How the face mask became the world’s most coveted commodity
This long read from The Guardian encapsulates all that is right about global capitalism (eg. lightning fast responses to business opportunities and human needs which can be monetised) and everything else which gives it a bad name (eg. the ever pressing need to loot the needy). Samanth Subramanian explains that even now nobody is clear […]
The Man Who Thought Too Fast
The greatness of the New Yorker lies not just in writing well researched articles on well known people (eg. Yuval Noah Harari on whom the New Yorker published a brilliant cover story a few months ago) but also in the magazine’s manifest ability to write carefully crafted pieces about important but less celebrated people eg. […]
Behold The Leviathan: The Remaking of Indian Capitalism
The 20 most profitable firms in India now generate 70% of the country’s profits, up from 14% thirty years ago. The rise of India’s networked economy (highways, cheap flights, broadband, GST) has allowed large, efficient firms to use superior technology & better access to capital to squash smaller competitors. In line with what is being […]
Shanghai Disneyland Sells Out Of Tickets For Post-Shutdown Reopening
Just earlier this week, the FT’s Alphaville wrote about ‘Introducing, the Disney Park Indicator’ as ‘the ultimate economic indicator of whether the world has returned to its 2019 “normality”’ – citing that ‘a visit to Disney, and in particular Florida’s Disney World, requires that a consumer does everything they’re not doing right now’. Going to Disney is an expensive affair (avg […]
The Landscape Has Changed For Traditional Value Investing
Bruce Greenwald is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business and the author of the books Value Investing: from Graham to Buffett and Beyond and Competition Demystified: A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy. The blog cites a recent podcast with him where he highlights why value investing as it has been traditionally understood (buying low […]
Extreme returns
Here’s one piece which highlights the merits of active investing and yet shows why it is so hard to generate alpha. Baillie Gifford, a Scottish investment management firm pursues strong collaborative ties with the academia to stay ahead of the curve. In one such piece, James Anderson, a partner at BG, writes about research from […]
Naseeruddin Shah: ‘Irrfan’s legacy is like a constellation of stars for everyactor to take inspiration from’
For those who aspire to excellence, Naseeruddin Shah has long set the benchmark in Indian cinema. Over the past decade however many of us were left spellbound by the acting of a modern master, Irrfan Khan. From his breakthrough movie “The Warrior” (2001) to seeing his spine chilling portrayal of Maqbool in Vishal Bhardwaj’s movie […]
Cox and Kings Dossier – Parts 1 & 2: Audit uncovers siphoning of crores, fudging of records and bogus sales
Last week, we highlighted a piece in The Economist which highlighted that the ongoing economic crisis will bring to the fore a decade’s worth of accounting fraud (see https://www.economist.com/business/2020/04/18/the-economic-crisis-will-expose-a-decades-worth-of-corporate-fraud). We also highlighted one of our older blogs where we had laid out the link between liquidity crunches and accounting fraud – see https://marcellus.in/blogs/accounting-fraud-and-liquidity-crunches-are-bedfellows/. Given that accounting fraud […]
Black swans, Black crows and Fund lies
In our conversations with investors, we find the emphasis is largely around returns and very little attention is paid to risk. In this piece, Ajit Dayal, who is not one to pull his punches, especially when it comes to the mutual fund industry, brings out the perils of not using risk-adjusted returns in the context […]
For more content on our strategy, visit the archives GO TO ARCHIVES