Much like investing legend Warren Buffett, Rajiv Jain maintains a conservative investment style. Now, the star fund manager has shared insights into his firm GQG, and the stock market experiences that shaped him.

Even stars start small. He took his first steps in the stock market at the age of 16 or 17, Rajiv Jain says, when his father had kept him busy during the summer months checking all the stocks that had not yet paid dividends. «So I had to physically go to the broker to deliver stock certificates to collect them,» he recalls in an interview with «Forbes» (behind paywall).

Born and raised in northern India, Jain joined the Swiss investment house in 1994 and had a stellar career there. As co-head of the equities team, he ended up being responsible for 15 Vontobel funds. He helped build assets under management to nearly $50 billion. In 2016, he left the Zurich-based firm and founded his company, GQG Partners.

From Zero to a Hundred

GQG is a success story. At the end of July, the barely eight-year-old investment boutique already manages more than $108 billion, while Jain's net assets are currently estimated at around $3.3 billion. GQG and Jain are known for taking a conservative investment approach rather than jumping on the hottest market trends.

Asked about the founding of GQG today, Jain reveals that his partner Tim Carver approached him six or seven years earlier. At the time, however, he didn't want to run his own company. In 2016, he says, the time was right, in part because he learned a lot from his mistakes. «To improve the game, you basically need to take a clean sheet of paper, make a bunch of changes and start fresh. I love investing, and you need to kind of adapt. You need to do a bunch of different things to continue improving,» Jain emphasizes.

He didn't take anyone from his old team with him, he said, but built a completely new team.

Wrongly Situated

Jain prefers to keep quiet about his biggest investment successes, instead providing insight into his biggest failures. «The biggest one would have been shorting Amazon in the late nineties. So much for my ability to predict long-term winners!» In 2011, he did get in on the American online giant, but about ten years too late, as he admits.

Tesla was also one of his big failures, believing the US electric carmaker would survive. If he could give himself one piece of advice in retrospect, it would probably be to take a little more risk, because being too risk-averse isn't the best thing.

Bagging the Elephant

Jain may have taken that advice a bit to heart this year, as he made one of his most sensational bets to date, as finews.ch reported. He invested $1.9 billion in Indian conglomerate Adani Group, a few weeks after a report by US short-seller Hindenburg Research accused the conglomerate of fraud and stock market manipulation. The bet worked out for Jain. His investment has returned about 50 percent to date.

«We looked at this company before, four or five years ago, and decided not to do anything, but after the report came out, we looked again even more closely and were positively surprised,» he says, adding that the firm hires several investigative journalists also scrutinized the company. He says the quality of the management team and the confidence of the partners in the Adani Group convinced him to join. «It was 180 degrees different from what had been written. That’s usually not the case.»