How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory
As everyone now knows, Liverpool are once again the football champions of Europe. But what you might know is the role data analytics – Moneyball style, Billie Bean style analytics – has played in Liverpool’s triumph. In fact, without analytics, Liverpool (which is owned by the same American company which owns baseball’s Boston Red Sox) […]
Marcellus: Crushing Risk is More Rewarding than Chasing Returns
Published on:14 June, 2019 High flown theories of Finance & Investing don’t work in India. What works in the Indian stockmarket is risk minimisation. We minimise risks associated with accounting fraud, with topline & bottomline volatility and with liquidity. In other words, we invest in clean monopolies selling essential products. Sophisticated investment literature can be […]
Marcellus: Your All-Powerful Plastic Brain
Published on:8 June, 2019 British neuroscientist, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, has shown that the human brain continues to learn, evolve and adapt throughout its life. Her work on the plasticity of the human brain is a tonic for those of us who are keen to learn new skills and push our minds to places it has not […]
Marcellus: India’s tiger boom is System 2 thinking exemplified
Published on:7 June, 2019 We navigate day-to-day life, making decisions mostly based on our intuitive thinking, which is formed by years of experience in understanding and judging events. However, many important decisions in life, especially in investing, require thinking beyond the obvious, what is called System 2 thinking. This summer, I went tiger sighting at […]
Influencer grannies are a lesson in how to reinvent oneself
Utkarsh Amitabh in his succinct post talks about the need for everyone to keep evolving to stay relevant in the current environment. He cites the example of Italian grannies who have embraced social media & digital marketing to spread their handmade pasta recipe and their culture. Their readiness to evolve & accept technology has helped […]
Why Tracking Your Symptoms Can Make You Feel Worse
Elena Lacey at WIRED cites some research studies to show how tracking your symptoms actually makes you feel worse than help in a recovery. “Fifteen percent of adults in the US use an app regularly or occasionally to track symptoms of a disease. About as many use a sleep-tracking app to figure out whether they […]
If Akbar and Ibrahim II had met, they would have liked each other: Manu S Pillai
This conversation between two of India’s best historians who are currently in circulation – William Dalrymple and Manu Pillai – exposes the cardboard cutout history that is routinely taught in India’s schools and which infect the popular narrative of how India has evolved. Pillai points out that whilst Shivaji (and his war with the Mughals) […]
Why Doctors Hate Their Computers
IT systems in large enterprises often cause as much anguish among the users whose lives these very systems were created to simplify in the first place. In this piece from the New Yorker, Atul Gawande a surgeon and better known as a best-selling author applies this situation particularly to the world of doctors where the advent of […]
Beyond the Hype of Lab-Grown Diamonds
Diamonds were formed deep inside the bowels of Planet Earth billions of years ago. “As the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates plunged down into the upper mantle, bits of carbon, some likely hailing from long-dead life forms were melted and compressed into rigid lattices. Over millions of years, those lattices grew into the most durable, dazzling […]
Return on Capital Super Heroes
American fund manager, Tom Machperson of Nintai Partners, highlights something that many of us who manage money know but never fully acknowledge i.e. “Managers who are frugal, both in their personal lives and in their compensation, generally run companies with higher returns on capital than those overseen by the most highly compensated managers.” Nintai Partners’ number […]
Why are we underperforming the Nifty?
In FY19, our portfolio companies reported 18% revenue growth, 16% earnings growth and 37% ROCE. Whilst this was a healthy performance at an overall level, the external environment facing our companies deteriorated towards the end of FY19 due to tight credit conditions accentuated by the challenges in the NBFC sector (and hence challenges faced by […]
Marcellus: “Unusual Billionaires” Flip the Competitive Paradigm
There are around 25 dominant franchises in the BSE500. Most of them have been created by “Unusual Billionaires – promoters or CEOs who saw their sectors through a very different lens than everybody else and then proceeded to flip the competitive paradigm to create an enduring competitive advantage. “…And they shared an interesting set of […]
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