The Locker Room
In this superb guest post for the Collaborative Fund, Ted Lamade explains – using examples from sports and business – why teams with less talented players often triumph over teams comprised of superstars. The first interesting point that Ted makes – and you should pay close attention to this if you are, like many of […]
The Alternative to Closing Schools
Last week, we learnt that the municipal corporation in Mumbai has ordered schools to remain closed for another six weeks which means that by the time schools reopen in Mumbai – which most parents are hoping will be March 2023 – it will be two years since our kids last went to school. Obviously, Mumbai’s […]
How Little Champs Become Consistent Compounders
A basic takeaway of cashflow based valuation is that a longer a company generates healthy free cash flow (FCF) growth, the higher its intrinsic value. Our longevity framework helps in assessing, using objective parameters, how long a company is likely to sustain healthy growth in FCF. For younger companies like the Little Champs, after a […]
Diamonds in the Dust
When we look back on 2021, most of us look back with a feeling of gloom. The devastating second wave of Covid-19 was a physical as well as an emotional drain on the country. However, in spite of this, there were many positives to celebrate – what senior journalist and author TN Ninan calls, “Diamonds […]
Are video games really addictive?
Many of us parents with teenage children often worry about how much time is ok for our kids to be on video games. The Chinese government recently issued a diktat “restricting the under-18s to an hour of gaming a day, on only three nights a week”. But even if we were to take a liberal […]
The end of the pandemic will not be televised
Just when we thought we had put the pandemic behind and begun to get on with our lives, Omicron has put the question back on everybody’s mind as to when will all this finally end? This research paper in the BMJ attempts to throw some light by studying past pandemics and juxtaposing the current context […]
First Principles: The Building blocks of True Knowledge
Many of us struggle to learn new things after a certain age or deal with complex systems outside of our core domain. Often the reason for that is we tend to box ourselves with information that has been handed out to us without questioning the fundamental basis. On the other hand, most successful innovators or […]
Why do we buy into the ‘cult’ of overwork?
Those of us in Marcellus who spent our twenties and thirties burning the midnight oil realised in the middle our careers that overwork can destroy your health, your family life and pretty much everything else that makes life worth living. Now we keep hearing that Covid has actually made things worse on this front: “New […]
China’s troll king: how a tabloid editor became the voice of Chinese nationalism
Chest thumping nationalism has become popular in many countries over the past decade. Whilst such nationalism becomes headline news when it shows up in democracies, even in one-party states like China, such nationalism has had a critical role to play over the past decade. Why? Because of the rise of social media and the space […]
The Benefits of Timing are Inversely Correlated with the Quality of Fundamentals
The rate at which fundamentals of a company compound (and hence its share price) over the long term is inversely correlated with the quantum of benefit that an investor can achieve by perfectly timing her purchases at the bottom of the share price trajectory. Moreover, for a portfolio consisting of high-quality companies, benefits from a […]
Is a greener, faster and more decentralised alternative to Bitcoin possible?
This piece is a counter of sorts to this week’s Long Read 3 about how tech is taking over geopolitics, at the core of whose argument lies smart contracts (self-executing rules, not enforced by an intermediary or an authority) that run on blockchains (decentralised or distributed databases). The most popular application of this concept so […]
Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
We have featured pieces of and by Peter Thiel (‘Zero to One’ being one of the key reasons to start Marcellus) in 3L&3S. This piece of prose by David Perell (who runs an online writing course), focuses on one key aspect of why Peter Thiel is such an inspirational thinker – the need to question […]
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