The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
As we continue to peel the layers of the Chinese onion, we found this brilliant piece which attempts to answer what is behind all the recent crackdown by the Chinese state on tech monopolies or rather who is behind it. Whilst there is no doubt it is Xi Jinping’s Common Prosperity programme, this article in […]
How to write with style
At Marcellus we care deeply about thinking, talking and writing clearly. Not only does it allow us to communicate better with the outside world, it also forces us to clarify our thinking. So, when we found a piece by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut, on how to write well, we […]
Electric vehicles: the revolution is finally here
The last 12 months has seen an extraordinary surge in demand for EVs – not just expensive EVs like Tesla but also regular non-descript EVs: “Electric vehicles still only make up about 1 per cent of the global fleet of passenger cars, but sales are taking off rapidly. Within four years, one quarter of new cars […]
Valuing stocks: why investors should look harder at expectations
Valuing stocks is often a tricky exercise which is why most market participants take the easy route of using multiples, the shortcomings of which we have discussed at length in our newsletters – here and here. Whilst in theory, the value of a company is the present value of its future cashflows, in practice it is less of […]
How ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Started a New Debate About Sexism in Chess
At last month’s Emmy awards, Netflix won a whopping 44 awards compared to HBO’s 19 showing how streaming TV had come around to dominate. A quarter of those came from the brilliant limited series “The Queen’s Gambit” about a female chess player and the struggles she faced on her path to glory. This article in […]
Xi’s Changing Plan
Plenty has been written and plenty more will be written about the Chinese unravelling starting with the failed Ant Financial IPO to the crackdown on edtech companies and most recently the collapse of real estate developer Evergrande. Yet, the opacity of the Chinese regime means it isn’t easy to get to the reality on the […]
How a stellar team of economists transformed India in the 1990s
Often economists are criticised for lacking a practical approach to policy making given the reality of the political economy. But this is a story to the contrary, about how a team of economists were instrumental in transforming the Indian economy from the brink in the 90’s, a decade that saw the rise of coalition politics. […]
12 Things Lee Kuan Yew Taught Me About the World
One of the things that we have learnt from our guru Sir John Kay is that if we are to improve the quality of our thinking, we have to read about people and concepts that we disagree with. Hence whilst we are proud of India’s democracy, we have to read about countries and leaders who […]
NFRA’s R Sridharan: Loose drafting of law and muddle-headed thinking have led to regulatory capture
As we learnt from our recent trip to New Delhi, there is a massive punch-up playing out at present for control of the audit & accounting profession. In the blue corner is the ICAI, the chartered accountants’ trade body, which is protecting its turf and its members. In the red corner is the National Financial […]
‘Lethargy Tests’ For Our Little Champs
At Marcellus we use our proprietary Longevity Framework to rank companies on the quantitative and qualitative aspects surrounding the longevity of their free cash flows. This framework is not only used for initial stock selection but also as a tool to continuously evaluate the portfolio companies to detect any signs of lethargy (or loss of […]
How Portfolio Rebalancing Tools Enhance Investors’ Returns
Every stock market crash causes a dislocation in a portfolio of high-quality companies, due to differential drawdowns in the share prices of constituent stocks. Rebalancing such a portfolio in the aftermath of the crash not only generates additional returns, it also crushes the risk of being left with uninvested cash. The biggest challenge faced by […]
Lennon a Marxist or capitalist?
The best part of publishing 3L&3S is the reciprocal content we get from our readers. Last week’s edition featured a review of the book “Greed is dead” by Sir John Kay and Sir Paul Collier, where we asked: “What these two economists highlight is a powerful contradiction which runs through the mental models many of us use to […]
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