Foreign ESOPs: Valuable, Illiquid, Tax-Inefficient & Tricky
Summary: The quantum of ESOPs held by Indians in foreign companies is orders of magnitude larger than ESOPs held in desi companies. And yet, this is a mixed blessing because foreign ESOPs are illiquid, tax-inefficient and tricky to manage. Marcellus recommends 3 simple steps which can help Indians make the most of these stock options: (1) Move portfolio […]
Short read: Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original
David Epstein, the author of the brilliant book Range which talked about why generalists are more likely to succeed, has published his new book – Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. This blog which is an adaptation from the book talks about why our best ideas don’t necessarily have to be original and why framing is the key to […]
Short read: Remembering Raghu Rai: The photographer who showed India to itself
In the 1980s and 1990s, as many of us in Marcellus were trying to make sense of the country we lived in, we encountered Raghu Rai’s photographs. Each picture seemed to open a window for us into an India which we did not know and hadn’t encountered in our teenage lives. Mr Rai’s pictures of […]
Short read: India has splurged billions on metro trains. But where are the commuters?
As we travel across India on business trips, we see airports and metro train networks in small cities. While the airports are welcome, they often seem to carry little traffic. Similarly, most of the metro trains we see in the smaller cities are empty and we ask our other colleagues in Marcellus whether cities like […]
Long read: The world’s most complex machine
In a recent trip to China, we were stunned by the technological progress there to the extent they are world leaders already in most areas or soon catching up with the west in others. Yet, there is one technology that has been elusive for the Chinese to crack – Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) Lithography, a rare […]
Long read: AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your mind
If your kids or graduate recruits involved in knowledge work use AI, you might want to read this. Not because AI use is bad but a passive use of AI can have detrimental effects on cognitive abilities of the young who haven’t yet had the opportunity to go through the struggles to build foundational expertise/skills […]
Long read: Does reading do us any good?
We often encounter people who believe reading books is a waste of time. Sometimes these are powerful people who implicitly tell us that “Look at me. Look what I have achieved without reading.” Given that many readers tend to be introverted, intellectual types, the prevailing atmosphere in capital markets across the world for several decades now has […]
Parents Are Dipping Deep into Their Retirement Savings to Pay for their Kids’ Education
Summary: With 1.3 million Indians studying at Western universities, India leads the world in sending its kids to study abroad . While you would expect that of the world’s most populous nation, what is unexpected is the level of financial stress that Indian parents are bearing to finance their children’s dreams of a better life. Most Indian parents […]
A Quadruple Shock to the Cost of Living
While the rising price of Brent crude features prominently in media reports, there are 3 other less reported inflationary shocks moving towards the Indian economy – the rising cost of imports, the soaring cost of edible oils and the likelihood of a poor monsoon – which are capable of delivering a punch as powerful as […]
Marcellus Portfolio Updates & Insights – April 2026
marcellus.in From Our CIO’s Desk The Case for Multi-Asset Diversification in Volatile Times The ongoing Middle East conflict is a stark reminder that global economies react differently to the same shock. In my recent conversation with Manish Hemnani, we explored why the “old rules” of domestic-only investing must evolve to preserve wealth in this […]
Short read: Your clout is a depreciating asset
The influencer economy is booming. People write blogs on substack or do podcasts to build a following so as to be able to influence them to buying a product or a service or at the least influencing their opinion on a subject which matters to them or someone deploying them. The followers are a measure […]
Short read: Pessimism is the world’s main economic problem
There’s plenty of gloomy thinking in the world today not least because of the ongoing war, as this piece in The Economist published much before the war began, suggests. And this has ramifications for the global economy as people’s thinking tend to be self-fulfilling. “In the late 1970s, as America grappled with an energy […]
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