Driving? The Kids Are So Over It
Last week, we wrote about the disruptions caused by the millenials’ changing attitude towards real estate ownership – you can read that here. This piece talks about how it is no longer a done thing for kids in America to get a driving license, what that is doing to automobile sales and how the auto makers […]
How Darwin Though: The Golden Rule of Thinking
Charlie Munger had said in 1986 that there is a reason why Charles Darwin achieved extraordinary things without an extraordinary intellect:“Darwin’s result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to […]
Traveling With Tagore
Ram Guha, himself a giant amongst contemporary scholars, makes a case for seeing Rabindranath Tagore as one of the ‘four founders of modern India’ alongside Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar. Guha begins by correctly noting that Bengalis and in particular the university that Tagore founded, Vishwa Bharati, have tried to appropriate for themselves this intellectual giant. “Ravi […]
Having Kids Is Terrible for Women’s Earning Power
This article quantifies what many of us have seen happening in our lives (or in the lives of our better halves). “At the beginning of their careers, men’s and women’s income are practically equivalent. By the time everyone’s in their mid-40s, women on average make as little as 55 percent of what men do. Claudia Goldin, […]
Netanyauism is Winning in Israel – and Globally
20 years ago for many non-Israelis, Israel looked like a strange country – a country created from the ravages of World War II by and for Jewish people, a country that seemed to be fighting the Palestinians almost perpetually. 20 years on Israel looks like everywhere else. The rest of the world seems to have […]
Elite men and inequality in the hedge fund industry
Megan Tobias Neely, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, tries to find the reason as to why firms run by white men manage 97 percent of hedge fund assets—a $3.55 trillion industry. Based on her work, Megan believes the answer lies in a system of patronage organizing the […]
How to Think About Taxing and Spending Like a Swede
Monica Prasad, a professor of sociology at Northwestern, discusses tax structures of various countries and its impact on reducing poverty and inequality. Sweden as a country has low poverty & inequality compared to other European countries and America. Whilst the average Swede falls under the high tax bracket (42.9%) compared to the average American (31.7%), […]
How to Value a Pot Stock
After enough research to show marijuana or cannabis or good old pot is now less harmful than tobacco and alcohol, leading to legalisation in America, there is plenty of new business models emerging to capitalise on this trend. More intriguing now is how these businesses are valued given the absolute greenfield nature of this business. […]
The Moral Peril of Meritocracy
This remarkable article from the NYT raises a toast to those who first fail in the great capitalist race to become rich & famous but then lift themselves up to imbue their own lives and that of others with more meaning. These are people whose lives have been lived on what the author calls “two […]
The Great Space Wait – How Virgin Galactic kept ticket holders’ interest and money
A beautiful piece on customer service, especially the role of customer communication when it comes to handling adversity and sustaining trust that underpins the relationship with the customer. Virgin Galactic’s multiple delays in its long anticipated retail space travel can be quite frustrating for customers who have signed up a long time ago, some as […]
Replicating Buffet’s Wide Moat Investing Method
At Marcellus, we like the idea of using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods for identifying firms with big moats. The author, an American fund manager, seems to be doing something similar in the US. Whilst we use YOY revenue growth and ROCE as our filters, he uses: “A decade of earnings predictability: Our Buffett model […]
How single women are driving gentrification in Hong Kong and elsewhere
All of us live with the knowledge the living in HK or London or even Bandra is an expensive affair. Many of us have elaborate financial theories for why this is so. This article comes up with a novel explanation for why living in the big financial & tech capitals of the major economies is […]
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