One of the best book I have read about Investing. It is not one time read book, need to read this book every year. For an Indian Investor, this book is must read after Intelligent Investor. I had not heard much about author but this book is positive surprise to me. Author has deep understanding of the evolution and Investing. He has blending both evolution theory and Investing concepts beautifully.

Author candidly shares his successful investments, mistakes and losses made over the journey. Author clearly give the way to choose stocks, when to buy stocks and when to sell stocks.

Author has achieved enormous success through his investing framework and gracious enough to share his framework with rest of the world. Hopefully this book motivate other India focused fund manager to write about their Investing style.

What I learned about investing from Darwin by Pulak Prasad

I found this book fascinating. When I mentioned that, I was asked what I was reading. When I replied it was about ideas from evolutionary biology applied to investing, I was told I was probably one of 10 people who would find that interesting. I think it is more than that and I hope I am right.

The book is “What I learned about investing from Darwin” by Pulak Prasad and I thank Netgalley (“https://www.netgalley.com/) for allowing me to read it before publication. The book comes out on May 9.


First I should mention that I am a retired geneticist, so although my careeer did not directly concern evolution, I would think I have an about average knowledge on the subject. I am retired now and partly dependent on my investments. I’ve also read a good bit on investing. I also find both investing and evolution interesting. Yet the connection never occurred to me.

But when you think about evolution, one of the first phrases that comes to mind is “survival of the fittest”. And that if you are a long-term investor in a business, you want it to be fit enough to survive changing circumstances.

But then there were factors that I thought would make to book less relevant to me. The author is big-time investor managing billions of dollars which are invested in individual businesses in India. I manage much less money and deal mostly with mutual funds.

But I as I said in reviewing another investing book :

My belief about investing is that it is a very good thing to read widely on investing and financial history. This book is a valuable part of that.

I recommend “What I learned about investing from Darwin” if you are interested in increasing your investment knowledge. There are many more suitable books if you want to learn the basics of investing.

Each book is special in its own way. The special thing about this book is an interesting application of evolution theory to investment practice. There are important rule of investing outlined as well as good examples privided. I liked the rules about not losing money and being lazy to sell, purchasing high quality shares at fair price. The key ideas are described using Darwin's theory with interesting examples from nature.

As a minimal business investor and entrepreneur coach, Pulak Prasad’s book is a godsend. His first chapter alone is worth the price: combining Buffet’s advice, with statistical inference on the types of risk and how natural selection works, you get a great idea of how Prasad evaluates opportunities. As the author says, you might miss out on an Apple or Tesla, but you will avoid hundreds, thousands of JC Penney’s (in the 21st century) and the like.

The key is minimizing calling a bad investment a good one (type I error). Mistankenly putting money into a bad company is a losing risk and the biggest hindrance to having an overall good record. Whereas most investment funds chase lots of opportunities, they underperform against the stock exchange indexes (S&P 500, DJIA e.g.) This might be in contrast to Taleb’s Black Swan strategy—because you can’t predict winners, invest some in a lot of companies and the winners will overwhelm the losing multitudes. But then Prasad gives simple advice on how to simply identify a few solid investments. For those familiar with Stern Stewart’s Economic Value Added, you’ll resonate with Prasad’s analysis.

While you think evolution is only concerned with physiological traits, the author identifies some behavioral evolution and relates this to company leadership and strategies.

I spotted one consideration worth changing on this upcoming book: Buffet’s guidelines are referred to as “diktat” but better is “dicta” since the former is considered pejorative as it refers to edicts from an external or distrusted authority.