2026.03.03 06:16

Mohnish Pabrai explains how studying airplane crashes completely changed his approach to investing: "The checklist is a very useful tool, and it's helped us in aviation a lot. Air travel has become extremely safe mainly because of the use of checklists by pilots. The aviation checklist came about from examining failures. When a plane crashed, the FAA would always go in and try to figure out why the crash happened." He details the surprisingly pragmatic mathematics behind FAA safety protocols: "They have a definition of what a human life is worth. It used to be around $10 million a few years back. When they see a plane crash, they try to figure out: if nothing was done, how many lives would be lost over the next 5, 10, 20 years? They multiply that by that $10 million number. Then they look at the cost of asking the industry to make changes to aircraft design. They will only make those changes if the cost is less than the projected loss. You don't want air travel to be so expensive that we cannot get on an airplane, and you don't want planes crashing all the time." Pabrai applied this exact "post-crash" analysis to the stock market: "I did the same thing when I developed a pre-investment checklist. I looked at great minds of investing who had made investments that didn't work, but where the reason why it wouldn't work may have been obvious before the investment was made. For example, Berkshire buying Dexter Shoes. The concept that low-cost foreign manufacturing may impact the moat should have been visible to Warren and Charlie." He reveals the surprising results of categorizing the greatest failures of the world's best investors: "I looked at many, many investments that had failed by great minds and recategorized them into different buckets. It was really interesting. The single greatest reason why investments failed was because the businesses were leveraged. The second reason was some misunderstanding of the nature of the moat."

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