Sports Cars, Psychopaths, and Testosterone: Inside the New Frontier of Fund Manager Research
We would like to believe a lot of investing success can be attributed to behavioural aspects or psychology than subject matter expertise. Now there is a whole body of research emerging taking this to the next level in terms of assessment of the fund manager’s personality traits as a key input to manager selection, according […]
How Scientists Built A ‘Living Drug’ to beat Cancer
This piece in the WIRED is an adaptation from the book The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer. Quite a riveting story about how when the parents of a six year old offered a bunch of researchers a chance to save their daughter when doctors of conventional medicine had given up all hope. […]
Was e-mail a mistake?
Cal Newport begins by telling us for most of human history, messaging was synchronous by default i.e. in an office or a factory people who needed to be told something had to meet the message giver face to face. As a result, for much of the 20th century “the push to create what communication specialists […]
Starbucks v Dunkin’: how capitalism gives us the illusion of choice
At the core of Marcellus’ investment philosophy is the hunt for quasi-monopolies i.e, companies that dominate their sectors, especially where the product or service is essential to the common man. Such dominance often comes with superior RoCE’s (Return on Capital Employed) which in turn allows high reinvestment rates and therefore long term sustainable profit growth. […]
WeWork Stands Before Us in All Its Naked Glory
How to spot the peak of a market bubble? WeWork’s planned IPO might just give you the template – a flawed business model with assets and liabilities totally out of whack, an up-in-the-air valuation, outright corporate governance misdemeanours, related party transactions, creative accounting in all its glory, a self-aggrandizing founder and here’s the best part […]
Dopamine Fasting – The Hot Silicon Valley Trend
Given the lifestyle of most professionals and the way they deal with broadcast & social media “many of us are highly overstimulated at best and addicted at worst to things that grab at our attention. Even worse, we don’t realize the extent—as I wrote, Americans spend a whopping 11 hours a day engaging with media […]
The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximise Retention
‘Learning how to learn’ is arguably the most important skill that any of us can master. Furthermore, once you acquire/learn new things, you want to be able to retain them. Unfortunately, our schools are not focused on teaching us these skills. “During the school years, most of us got used to spending hours at a […]
Disintermediating your friends
You would think that whilst financial markets can change rapidly, social change takes place more gradually. This academic paper challenges that notion in an important area – how people of opposite sexes meet each other and enter a relationship specifically in the USA: “We present new data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American […]
In Sua Causa: What the judiciary has done to itself
Whilst political corruption is extensively discussed in India, the corruption of the Indian judiciary is both reported less frequently by the press and discussed even less frequently by Indian voters. That’s a shame because alongside the executive and the Parliament, the judiciary is the third pillar of India’s democracy. This in-depth piece from the Caravan […]
Bruce Lee And The Rise Of The “Generalist”
Published on:19 August, 2019 Whilst David Epstein’s latest book, ‘Range’, has ignited the debate on Generalists vs Specialists, we believe that the ideal recipe is a combination i.e. in any competitive profession the people who will rise to the top are those who have: (1) the skills/experience to deal with a wide variety of challenges; […]
Asking Difficult Questions
Published on:14 August, 2019 Asking tough questions which shed new light on the opportunities and challenges facing companies is a non-trivial task. Asking difficult questions involves not just preparation but also an understanding of Q&A techniques and a willingness to shed the deference that analysts naturally have of CEOs. “Getting the right question is the […]
What makes a fulfilling career? Ask a teenager
Featured in the 24th March edition of 3L&3S When we are young, we want to do something creative, something fun in our lives. As we grow older, other considerations kick in and often we find ourselves stuck in a career which is anything but fun & creative. Janan Ganesh delves into why this happens and […]
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