Marcellus Insights
Haters
Last week we featured a piece by Paul Graham, best known for the start-up incubator, Y Combinator. Last week’s piece was advice to founders on building sustainable competitive advantages whilst this one, albeit a bit dated is also advice to founders, on how to deal with ‘haters’ that inevitably come with success and in particular, fame. First, […]
From GE to FTX, beware the Icarus complex
A few weeks ago, we featured a podcast about the rise and fall of GE, the American conglomerate with a Morningstar analyst. This week’s Schumpeter column in the Economist features the recent book on the same subject – ‘Power Failure’ by William D Cohan, which seems to have the same message as the podcast – Jack Welch […]
Investor Howard Marks: ‘The short run is by far the least important thing’
Most of us in Marcellus know Howard Marks for his outstanding books and his remarkably well written investment memos. What we also know now thanks to this lively interview in the FT is: “He began writing the memos in 1990, initially sending them by post to Oaktree’s 50 or so clients. For the first 10 years, […]
The World Cup’s New High-Tech Ball Will Change Soccer Forever
The football world cup is not known as the greatest show on the planet for no reason. It is indeed the beautiful game and most watched sport globally. The tournament has taken off with much excitement what with Argentina, Germany and Belgium facing upset defeats, enough to drown the initial controversy around the event’s hosts. […]
J. Edgar Hoover, Public Enemy No. 1
As we watch strongmen in Russia and China propel their great countries towards ruin, it is worth remembering that even in established democracies, autocrats can flourish and cause immense damage. This article based on a new biography of J Edgar Hoover, the man who ran the FBI from 1924 up to his death in 1972, […]
‘They want toys to get their children into Harvard’: have we been getting playthings all wrong?
This long read is a tribute to capitalism’s ability to tap into our insecurities by using pseudoscience and thereby persuade us to spend tens of billions of dollars every year on useless bits of plastic. The author is a father of a 10-year old child in the UK and begins by noting that like him, […]
Four years of CCP: 98.2% total returns, 18.6% CAGR
A review of the last four years of CCP returns highlights the consistency of performance across investee companies – almost all constituent stocks have compounded their share prices at 15-30% annually demonstrating that stock selection contributed significantly to portfolio returns. Additionally, portfolio management tools such as the Longevity Framework and Margin of Safety & Sustainability […]
Powering Through the Slowdown
In 2QFY23, Little Champs Portfolio (LCP) witnessed median revenue growth of 24% and PBT growth of 14%. However, some portfolio companies did face headwinds around revenues (Covid-19 related revenues tapering off, impact from price hikes) and margins (raw material and energy costs up). However, these headwinds have been abating in recent months which should aid […]
Boring is Beautiful in Investing
It might sound like an afterthought given the crash we have seen this year in ‘exciting’ assets like crypto and tech stocks. But to be fair to the author Ben Carlson, he did write a piece in the middle of the boom on why ‘It’s OK To Build Wealth Slowly (awealthofcommonsense.com)’. Like Paul Samuelson is […]
A sleuth’s guide to the coming wave of corporate fraud
Accounting quality is a key aspect of Marcellus’ investment philosophy and hence detecting accounting fraud is beyond just a skill for the Marcellus analyst. This article is dated 7th November, the day before FTX unravelled. The Economist’s prescience is less to do with the specifics of Samuel Bankman-Fried or crypto in general than the remarkably repetitive […]
Dilip Mahalanabis, paediatrician, 1934-2022
When Dr Dilip Mahalanabis passed away in a private hospital in Kolkata on 16th October 2022 very few of us noticed as we were busy watching the T20 World Cup in Australia. And yet as the Financial Times noted “…the distinguished paediatrician deserved a less muted valediction. His pioneering medical work among refugees fleeing war in the […]
What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About the Frustrations of Modern Work
Cal Newport, the author of the brilliant book – Deep Work, has written extensively about the problems of the current workplace, especially in the context of the knowledge worker and the umpteen distractions she faces from technology (email, instant message, social media) to perform ‘Deep Work’. In this piece for the New Yorker, Newport draws upon […]
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