Marcellus Insights

Bloomberg Quint | Talking Point With Saurabh Mukherjea | May 31, 2020

The Last Dance’ and lessons in leadership

For most Indians, the first experience of watching the NBA live on TV was in the early nineties with the arrival of cable television. And this coincided with one of most purple patches for a basketball team featuring the greatest basketball player and the greatest basketball coach ever. The Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan’s genius […]

As WeWorks lie empty, coworking spaces face their day of reckoning

The WeWorks fiasco may have been a result of its’ founder Adam Neuman’s shenanigans fueled by Softbank’s megalomania. But it also showed the fundamental weakness of the co-working business model i.e, an asset-liability mismatch with long dated assets in the real estate backed by short term contracts with tenants, a classic recipe for disaster, exacerbated […]

Old style investing doesn’t work anymore, says Damodaran

The chorus of the end of value investing the way it was known and practised is getting louder and louder with more legends from the world of investing lend their voice to it. This time it is Professor Aswath Damodaran, who perhaps knows a thing or two about valuation – he teaches a popular course […]

While Everyone Is Distracted By Social Media, Successful People Double Down On An Underrated Skill

One of the key reasons to publish ‘Three longs and three shorts’ is that in a world with information overload, any means to separate the signal from the noise can make a meaningful difference to our understanding of the world around us. This is perhaps the most common problem all of us face when it comes to […]

The great depression paradox: Children survived, then thrived

Millions of parents around the world are fretting about the impact of the lockdown on their children. This article from Bloomberg should reduce parental anxiety a notch or two: “Perhaps it’s time to re-read the classic longitudinal study “Children of the Great Depression.” Written by sociologist Glenn Elder, it mined data first collected in a study […]

Where do eels come from?

Every now and then we across an article which makes us realise just how little we understand of the world around us. This piece from the New Yorker not only highlights the limits of our knowledge but also how that lack of knowledge isn’t preventing us from wrecking the world which we live in. This […]

India’s Kings of Capital – Part II: Deepak Parekh

In part I of this series, we looked at how Uday Kotak has successfully steered the Kotak group over the past 35 years (read Part – I here). In this piece we try and delve deeper into the illustrious career of another successful Gujarati banker – Deepak Parekh. We explore the two vital facets of institution building […]

Investing Through a Crisis: A Handbook from Marcellus Investment Managers

When stock markets crash during an economic crisis, the move to the bottom is usually so fast, that investors seldom get a chance to react in a rational manner. With panic all around, many end up exiting their investments at or near the bottom. Further, with uncertainty on when the economy will recover, its hard […]

Covid is teaching us that force of nature is bigger than combined force of science and technology

Despite being a political appointment, the Reserve Bank of India has been blessed with some illustrious Governors at the helm. Dr Duvvuri Subbarao was one of them. In this oped for the Indian Express, he does a compare and contrast with the current Covid driven financial crisis to the subprime mortgage led Global financial crisis […]

Mathematics of investing and life

Nalanda Capital is one of the most successful investment firms that have come up in the last couple of decades and one that has been an inspiration and source of learning for many of us at Marcellus. Anand Sridharan, an investor at Nalanda writes an entertaining yet enlightening blog on LinkedIn. This one, as the title says, […]

Is your strategy good enough to move you up on the power curve?

Earlier this week, we published a blog about the rising concentration of profits in India amongst a handful of companies – the 20 most profitable firms in India now generate 70% of the country’s profits, up from 14% thirty years ago. In response, one of our readers shared this piece from Mckinsey which shows similar findings from […]