The True Cost Of Ignoring True Cost
WeWork’s failed IPO has led to several notable commentators in America highlighting the folly of private markets and pointing to the broader house of cards constructed by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. The most famous of these pieces has come from veteran commentator, Jason Zweig (see https://jasonzweig.com/how-we-should-bust-an-investing-myth/> ). The responses to Zweig’s piece are actually very interesting […]
Is Amazon Unstoppable?
As we approach the next US presidential elections, the chorus against big corporate will only get louder. Hence, it is only logical that the largest corporate – Amazon becomes front and centre of this outrage. Plenty has been written about Amazon’s ‘Day One’ and ‘Flywheel’ approach to business which has made it a relentless growth […]
Stephen Schwarzman Hung Out a Shingle.Then He Waited.
The appropriately titled King Capital was a story about Blackstone and how Stephen Schwarzman built a world class investment management organisation. Now, you can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth in Schwarzman’s new book What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence. Here’s a two-part excerpt of the book from The Institutional Investor. If you would […]
Real Economy Check: ‘Jammed Liquidity’ To ‘Overwhelming Regulations’ Hurting Small Drugmakers, Says Orbit Lifesciences
This insightful interview with Amit Sheth, the promoter of Orbit Lifesciences, is a rare example of a promoter talking rationally and articulately about the ongoing economic slowdown. [Most promoters’ interviews regarding the slowdown span the narrow spectrum from begging the Government for help to thanking the Government for help!] First off, BloombergQuint gives you a […]
AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks
An argument in favour of automation using Artificial Intelligence replacing humans with machines for jobs that are menial is that humans will go on to devoting more time to solving the harder and more challenging problems the world is facing. However, cognitive psychology suggests that in some fields, taking away the menial jobs from humans […]
‘The 3.5% rule: How a small minority can change the world
The arresting piece contends that “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.” The article begins with several examples of how quickly authoritarian governments cave-in when faced with civil protest. It then says that […]
Contradictory Figures: Lessons From Uber’s Rise
Ben Carlson, another star commentator from the fabulous Ritholtz stable, discusses one of the best business books he has read for a long time – Mike Isaac’s book ‘Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber’. Carlson says that there are no neat black & white takeaways from Uber’s rise; instead there a good, bad and ugly […]
Is it possible to disrupt a cow?
We have featured the rise of the fake meat or the plant based protein industry in this space earlier highlighting how this could go a long way in reducing carbon footprint generated by the beef industry. This blog by Seth Miller provides an alternate perspective – about how the success of fake meat may not […]
Notes from a Sun Tzu skeptic
In many aspects of our lives, we tend to take certain age-old practices for granted without understanding the underlying principles and context, including our own world of investing – whilst principles of investing are broadly applicable across the world, there are nuances in each market which require a more contextual application. In this article, John […]
What former CAG Vinod Rai found when auditing the accounts of Kerala’s Shree Padmanabhaswamy temple
t Marcellus we never stop harping on the importance of clean books of accounts and why companies with cooked up numbers have caused major wealth erosion of shareholders/bondholders/banks over the years. Among other things, companies must pass our forensic audit to become part of our portfolio. This article is an excerpt from Vinod Rai’s new […]
The House Releases the Declassified Whistle-Blower Complaint Against Donald Trump
A whistle blower has released a letter that has set off the events that may well end with President Trump’s impeachment. The contents of the letter are so remarkable that Trump’s decision to make public the recording of the call to the Ukranian president (which is at the centre of the controversy) in an attempt […]
The curious case of Bhavish Aggarwal and Ola Electric
More than a decade after the Lehman Brothers bust unleashed the greatest tide of liquidity seen in the history of mankind, across the world we are now seeing weird & wonderful transactions in the Tech sector. From WeWork’s stalled IPO to Uber’s tanking share price to, closer home, the remarkable valuation of Ola Electric. Moneycontrol […]
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