How Rajiv Khanna invests his money

livemint.com:

You may be surprised to hear that Dolly Khanna, one of the most celebrated names in investing, is a homemaker. Let me explain. The person actually running the show behind the scenes is Rajiv Khanna, her husband.

For some reason, Mr. Khanna prefers to invest using his wife’s name. In fact, for a long time business channels didn’t know who Dolly Khanna was, despite her name appearing in the shareholder lists of various companies.

Hailing from Chennai, Rajiv Khanna studied engineering at IIT Madras and worked at two companies before setting up his own business. His venture, Kwality Ice Cream, became profitable and was sold to Hindustan Unilever. The money he received from this became the seed capital for his investing journey.

Khanna is known to be a media-shy person and one who prefers to keep his investing style to himself. But he opened up about his investment journey and style at the recent Tamil Nadu Investor Association’s (TIA’s) annual ‘Bullet Proof Investing’ seminar. “He has been a secretive investor for a long time," said Rahul Goel, former chief executive officer of Equitymasters.

Here is a summary of what he said: He first bought shares of Satyam, the company known for carrying out India’s largest corporate fraud until 2010, before the dotcom bubble. He candidly told the audience that he bought Satyam because his neighbor's son worked there and he thought it was an interesting company. As the internet boom was in full swing, he made a lot of money on Satyam and a few other tech stocks.

But when the mania finally ended and the dot com bubble burst, he lost a lot of money on these investments. Nevertheless, he had made some money at the end of the dotcom crash. This allowed him to continue to invest through the