The Long Unhappy History of Working From Home
In the first few days of the lockdown, we featured a piece in 3L-3S, which waxed eloquent about the benefits of Working From Home (WFH) and how it is here to stay. Indeed, the ensuing period saw several large corporations implementing policies where large proportions of their workforce would end up WFH permanently. Facebooks aims […]
The Attack of The Civilization State
Much has been written about the rise of hyper-nationalism with strong men at the helm across countries the world over. This outstanding essay by Bruno Macaes, Portugal’s former secretary of state, attributes this rise to the inherently conflicting perceptions of the concept of western civilisation by nations world over and their reaction to that. The […]
How Berkshire Hathaway May Have Been Snookered in Germany
We spend a significant amount of our time in Marcellus probing our investee companies’ accounts for fraud & theft. It is exhausting work and given the ingenuity of Indian promoters and the Chartered Accountants they hire, it is never ending work. We often lie in bed thinking about the various ways a promoter could be […]
The 5 Elements That Make For An Outstanding Business
Whilst this piece is written in the context of investing in the United States, it gels nicely with Marcellus’ investment philosophy. That apart, the piece elegantly explains the benefits of “Identifying, buying and holding very good businesses over a long period of time can help deliver good returns. While there is no universal template, founder-led businesses […]
Little Champs Are Using The Crisis To Their Advantage
The Little Champs portfolio delivered a PBT growth of 1% in FY20 (compared to the BSE Smallcap’s median decline of 10-15%), a resilient show despite an economy disturbed by Covid-19 towards the year end. Furthermore, with their cost and cash focus, Little Champs have been able to maintain healthy RoCE (19% pre-tax) and debt levels […]
More Younger People Are Testing Positive for the Coronavirus
Daily new cases in the US after having been on a decline for almost two months has surged again in the past two weeks with the count well north of 50,000. Whilst this doesn’t seem to suggest a second wave as bulk of the new cases are coming from states which are seeing a late […]
Why is Gold Valuable?
Last week, we published a blog “The Most Damaging Myths of Indian Investing” in which the first myth we attempted to bust was that Gold will help me protect my wealth. Earlier this week, Nick Maggiulli put out his weekly blog on the same topic – gold as an investment. Unlike Warren Buffet who has been critical of […]
Eyes in the sky
The Kumbh Mela is said to be one of the world’s largest human congregations attracting tens of millions of pilgrims at any given time, obviously posing daunting challenges for the authorities in terms of logistics and crowd safety. Whilst the Kumbh happens every 12 years with the last one in 2013, there is also a […]
Did a Chinese Hack Kill Canada’s Greatest Tech Company?
For some of us who graduated at the turn of the millennium as electronics and communication engineers, Nortel Networks was a dream company to land your first job at. Besides the chance to work with the brightest people in communications technology, Nortel was front and centre of the dotcom boom, being the leading supplier of […]
How Would Investors React If We Finally Get Some Inflation?
In last week’s edition of ‘Three Longs & Three Shorts’ we highlighted the views of Russell Napier and Albert Edwards with respect to the potential for inflation to rise going forward (see https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-inflation-is-coming-the-market-isnt-ready-11592305397). In this piece, Ben Carlson interviews Jeremy Siegel (he of ‘Stocks for the Long Run’ fame) on the same subject and elicits some […]
How to think under pressure
Maria Konnikova used to work for the New Yorker. In January 2017 she took a sabbatical from her job to pursue an unusual goal: “…to train (from scratch) as a professional poker player. The aim was to write a book about the role that chance plays in our lives, using her experiences in the game as […]
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