Short read: Angry Young Men Review: Salim-Javed Documentary Coasts on Full-Blown Nostalgia and a Dizzying Array of Stars
Did you know that the of the 24 Bollywood movies that the duo of Salim Khan & Javed Akhtar (screen name “Salim-Javed”) scripted, 22 were blockbuster hits eg. Deewar, Don, Sholay, Zanjeer, etc. No scriptwriter before or since has managed a strike rate remotely close to this. And did you know that they were the […]
Long read: History is in the Making
Our history curriculum in school largely involved learning about major political events such as kingdoms, wars, revolutions, etc. As this brilliant article points out, the Wikipedia pages for specific calendar years in history also primarily highlight political events and figures in those years. This piece talks about what’s wrong with that view of our history […]
Long Read: The Lonely Death of a Jailed Russian Pianist who Opposed War
Most of us who earn a living by investing in this and that tend to have a cavalier attitude towards people who agonise about human rights. Why, we ask, can’t these jholawalas also live lives whose main focus is to make as much money as possible? A minority of the truth tellers tend to get publicity (eg. […]
Long Read: Snakebites Kill More Indians Than Malaria, Dengue. Blame the Urban-Rural Divide
Over the past month, as part of our research into the healthcare sector, we have travelled to several Tier 2 & 3 towns in northern India. There, to our surprise, we found not just crumbling public health infrastructure (which creates obvious opportunities for competent vendors from the private sector) but also a massive market for […]
Short read: Hidden Figures: Giving History’s Most Overlooked Mathematicians their Due
Growing up in Indian schools, we were taught to look at history as a matter of fact. But as we realise, history has many accounts depending on what version you want to believe. This is about a new book about the less known history of mathematics and mathematicians, The Secret Lives of Numbers by Kate Kitagawa and […]
Short read: The Untold Story of Bank Deposits
Whilst the Indian equity markets have been on fire, not breaking a sweat over any perceived disappointments, be it the election results or the unwinding of the Yen carry trade nor the fairly muted earnings season that went by. Yet Indian banking stocks have lagged over concerns over a deposit crunch (deposits are the raw […]
Short read: How did a Neanderthal Gene for Antibodies Become Predominant in Humans?
All humans share the same African ancestors but as this fascinating article in The Wire explains, 800,000 years of evolution has meant that, some humans have certain genes which are different from the genes other humans have: “Our white blood cells make molecules called antibodies that bind to other molecules called antigens made by bacteria and […]
Long read: Notes on Eric Schmidt’s AI Talk at Stanford
Last week, Stanford put out a YouTube video of the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking to students on everything about AI, which instantly went viral thanks to some bold and controversial comments made by Schmidt. Stanford eventually deleted the video. Controversy apart, there was some genuine insights shared by Schmidt. Weikang Liu has duly […]
Long read: Antibiotics Are Failing. The US has a Plan to Launch a Research Renaissance
Nearly a century after penicillin was discovered, doctors are now finding that that many infections have become resistant to antibiotics. As Jess Craig explains, “This phenomenon where bacteria evolve to survive antibiotics is called antibiotic resistance, or antimicrobial resistance more broadly because viruses and fungi can also evolve to survive antivirals or antifungals. Common infections are […]
Long read: A Delhi doctor is the ‘Tihar specialist’. Extracts phones, drugs & blades from inmates’ bodies
Those Indians who gorge on the diet of gritty serials dished out by the OTT channels will be familiar with the smuggling of phones and drugs through the bodies of human mules. For the rest of us, this is a grimly fascinating world where crime meets desperate poverty and then – at least in this […]
Global Compounders Portfolio: Update on Favourable Policy/Regulatory Change
Marcellus’ Global Compounders Portfolio (GCP) strategically invests in 25-30 deeply moated global companies aligned with megatrends, fostering a consistent mid to high teens compounding of free cash flow/earnings. This portfolio is agnostic to market cap or sectors, and targets to deliver excess return through different periods in the cycle. As India catapults into the most […]
Portfolio Performance and Update on Fundamentals – July 2024
Note: For all strategies except GCP, performance data is net of annual performance fees charged for client accounts whose account anniversary date falls up to the last date of this performance period. Since fixed fees and expenses are charged on a quarterly basis, […]
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