Mohnish Pabrai: Become A Better Investor By Watching Paint Dry
Wednesday, December 10, 2025 · Johnny Hopkins
In the fireside chat with the Ben Graham Centre, Mohnish Pabrai returned again and again to the foundational idea that, as he put it, “cloning is the best mental model.” For Pabrai, the reluctance of investors to adopt what already works remains one of the market’s enduring advantages.
As he explained, “most humans don’t want to clone and most humans think cloning is beneath them,” even though “if you are a shameless cloner like yours truly, it gives you a huge edge.”
This perspective shaped his entire investing life, beginning with the moment he encountered Buffett’s old partnership structure.
He recalled discovering that “Buffett had a very unusual fee structure… 0% annual fees, 6% hurdle, and then above the 6% he got 25% of the upside.” What stunned him was that “nobody went for this win-win structure.”
The failure of the investment community to adopt something obviously superior convinced him of one thing: “They cannot clone. And so I said, ‘The Indian guy is going to do it.’”
Yet Pabrai is equally clear that cloning works only when paired with ruthless simplicity. He stressed that “the highest level of intellect is simplicity,” and warned that if he cannot “explain the thesis of that investment in three sentences to a 10-year-old, there’s something wrong with the investment.”
Simplicity also clarifies what a great portfolio should look like. He admitted it took decades to internalize that “if the job is done right, your portfolio is going to be 95% one stock,” because “there are very few truly great businesses run by truly great managers.”
His earlier mistake was failing to hold them: “The problem was that Monish was too much of an idiot to keep them.”
Even when cloning or experimentation fails, Pabrai highlighted the importance of positive asymmetry. Drawing from Jeff Bezos, he noted that “Amazon keeps throwing stuff against the wall… most of these bets don’t work,” but the winners pay for everything.
His own ventures fit the same pattern: “Most things I have done in life, cloned or uncloned, have not worked,” but because the downside was low, “the ones that work, they work so much that it pays for another 50 of these side bets.”
Ultimately, Pabrai grounds investing in temperament. As he joked while quoting Pascal, “all investment manager misery stem from their inability to sit quietly in a room alone and do nothing.” The discipline to “become really good at watching paint dry” remains, to him, the real competitive advantage.
You can watch the entire interview here: