processes, research framework, and workings of Nine One Capital.

The Big Change

The change that stands out most is how social investing has become. Open any messaging app and you will find groups built entirely around swapping stock ideas. There are paid communities and free ones, offline meet-ups, and conference corridors. A large part of many investors’ day now goes into talking to other investors, trading calls and voice notes and screenshots of charts. People who have been investing for longer than 10 years would know how all of this was pretty nonexistent back in the day.

I have spent a fair amount of time asking myself whether all of this is a good thing, and I have landed somewhere firm.

Investing is a solo sport

The more you act on your own beliefs, the more those beliefs sharpen, and the better you become at placing the next bet. Anything you work out for yourself stays with you and improves you, while anything you outsource tends to leave you roughly where you started. That is the heart of what I want to say, and the rest of this is me walking through why I have come to believe it.

A lead is not a conviction

I should be careful here, because this is easy to read as a claim that you should never to speak to anyone, and that is not what I mean at all. I read Twitter, I talk to people, and ideas reach me from every direction, and I am glad of it. The distinction that matters to me is not where an idea comes from but what I do with it once it arrives, and that is the difference between a lead and a conviction.

A lead can come from anywhere, whether a tweet, a friend, a screen or a stray remark in a call, and the entry point makes very little difference. What matters is the work that follows it. The real trouble with the culture that has grown up around investing is that it has shrunk the distance between hearing an idea and believing it almost to nothing, so that someone you respect mentions a name with confidence and a day later it has become an 5% position you never did any real work on.

A lead is allowed to come from outside. A conviction has to be built inside. Everything we do at Nine One Capital is arranged to keep that gap intact. An idea reaches us, and then it has to pass through our own process, where we make up our own mind independently of whoever happened to bring it to us. The source gets no vote.

The people who keep these rooms running

Here is something it took me a while to see clearly. The people with the least process of their own are very often the ones running these rooms. The busiest admins, the most generous sharers, the ones forever adding you to one more group, are rarely the ones sitting alone with a set of filings. For them, activity in the network has quietly taken the place of work on the company.

Here is a small and recent example. An analyst at a large foreign fund approached me, keen to be part of my cosy network (there is none by the way). He floated a couple of ideas. When I pushed on them even slightly and asked why, the answers blurred out almost at once, and he admitted that the idea had come from another large fund and that, for now, it was only a small position for him. So here was someone passing me a name he had neither worked out for himself nor backed with any real money of his own. That tells you most of what you need to know about how a lot of ideas travel.

Here is another, of a different kind. Not long ago I was added to a WhatsApp group built around exactly this notion of exchange and collaboration. The rule was simple. Every member contributes one stock idea a month, and there are around eighty members. Eighty ideas arriving every month, each of them somebody else’s starting point, not one of them your own. That is not a pipeline. It is noise dressed up as generosity, and acting on it would mean handing your portfolio over to eighty people you have never had to think alongside.

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The Passenger Seat

There are large HNI investors who manage their own counters closely, quietly clearing out the sellers, and around each of them sits a long line of people hoping to stay in their good books. The arrangement is simple enough. Stay close, stay useful, stay liked, and you may get told what they are buying in time to buy alongside them.

Let me put it plainly. If your edge is your closeness to a particular person, then you do not really own anything at all. You are a passenger. You did not choose where the car is going, you cannot read the road ahead, and you have no idea when the driver intends to pull over and step out. Your return rests entirely on someone else’s goodwill, on someone else’s continued buying, and on your own luck in getting out before they do. It is the most fragile seat in the market, and it has been dressed up to look like the most powerful one. The day the access dries up, you are left holding a set of names you never understood and have no way to value on your own.

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Why borrowed ideas teach you nothing

You only become a better investor when you put your own money behind your own thinking. You are either rewarded or you are punished, and both of those matter equally, because both of them teach you something that a tip never can.

Think about what happens once the result is in. If a tip works out, you have no real way of knowing whether you were skilful or simply lucky, because the reasoning was never yours to inspect. If it goes wrong, there is nothing for you to go back and correct, because you never built the logic that failed in the first place. Either way you come out of it exactly as good an investor as you went in, and you could ride ten winners in a row off other people and have learned nothing from a single one of them.

A process works the other way around. Every position we hold can be traced back to something we did, a filter we ran, a filing we read closely, an assumption we chose to make, so that every outcome turns into information we can use. A winner shows us which part of oour judgement to lean on the next time, and a loser shows us which part of it needs work, and the whole thing compounds on itself.

An imperfect process with a feedback loop will beat a good network over time, because one of them is getting better and the other is not.

For us, most of the ideas which we currently own are the culmination of various things that we do daily:

1. Narayana Hrudayalaya surfaced via the screens which we have written about here

2. Venus Remedies came from reading annual reports and attending AGMs

3. Religare reached us via BSE announcements of Burmans buying big volumes in the open market

4. CCTV came via going through calls of one of the large ESDM companies which we had no intention of owning but we were just reading to know what is happening here.

5. An automotive ancillary company which we own, again came via screens.

I should admit here that the stocks which have not done well for us have also came to us via the same process. And that’s the whole point that the mistakes are going to be the feedback loop for this thing to become better over time.

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When a missed stock stops hurting

This brings me to the next point: crying over a missed bus.

Every investor carries a stock that got away, the one you looked at and passed on, or never saw at all, that then went on to multiply many times over. The usual reaction is to treat it as a wound and to go hunting for a better network so that it can never happen to you again.

I have come to see it quite differently. A missed stock only stings if you believe that ideas are scarce. Once you own an engine that keeps surfacing fresh candidates every quarter, the loss of any single one of them stops carrying much weight, because you know another is already on its way. There is a second layer to this as well, and it is the part that does the most to settle the mind. The engine is not merely refilling itself, it is slowly getting better. It is that combination of abundance and improvement that buys you a settled mind.

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Ending Words

None of this is as good as it sounds. There are stretches where you read for weeks and nothing turns up worth buying, and there is the standing risk of slowly coming to see only what your filters were built to show you in the first place. A quiet pipeline tests your patience in a way that a busy group chat never will.

So I am not suggesting that you delete every contact and go off to read in a cave somewhere. Talk to wise people whenever you can, because wise people are well worth having around and by definition there are only few of them (When I left my job in 2023 to start Nine One Capital, I was speaking with 50+ people Vs today the same number has come down to less than 5).

The one rule which helps is to never let the same handful of people be both where your ideas come from and where your conviction comes from. Let the leads arrive from wherever, and keep the conviction building yours, every single time.

If you would like to understand our research process in more depth or explore how our advisory services can support your investment journey, you can reach us at gaurav.a@nineonecapital.in or fill in the form here (link).

Important Note and Disclaimer: Nine One Capital is a SEBI Registered Investment Adviser (Registration No. INA000018814). This article is not a buy/sell recommendation. We could be wrong, and investors must do their own due diligence before taking any position. Please note that this note is shared only for the education purpose and in no way, it constitutes any buying or selling recommendation. We and our clients hold a position in stocks mentioned in the post and may transact in it. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Investments in the securities market are subject to market risks. Read all the related documents carefully before investing. Registration with SEBI, BASL membership and NISM certification do not guarantee performance or assure returns.