Focusing on his experience in IT to measure and compare the Intellectual Capital of businesses, Mr. Abhijit Talukdar founded Attainix Consulting in April 2007. Intellectual Capital means those intangible assets of the business that gives it a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
As innovation and technology enhancements become all the more differentiating factor within modern companies, intellectual capital becomes a greater factor in achieving success in a competitive marketplace. This leads to intellectual capital increase the value of the business.
Mr. Abhijit studied various financial literature and developed a proprietary algorithm for calculating the Intellectual Capital of a business from its published financial statements. To add a technological strength, he developed a web-based software tool to represent the result.
After striving hard and smart for 2 years to set up his tool, Mr. Abhijit was the first to jump into this brand new field. It had its pros and cons, being a pioneer means there is no other business to learn from. And so there are a lot of chances of making mistakes and getting stuck into the antecedent challenges. The very first mistake he did that he approached professional investors with his tool so they can make better investment decisions, but the issue was, the professional investors were empowered with various strong and complex analytical software, and so they didn’t think much of his tool.
After realizing this, Mr. Abhijit changed his path to success and decided to become a professional investor himself. To do so, he got certified as a hedge fund manager and started approaching various hedge funds for seeding his fund which he intended to run with the help of the tool. Unfortunately, this turned out to be his second mistake! Hedge funds in India are non-existent because of the double tax treatment of such funds. This took him more than a year to figure out. Upon realizing this, he changed his strategy once again.
With the sack full of experiences, Mr. Abhijit decided to use the output from his tool and make benefits for retail investors. He explored that, the retail investors haven’t access to costly analytic tools and relied mainly on word of mouth from friends, media reports, and their brokers for making investing decisions. Hence they were naturally prone to making sub-optimal decisions.
And so Mr. Abhijit decided to make the output from his tool available on his website for free. He also decided to establish the credentials of the tool as well as his credentials for this purpose. To do this, he first back-tested the tool for both the Indian and US markets. The results were nothing short of stunning. Not only was the portfolio generated by his tool outperforming the benchmark indices in both markets, but the outperformance was by a very wide margin.
The back-testing results, along with each transaction detail, are updated and published on their website every quarter. This established the credentials of the tool. For establishing his credentials, he went through the arduous process of registering with SEBI as an Investment Adviser.
All This took him few more years, but he was ready to start operating as a SEBI RIA by the end of 2017. This is when he started getting recognition for his concept, tool, and services. Coincidentally, this was also the time when SEBI was trying to push radical changes in the capital markets including direct plans for Mutual funds where investors would not have to pay hidden distribution charges anymore. As part of this change investors also slowly became accustomed to the concept of paying fees for investment advice in a transparent manner.
Patience!
If you have done all the homework possible before making your investment decision then the only thing left to do is to have patience so that you give time to the markets to reward your conviction.
Mr. Abhijit Talukadar’s One Word Rule for Investments
Transparency with Clients is something that Mr. Abhijit has prioritized and built-in into his business model. This transparency has been one of the main reasons for the growth of his advisory business. In the past year, his business has more than tripled.
“The fact that my software-driven investment advice has also generated alpha returns for my Clients has been a bonus. For instance, for the calendar year 2020, the Nifty returned 14.9% whereas the average return for all portfolios under my advice returned 39.71% for the year. I wrote about this in my annual letter to Clients. In summary, the combination of an innovative research approach and a transparent business model is the reason for my business’s growth and success”, Mr. Abhijit Stated. Attainix Consulting.
Their Market Leading Offerings of Attainix Consulting
Attainix Consulting provides Stock Investment Advisory, Mutual Fund Advisory, and Financial Planning services for Retail Investors. Stock investment Advisory is provided for both Indian and US markets. They also provide fundraising services for qualified businesses.
As far as their Investment advisory services are concerned, they differ from the competition in that their service is the only one that is based on an Intellectual Capital assessment of the underlying business. No one else has this one-of-its-kind approach for assessing stocks, simply because this approach is based on their own proprietary developed algorithm. Using this approach, they have simplified the process of assessing any stock by just asking three simple questions.
- Is the business generating more money than its cost of capital?
- If so, are the underlying assets of the business significantly knowledge assets?
- If so, is the stock available at a reasonable valuation?
The answers to these three questions are provided for every stock on Attainix Consulting’s website in a graphical manner by three corresponding charts. Any retail investor can look at these three charts to make a quick decision whether the stock is worth investing in for the long term. They have therefore not only simplified the stock selection process but have also made it available for free on our website for the benefit of the retail investor.
Further, our Mutual Fund advisory service uses the same algorithm to assess the quality of each Mutual fund portfolio to quantify the relative quality of the fund. We recommend funds based on this analysis rather than on the past performance of the fund.
The core competency of Attainix Consulting is in assessing the Intellectual Capital of private and public businesses to determine whether they are investment-worthy. On their website, they track the Intellectual Capital of more than 725 Indian businesses and more than 235 US businesses. If you see the Capital Markets today, whether, in India or abroad, you will not find a single analyst who uses this methodology for discovering investment ideas. Yet it is the very bedrock of what Warren Buffet preaches in his writings. A business with a high Intellectual Capital effectively has a high moat, and in this sense, Intellectual Capital quantifies the concept of the moat for the first time.
