Tokyo Olympics: India’s Hockey Win Holds Key Lesson For Women’s Sport
The two highlights of India’s Olympic campaign have to be the performance of our hockey teams, promising a path to regaining lost glory in our national sport and how our women athletes have outshone their male counterparts. Whilst the men’s hockey team won their first Olympic medal after 41 agonising years, the women’s team though […]
Extracting Value Vs Creating Value
Aaron Tang is a young Malaysia based founder of mr-stingy.com where he writes about optimizing time, money and relationships — to make the most out of life. His writing is featured in the likes of Business Insider and The Huffington Post. In this blog, Aaron talks about the scarcity mindset which drives extracting value versus the abundance […]
The New Cold War
Last week, we featured a piece on why China is smashing its tech industry which drew inferences from China’s political economy, which can have far reaching implications on the world economy, whether it is investing in Chinese tech stocks or the impact on global supply chains and hence inflation. In this piece, Pratap Bhanu Mehta reviews a […]
Everything Is a DCF Model
The value of a business lies in the cashflows it generates over its life, adjusted for time value or what is called the Discounted Cashflow (DCF). Yet, majority of market participants don’t use it for reasons ranging from the frivolous to somewhat valid. In this article, Michael Mauboussin and his colleague Dan Callahan at Morgan […]
A Scam Unfolds – Extract from ‘Absolute Power’
Sucheta Dalal, the legendary financial journalist who has uncovered several mega scams – including the Harshad Mehta scam and the Ketan Parekh scam in Mumbai’s financial markets – has written a book along with her husband Debashis Basu. Titled “Absolute Power”, the book is about the spectacular rise of the NSE through the late 1990s […]
How the investment bubble in conventional power assets will blow up
Over the past five years Tony Seba has been one of the most prescient analysts of the shift from conventional energy sources to alternative energy sources and from ICE vehicles to EVs. Five years ago when he published a book and a series of notes on why EV will replace ICE much faster than expected, […]
Celebrating Three Years of Marcellus with Three Outstanding Books
“I know where I am going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I am free to be what I want.”–Muhammad Ali As Marcellus turns three, we reaffirm our commitment to our 7,000 clients to make wealth creation simple and accessible, by being trustworthy and […]
Amidst the Covid turmoil, CCPs invested in tech & in institutionalisation
Longevity of free cashflow compounding is the most undervalued aspect of a high-quality stock. Besides strength of the existing business, the sources of longevity for a business include incremental reinvestment in areas which will deliver cashflows beyond the next 3-5 years, and the institutionalization of strategy and business execution. In the recent past, most CCP […]
Invert, Always Invert
In a recent podcast, Howard Marks recalled his chat with a pension fund manager who said that his fund was “never above the 27th percentile or below the 47th percentile. It was solidly in the second quartile.” The net result of that consistency during a 14 year period was to move the fund into fourth […]
Why is China smashing its tech industry?
Just as India is celebrating its first big consumer tech IPO in Zomato, China is smashing its hugely successful tech industry. For those who haven’t been following, the Chinese government is clamping down on exactly the sort of businesses that are enjoying increasing monopolisation in the rest of the world – starting with the last […]
The Network Effects Manual: 13 Different Network Effects (and counting)
With Zomato’s listing, Indian investors are required to get their head around how to value businesses which don’t yet make money yet are being sold the long term story around ‘winner takes all’, thanks to network effects. Whilst it is increasingly clear that in the digital age, network effect is perhaps one of the stronger […]
Ending shadow banking means ending modern central banking
In last week’s ‘3 Longs & 3 Shorts’ we had quoted the great strategist Russell Napier’s point of view that in the decades ahead Western Central Banks will deliberately keep interest rates (short term and long term) below the rate of inflation (i.e. negative real interest rates) thus allowing their sovereigns to: (a) borrow money […]
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