We do not analyse stocks, we analyse businesses, mostly small and emerging companies which are dominant in their niche, are run by a competent and ethical management and are available at fair valuations. A few good stocks are enough for creating lifetime of wealth and these are the kind of opportunities we strive to unearth. We do not get interested in businesses until they have potential to give multi-fold return. We are extremely obsessed about capital protection and hence first assess the downside risks before thinking about potential upside which rules out most of the commodity companies, highly regulated sector, government owned companies and those run by managements with questionable integrity and bad capital allocation history. We channelize all our energies into discovering companies that have some sustainable competitive advantage run by an ethical and competent management; in other words, companies that have potential to be tomorrow's blue-chip.

We are not arm-chair investors who just read annual reports and invest, we make sure we meet or talk to the management and visit their plant, to understand their vision and judge if they got any fire-in-the-belly traits. We also interact with other stakeholders mainly channel partners (dealers and distributors) and employees to get a first-hand information on the management quality. Since our process involves lot of qualitative as well as quantitative filters, we leverage simple yet effective tools like checklists and mind maps to make sure we do not miss any important factor.

Primary focus is Risk Control

Superior investment performance is not our primary goal, but rather superior performance with less-than-commensurate risk. Above average gains in good times are not proof of a our skill; it takes superior performance in bad times to prove that those good-time gains were earned through skill, not simply the acceptance of above average risk. If we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves.

Emphasis on Consistency

Oscillating between top-quartile results in good years and bottom-quartile results in bad years is not acceptable to us. It is our belief that a superior record is best built on a high batting average rather than a mix of brilliant successes and dismal failures.

Importance of market inefficiency

We feel skill and hard work can lead to a "knowledge advantage," and thus to potentially superior investment results, but not in so-called efficient markets where large numbers of participants share roughly equal access to information and act in an unbiased fashion to incorporate that information into asset prices. We believe less efficient markets exist in which dispassionate application of skill and effort should pay off for our clients, and it is only in such markets that we will invest.

The benefits of specialization

Specialization offers the surest path to the results we, and our clients, seek. Thus, we insist that each of our portfolios should do just one thing — practice a single investment specialty — and do it absolutely as well as it can be done. The availability of specialized portfolios enables 3C Capital clients interested in a single asset class equity to get exactly what they want.

Macro-forecasting not critical to investing

We believe consistently excellent performance can only be achieved through superior knowledge of companies and their securities, not through attempts at predicting what is in store for the economy, interest rates or the securities markets. Therefore, our investment process is entirely bottom-up, based upon proprietary, company-specific research.

Denial of market timing

Because we do not believe in the predictive ability required to correctly time markets, we keep portfolios fully invested whenever attractively priced assets can be bought. Concern about the market climate may cause us to tilt toward more defensive investments, increase selectivity or act more deliberately, but we never move to raise cash.