Mohnish Pabrai: The Dhandho Investor

This film is the Great Investors program on Mohnish Pabrai, managing partner of Pabrai Investment Funds and chairman and chief executive officer of Dhandho Holdings. Great Investors is a podcast by Latticework. Each program is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, drawn from MOI Global’s archive of interviews and conference sessions and from the investor’s published work. The film shows the narration’s words on screen, with his recordings from MOI Global and his own YouTube channel, pages from his fund letters and annual meetings, and photographs and footage of the places in the story. Mohnish Pabrai grew up in a suburb of Mumbai. His father started, grew, sold or shut down well over twenty ventures in forty-two years. He came to the United States around 1983 and took a degree in computer engineering. In 1990 he started TransTech, an information technology services firm, with his retirement savings and credit cards. On July 1, 1999, he started Pabrai Funds with eight friends as its first partners, on a legal structure copied from one book chapter about the Buffett Partnership. Dakshana, the foundation he co-founded in 2005, coaches its scholars for the entrance exam of the Indian Institutes of Technology. He calls himself a shameless cloner. He watches what Buffett, David Einhorn and Ted Weschler do and tries to reverse-engineer what they saw. He noticed that Berkshire Hathaway owned General Motors and forgot it in about five seconds, because he hated the auto business. Then, flipping through The Manual of Ideas, he saw that Einhorn owned it too, drilled into the company to learn why, and bought GM and then Fiat. At his April 2026 annual meeting a partner said he looked more like a trailblazer. “If you go through my portfolio, it is a trailblazing portfolio, but I am sorry to disappoint you, it is all a cloned portfolio.” Dhandho, as he applies it to investing, starts with downside protection. He credits the phrase heads I win, tails I don’t lose much to his friend Amar Bhidé. His case is Ipsco, a steel tubing maker whose cash and two years of promised cash flow came to nearly the whole share price. The checklist dates from the fourth quarter of 2008, built the way aviation studies crashes, from other investors’ mistakes and his own. By January 2014 it had about 97 questions, and its first section, on leverage, held the most failures. The big bets are few because the anomalies are few; that January he said it was approaching nineteen months since his last new idea. Listen on Latticework, where members can also download the transcript: https://www.latticework.com/p/mohnish... Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:53 I. Flipping Through the Manual 5:22 II. The Bottom of the Well 9:28 III. Two Business Cards 13:58 IV. A Partnership Copied from a Book 18:02 V. Heads I Win 23:52 VI. Playing the Odds 28:55 VII. As If a Plane Crashed 33:49 VIII. A Lunch to Say Thank You 38:48 IX. Cloning Super 30 43:41 X. A Year of Renaissance 49:32 XI. An Inch Wide and a Mile Deep 53:20 XII. A Four-Letter Word 59:56 XIII. Trailblazer or Cloner 1:02:11 Closing Great Investors is also on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...) and Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5kzMgVh.... Subscribe at https://www.latticework.com. Footage of Mohnish Pabrai: MOI Global’s recordings (Irvine, January 2014; the Meet the Author Forum, July 2019; Best Ideas 2023 and 2025; an interview, March 2017) and talks from his YouTube channel (University of California, Irvine, May 2016; University of Texas at Austin, February 2023; University of Nebraska at Omaha, May 2024 and May 2026). Documents: Pabrai Funds letters, slides and annual meeting transcripts, and MOI Global’s Best Ideas 2014 session transcript. Portrait and photographs of Mohnish Pabrai courtesy of MOI Global. Pictures: photographs from Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress, credited on screen, converted to black and white and cropped; adapted CC BY-SA photographs are offered under the same license. Licenses: CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC BY-SA 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdom.... Stock footage of places from Envato and Storyblocks, credited on screen. Music from Envato: Ambient Airy Documentary Underscore by PaBlikMM; Ambient Documentary Piano Unwind and Thoughtful Ambient Piano by marcobellonimusic. Narrated by an AI voice.