Marcellus Portfolio Snapshot – September 2025
marcellus.in From Our CIO’s Desk White Collar Jobs Growth & Wage Growth: Twin Drivers of India’s Slowdown From Diwali 2023 onwards, Indian companies’ earnings growth has decelerated at a rapid rate. Underpinning this deceleration is a sharp conk-off in consumption growth, long the mainstay of the Indian economy. Key drivers of this consumption downturn […]
Short read: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people
By now, most of us are comfortable using AI to generate our slide decks. Be that as it may, it might still be worth paying heed to this article about the challenges in communication. “We’ve all sat in those presentations. A speaker with a stream of slides full of text, monotonously reading them off as […]
Short read: How China is losing its title as the world’s sneaker factory
Even as Donald Trump’s tariffs & tweets become a daily feature of our lives, the world in general and Asia in particular continues to evolve. In particular, Trump’s tariffs are leading to a realignment of trade flows within Asia. For India the speed with which these trade flows are moving is an object lesson in […]
Short read: With MiG-21’s exit, India’s squadron strength hits 6-decade low. What are IAF’s plans for the Tejas
Even though the Government of India’s capital expenditure on defence has grown at twice the rate of overall Government spending over the past five years, in some areas, India’s preparedness still appears to be inadequate. As Snehesh Alex Philip describes in this article, with the MiG-21, India’s first supersonic fighter, now retired after 62 years […]
Long read: Life is Poker, Not Chess
In 2018, Annie Duke, a professional poker player, published her bestselling book “Thinking in Bets”, as a guide to decision making amidst uncertainty from her experiences of playing poker. She and her book became popular among investors and business-people alike, both of whom face the task of making decisions amidst inherent uncertainty about the future. She went […]
Long read: I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong
Steven Levy, an American journalist has covered Silicon Valley and the tech industry for almost half a century, in the process authoring books on its icons ranging from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg. So, he has been around long enough to notice the transformation, politically speaking – how a generally left leaning community, at least […]
Long read: Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything: what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films?
This is an entertaining and insightful long read about the business of movie making and how Netflix is profoundly changing the way movies are made. In order to help us understand why Netflix is a big deal, Phil Hoad of The Guardian, gives us a bit of context: “Among the streaming companies, Netflix is by […]
Short read: Dickie Bird (1933-2025): Loved, respected, popular and the super star umpire who rarely gave LBWs
The world lost some legends these past few days – the iconic Hollywood actor and filmmaker Robert Redford, the legendary Kannada novelist SL Bhyrappa and the Assamese music icon, Zubeen Garg. But the obituary we choose to feature was a one-of-a-kind superstar, a cricket umpire – Dickie Bird. We thought it is apt, given the […]
Short read: The Golden Age of Value Investing Is Over
The information edge in investing has long been nullified with the emergence of the PCs, Internet and Google. So, it boiled down to the insight an analyst or a fund manager could produce by stitching together information that was now ubiquitously available to all i.e, mosaic theory. This piece argues that even that edge is […]
Short read: What’s behind bond yields’ logic-defying spike? The market’s concern over the future
For the last couple of years, even as India’s equity indices have held up, the bond market has been sending a very different signal – that of rising risk and growing concerns. However, until 6 months ago, India’s benchmark bond yield – the 10 year Government bond yield – seemed to be reasonably insulated from […]
Long read: The Electric Slide
A few weeks ago, we featured a piece by Andreessen-Horowitz on the Electro-Industrial stack about how the convergence of software and the physical world through electro-mechanical technologies like batteries, motors, etc allows for a new tech stack that will define the future. This piece is a more detailed follow up to that, in that it helps us […]
Long read: How Panchayats Falter In Collecting Revenue
Tax collections in India – both direct and indirect – are throttling off at an alarming rate. This is likely to become a major issue as we approach the Union Budget in February 2026. Priya Verma’s article in IndiaSpend is interesting in this broader context because it helps us understand why nearly 80 years after […]
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