Mr. Abhijit says, “ Everyone understands moat but I do not see anyone who has quantified it so far.” Attainix Consulting’s icAdvisor stock advisory service uses Intellectual Capital to discover quality stocks bases on the investor’s risk profile. They could take this approach because with his background he had the luxury of an outsider’s perspective to stock picking and was not pre-biased towards using existing analysis techniques. To prove that this approach worked, they did a back-testing of our algorithm for both Indian and US markets. The results are published on their website for everyone to see but in both markets, they outperformed the corresponding benchmarks handsomely over the long term (10 years).
In US markets the outperformance was more than 200% and in Indian markets, it was more than a staggering 300%. Further, they update the back-testing results every quarter and have been seeing the outperformance results consistently every quarter. This demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that Intellectual Capital as a concept works across capital markets.
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
Leading the way – Mr. Abhijit Talukdar, Attainix Consulting
A leader is one who inspires innovation, transmogrify the sector, and motivate others to do so. One of such passionate techno-savvy leaders, Mr. Abhijit Talukdar is a Founder at Attainix Consulting. His dedication, futuristic vision, and positive approach have helped Attainix Consulting to create a unique place in the global market.
Since his college days, he has developed his technology and entrepreneurship skills. Mr. Abhijit did his graduation in Computer engineering from Delhi University, post-graduation an MBA from the USA, and exec education certifications from Chicago Booth.
His 16+ years’ experience in the IT landscape has powered Attainix Consulting, and Attainix Consulting is charting new paths of success for the past 13 years. In the process from nowhere to creating a landmark, Mr. Abhijit has obtained certification as a hedge fund manager and he is also registered with SEBI as a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA). He has been practicing as a SEBI RIA since late 2017.
Mr. Abhjit finds Apple’s journey the most inspiring as it was on the verge of bankruptcy when Bill Gates of Microsoft helped Steve Jobs of Apple with a $150mn loan. Little did Bill Gates know that 23 years later Apple would become the company with the most amount of Market cap on Wall Street. Today Apple’s Market cap is about $2.3tn, which is $700bn greater than the market cap of Microsoft itself! “Apple is a great example of a business which can leverage its Intellectual Capital to generate excessive business profits quarter after quarter,” Mr. Abhijit commented.
He Admires PM Narendra Modi the most. His ability to think differently in the most difficult of situations and come up with out of the box solutions is exemplary. He is a great orator no doubt but he is an even better listener, with an ability to connect seemingly unrelated things to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Talking about Constant vigilance Mr. Abhijit says, “Constant vigilance is not a strategy, it is only a need. A strategy is something for the long term. For instance, Warren Buffett discovered that Coca-Cola is a great business many decades ago because he realized that consumers had an insatiable appetite for drinking coke.
Once this was clear, he invested all he could into buying Coca-Cola stock in the expectation that this would pay him healthy returns year after year. This was his strategy. This is not to say that Coca Cola stock would not have tanked in terms of crisis – it certainly would have tanked from time to time. His vigilance on the stock would have made him aware of the need to buy put options to hedge against such down moves. Vigilance can help you only in the short term, but strategy pays you in the long term.”
About Attainix Consulting clients
Mr. Abhijit says, “My Clients are my learning posts. My experience with them over the years has shaped my learning many a time and has helped me to sharpen my advisory practice. The one experience that I have had with almost all my Clients is to coach them on the need to be patient. Stock markets are inherently volatile and there is nothing to be gained by looking at prices every day and getting worked up. The best investors are those who stand by their conviction even in terms of crisis and perhaps even invest more during such times.”
Key achievements of Attainix Consulting
Mr. Abhijit’s entrepreneurial journey has been longer than he wished and has been laden with mistakes. He made many mistakes along the way, but learned from them every time and has changed his course to make the rubber meet the road. He has been invited by industry associations to speak about the concept of Intellectual Capital and has piqued the interest of the audience every time by making them aware of this common-sense concept which is right there in front of every one of us, but which only he has quantified till date. He says, “The key achievement of my entrepreneurial journey has been that no one has been able to find a flaw in my analysis approach so far.”
The Driving Force of Attainix Consulting
Attainix Consulting has a distributed team. Its team is located in different cities in India and they work on defined work items on a need basis. This approach ensures that their resources are used most optimally and also ensures that the team members are motivated at all times to complete the work item on hand in the most complete manner without compromising quality.
Looking Ahead – Attainix Consulting
Attainix Consulting aims to keep expanding the number of stocks that they track in both the Indian and US markets incrementally. They want to grow both horizontally and vertically in the future. This would include expanding the quantum and geography of stocks, such as UK capital markets as well as targeting Institutional Investors as clients
Mr. Abhijits take on transformation in the stock market
The biggest change in the stock markets was in 1995 when online trading was first introduced. The proliferation of this change has been so wide and so deep that today you can place trades even from your mobile when you are on the road. So online trading made the stock markets accessible to everyone. The next biggest change has been the appearance of discount brokers sometime from 2010. This made trading affordable because of their flat brokerage structure.
So together, these two changes have made the stock markets both accessible and affordable – the two attributes that are required for widespread adoption of any product or service. Regulatory changes along the way have also helped tremendously. For instance, the introduction of Demat accounts in the late 1990s ensured that paperwork was done away with and shares were held electronically and securely by one of the two Government-owned custodians.
