Everyone says buy high ROE, high ROCE companies. @Raamdeo sir says above 30% is great. @VijayKedia1 sir says don't look at roe and roce at all.
I used to think the same.
Then I looked at the data — and it broke my thinking.
75% of multibaggers in India did NOT come from high ROE companies.
They came from weak fundamentals. Very small caps. Near penny stocks.
The "bad business" was the beginning of the story — not the end.
Reliance. Listed 1977. Market cap: ₹10 Crore. A textile company. Nestle. Listed 1978. Market cap: ₹3–4 Crore. A consumer company.
Nestle has 83% ROE. Reliance has single digits 8% ROE
Today Reliance earns ₹29x more than Nestle annually. ROE: still 10x lower than Nestle.
Here's the math that changed how I see this:
Nestle invested (equity) capital is ₹4,000 Cr, × 83% ROE = ₹3,320 Cr, profit → grows ~₹300 Cr next year
Reliance invested (equity) capital ₹12,00,000 Cr × 8% ROE = ₹96,000 Cr profit → grows ~₹10,500 Cr next year
Same logic. Completely different world.
Size ate the ratio.
Mukesh Ambani spent ₹5,000 Cr on a wedding.
Not because his ROE is great. Because 8% on ₹12 lakh Crore — growing at 11% — is a compounding machine most can't even imagine. while the total earning of nestle is less than that
For the promoter — Reliance won. It's not even close.
But what about the investor?
Nestle India trades at 80 PE. Nestle's own parent holding company — same business— trades at 23 PE with a 3x higher dividend yield.
The "perfect business" was priced so well that even owning it the wrong way cost you 3–4x.
High ROE didn't protect you. The price (PE) did you in.
Tata Group started in steel. Tata Steel today: ~3% ROE. Adani's core businesses — ports, coal, power — not high ROE by any measure.
Yet India's largest wealth creators for their promoters.
ROE tells you how efficiently a business uses money.
It doesn't tell you how big that business can get.
Startups are the clearest proof of this — they are not valued on ROE, not on profit, not on efficiency. They are valued on one thing: how big can this become?
Ambani understood this before anyone called it a framework.
The game was never — how much can I earn on what I have. It was always — how big can I get, and then earn on that.
So here's the real split:
Investors who want it big — look at growth.
Investors who want it safe — look at ROE, ROCE. Ramdeo sir's filter.
Both are real. Just for different stages.
The filter Ramdeo sir gives you works. Use it.
But only for established companies. I repeat — established companies.
The proof? Warren Buffett.
Didn't buy Tesla. Didn't buy BYD even when Charlie Munger pushed him to. Didn't buy Apple when it was starting out.
Same guy. Same stock. Apple becomes big, stable, established — he buys.
He wasn't wrong about Tesla or Apple early on. He was just using a filter that wasn't built for that stage.
And even his filter — it has been outdated .
The way markets value businesses has changed every 20 years.
Ramdeo sir mentions it himself ,in One-Off his wealth creation studies. Buffett has said the same.
The filter evolves. The masters evolve with it.
Look at Ramdeo sir today — Largest investor in Ola. Personally owns Zepto.
😂okay jokes aside - his fund owns Ola, not him personally — and he doesn't fully control the fund either. So saying "he owns Ola" was a bit of a stretch!
Only the Zepto one is clean — that's his personal portfolio call.
The man who taught you the ROE filter is himself betting on growth, on scale, on what it can become.
That's not contradiction. That's the next level. (evolution)
The filter was never the destination. Knowing when to use it — and when to set it aside — that's the real skill.
Two truths. One market.
Dhirubhai started with textiles! 😄