What I Learned About Investing from Darwin

Prasad, who runs the India-focused Nalanda Capital, organizes his investing rules around a single metric, return on capital employed, treating it the way a field biologist treats a proxy trait that correlates with a species' overall fitness. The book's most useful stretch is procedural: three blunt mantras — avoid big risks, buy quality at a fair price, and be 'lazy' rather than trade reflexively — paired with case studies of his own firm's hits and misses. Reviewers, including the CFA Institute's Enterprising Investor, have credited the Buffett-style plain talk while pushing back on the Darwin framing itself, noting the evolutionary-biology detours are entertaining but not rigorously load-bearing. It reads best as a value-investing field manual with a naturalist's hobby grafted on.