The rich own stocks, the middle class own homes. How betting it all on real estate is a wealth gap problem
Ben Carlson comes at the inequality challenge from an asset class ownership point of view. Over the last decade or so much of economic policy making such as quantitative easing has benefited owners of capital i.e, the rich with financial markets having their best decade. And hence contributed to the growing inequality between the have’s and […]
Old People Have All the Interesting Jobs in America
Tyler Cowen sheds light on an issue which has puzzled many of us over the past 20 years. Here is the conundrum: in the West, over the past 20 years, a peculiar trend has emerged wherein the brightest graduates aspire to enter Finance, Management Consulting and Law. (India too has seen the onset of this […]
Prudent Capital Allocation is Critical for Consistent Compounding
The most sustainable way for a firm to compound profits over the longer term, is to sustain high ROCE alongside a high rate of capital reinvestment. However, such businesses face the challenge of consistently finding avenues for incremental capital redeployment in areas which deliver high ROCE. Some of the most common capital allocation mistakes made […]
Security analysis at Columbia Business Schol
The last couple of decades have seen a new stream of sources of information and insight with the emergence of social media or user generated content. Whilst books, journals, periodicals and news papers have contributed immensely over time, blogs, Ted talk videos, podcasts, etc have become a rich supplementary source. Whilst we have featured most […]
The Revolution Comes to Davos
It is that time of the year when billionaires across the world come together at the Swiss ski resort town of Davos to ideate on how to make the world a better place. Tim Wu of the NY Times writes why the event is becoming increasingly farcical given the ironies involved. Last week, a meme […]
This book put me to sleep
You can’t go too wrong with your reading if you have Bill Gates making your reading list. In this blog post, he reviews Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” and based on his learnings, provides a quick tutorial on the why’s and how’s of sleep science. Reflecting upon his younger days as a software engineer pulling […]
Virgin Galactic And The Potential of Space Tourism
Kevin Rooke is a young independent analyst focusing on investment research on technology companies. Some of his other posts about how Apple’s booming airpods business at $12bn revenues alone is bigger than some marquee tech companies including the likes of Adobe, Nvidia or AMD or the one on Tesla’s now meaningfully large energy storage business […]
Is Singapore’s ‘perfect’ economy coming apart?
Friends in Singapore keep telling us that it ain’t like the good old times in the city. The city apparently as friendly and as habitable as it was a decade ago. This piece in the Asian Review details the challenges facing Singapore. The first problem is the familiar challenge of blue-collar manufacturing jobs disappearing: “Midlevel jobs […]
How Private Equity Wrecked New York’s Favourite Grocery
Although private equity (PE) in India has barely been around for 20 years, many of us have already seen some of our favourite brands laid low by the combined incompetence of PE firms and the original owners of the franchise. Nirula’s in the NCR is one such example. In this piece Joe Nocera describes how […]
Learnings from the Unravelling of Indian Pharma Industry
US FDA’s record warning letters to Indian pharma majors in the recent years, Katherine Eban’s hard hitting book on Indian pharma (ignoring the controversial aspects) and our research on the sector raises concerns around the risk-adjusted rewards of investing in the standard Indian Big Pharma model. Moreover, in an industry where non-compliance costs years of […]
Johns Hopkins University Reimagines the M.B.A.
At Marcellus, we prefer to hire our research analysts via an internship program and for interns we tend to lean towards those with an accounting or a CFA qualification as opposed to an MBA. We don’t seem to be alone in that with the MBA program globally falling out of favour to the extent that […]
Why India faces a public funding crisis
Rathin Roy is perhaps one of India’s finest macro economists currently. He made headlines last year for suggesting that India could be heading into the middle-income trap if things weren’t fixed soon. In this logically argued piece with plenty of data in the Mint, he relieves most of us of our misery of anticipating what could be […]
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