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 […]
The Investor’s Fallacy – Why Markets are Never “Due” for Anything
“In God we trust, others must bring data” is a quote attributed to Deming. But Nick Maggiulli is perhaps one of the most ardent followers of that. In this piece, Nick uses long term data to show why the fact that the US stock markets have had a great run in the past decade doesn’t […]
Tomorrow’s industries: from OLEDs to nanomaterials
In his incredibly fascinating book Loonshots, Safi Bahcall discusses how serendipity plays a role in most big inventions. This aspect is even more accentuated in the field of material science. As this piece by Neil Savage in Nature shows, humans have always explored the different properties of various materials available on the planet to solve a […]
Why every company needs a Chief Fun Officer
It is worth ignoring the puerile title of this piece and focusing on the more substantive point made by the piece: “Besides making working lives more enjoyable, there is strong evidence that fun in the workplace packs a powerful punch in terms of organisational benefits. For example, I researched the restaurant industry (in collaboration with John Michel from […]
Manchester United Is the General Electric of Football
This article draws an interest parallel between capital allocation in the corporate world and that in the world of football in the specific context of GE and Manchester United. The author contends that “Like GE, the club once dominated its field but has lately chucked away its cash on terrible acquisitions.” So, how did these two […]
How the Nifty will change in the coming decade?
20 of today’s Nifty constituents are highly likely to be booted out over the next decade. We outline how you can identify the exits (relatively easy to do) and the entrants into the Nifty (a little harder to do) over the next decade. If you are good at spotting the 20 entrants into the Nifty […]
What’s in the Forecast: Private Weather Predictions
The movie industry globally has had this Sci- Fi sub-genre “Climatic Apocalypse” movies, which gained momentum in the 90s and is still profitably milking it. If you watch them again (and tone down the magnitude and special effects) you will find it is more relatable and it is happening for real. Eerily unravelling like Nostradamus […]
Phil Fisher: The Art of Holding On
At Marcellus, we believe that identifying a great company is hard enough, selling them is harder and continuing to hold them for long is hardest. Phil Fisher is a legend in the world of investing and had a similar investment philosophy of identifying great compounders and holding them for long. He is the man who […]
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