Neel Khokhani on Compounding at 29.9%: Infrastructure, Primary Research and the Discipline to Wait

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, August 11th, 2026, FinanceWire

Neel Khokhani, founder of Epochal Corporation, has outlined the investment approach behind a compound annual return of 29.9%: a philosophy built on hard infrastructure assets, primary-source research, and a refusal to let quarterly noise dictate capital allocation.

Epochal is a single-family office. It manages Khokhani's own capital exclusively, takes no outside money, and answers to no redemption calendar. That structure, he argues, is not a footnote to the 29.9% figure, it is the precondition for it.

Compounding at that rate isn't the product of being early on one idea, Khokhani said. It's the product of being able to hold a position through a 40% drawdown because nobody can pull capital out from under you. Most investors underperform their own thesis because the structure they operate in forces them to sell at exactly the wrong moment.

The constraint is physical, not financial

Khokhani's core position, an investment in IREN first established in 2022, reflects a view that the bottleneck in artificial intelligence is not capital. It is electricity, land, and the queue to connect to a grid.

Money is abundant. Interconnection capacity is not, he said. You can raise a billion dollars in a week. You cannot conjure 300 megawatts of firm power and a signed interconnection agreement in under three years. That asymmetry is the entire investment case, and it is visible in public documents years before it shows up in an earnings call.

He argues that markets have historically been slow to price scarce, permitted, energised infrastructure, assets that cannot be replicated quickly at any price, and that this lag is where durable returns are made.

Research from primary sources

Rather than building positions from sell-side forecasts, Khokhani conducts what he describes as institutional-grade primary research using entirely public material: utility interconnection queues, transmission planning studies, municipal permit filings, corporate-registry records, satellite imagery of construction progress, equipment and switchgear specifications, and hiring data.

An interconnection filing will tell you what a company is actually building eighteen months before the press release does, he said. None of it is secret. It is just tedious, and tedium is a competitive advantage.

That same document-first discipline extends to governance. Khokhani has publicly challenged executive compensation structures and shareholder dilution at companies he owns, arguing that management incentives are a valuation input rather than a soft consideration.

If a board treats share count as a renewable resource, no amount of operational excellence downstream will reach the shareholder, he said.

Valuation discipline over benchmarks

Khokhani's framework is conventional in its architecture and unforgiving in its application: buy businesses below an internally calculated intrinsic value, apply a fixed hurdle rate, hold cash without apology when nothing clears it, and measure results in years rather than quarters.

The hurdle doesn't move because the market got expensive, he said. Either the asset clears it or I own cash. Cash has never once cost me a permanent loss of capital.

He is explicit that benchmark tracking plays no role in the process.

Indexes are a measure of what everyone else did. They are not an objective.

From operating companies to capital allocation

Khokhani came to investing through operating businesses rather than finance. He founded Soar Aviation, growing it from a single aircraft into Australia's largest flight-training academy before exiting all operational and board responsibilities. He was subsequently the controlling shareholder of Stratton Finance, a consumer finance business he helped scale through to its sale in 2022.

He continues to own Vachi Storage, a UAE-based self-storage operator serving the region's high-net-worth migration corridor, a business he describes as deliberately uncorrelated.

Storage cash flow does not care what happens to semiconductor multiples. Owning something boring and asset-backed is what allows you to be aggressive elsewhere.

That operating background, he says, shapes how he reads a balance sheet.

Managing payroll changes how working capital is viewed.

Advice for individual investors

Khokhani maintains that most of his research edge is available to anyone willing to do the reading.

Almost everything I use is free and public. The advantage isn't access, it's attention span, he said.

He encourages investors to build their own valuation frameworks rather than inherit them, to read primary filings before commentary, and above all to maintain enough liquidity that no decision is ever made under duress.

Forced sellers do not compound at 29.9%. They do not compound at all.

He publishes research, portfolio commentary, and market analysis at epochal.mc and through his public channels.

About Neel Khokhani

Neel Khokhani is an Australian entrepreneur and investor based in Dubai, and the founder of Epochal Corporation, a single-family office investing across infrastructure, technology, and asset-backed businesses. He previously founded Soar Aviation and was controlling shareholder of Stratton Finance, and today owns Vachi Storage in the UAE. His approach combines long-term value investing with independent primary-source research and disciplined capital allocation. He shares research and market insights at epochal.mc and through his public publications.

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