How to Think About Taxing and Spending Like a Swede
Monica Prasad, a professor of sociology at Northwestern, discusses tax structures of various countries and its impact on reducing poverty and inequality. Sweden as a country has low poverty & inequality compared to other European countries and America. Whilst the average Swede falls under the high tax bracket (42.9%) compared to the average American (31.7%), […]
Marcellus: Our Habits, as Much as Our Brains, Drive Investment Decisions
Published on: 26 April, 2019 Even though habits account for 40% of the decisions that we make, the “thinking” part of the brain does NOT control our habits. Understanding the auto-reflex element of habit-driven decision making is central to nailing down why some promoters consistently allocate capital better than others. [Marcellus is offering internships to […]
How to Value a Pot Stock
After enough research to show marijuana or cannabis or good old pot is now less harmful than tobacco and alcohol, leading to legalisation in America, there is plenty of new business models emerging to capitalise on this trend. More intriguing now is how these businesses are valued given the absolute greenfield nature of this business. […]
The Moral Peril of Meritocracy
This remarkable article from the NYT raises a toast to those who first fail in the great capitalist race to become rich & famous but then lift themselves up to imbue their own lives and that of others with more meaning. These are people whose lives have been lived on what the author calls “two […]
Marcellus: Three Degrees of Disruption in Home Buying in India
Published on: 18 April, 2019 The rapidly growing sharing economy, and the availability of easy credit for pursuing ‘dreams’ and ‘desires’, together are shaping the attitude of young Indians towards buying assets. The impact is most visible in the waning demand for assets that demand long-term financial commitments and where options exist to delink usage […]
Marcellus: The Most Important Questions to Ask Your Fund Manager
Published on: 17 April, 2019 The clients who ask us the most probing questions tend to have well organised work lives and a fierce focus on doing what is most useful and most enjoyable for them. Everything else is edited out of their lives. Such clients are not just successful capital allocators, they are also […]
The Great Space Wait – How Virgin Galactic kept ticket holders’ interest and money
A beautiful piece on customer service, especially the role of customer communication when it comes to handling adversity and sustaining trust that underpins the relationship with the customer. Virgin Galactic’s multiple delays in its long anticipated retail space travel can be quite frustrating for customers who have signed up a long time ago, some as […]
Replicating Buffet’s Wide Moat Investing Method
At Marcellus, we like the idea of using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods for identifying firms with big moats. The author, an American fund manager, seems to be doing something similar in the US. Whilst we use YOY revenue growth and ROCE as our filters, he uses: “A decade of earnings predictability: Our Buffett model […]
How single women are driving gentrification in Hong Kong and elsewhere
All of us live with the knowledge the living in HK or London or even Bandra is an expensive affair. Many of us have elaborate financial theories for why this is so. This article comes up with a novel explanation for why living in the big financial & tech capitals of the major economies is […]
The humble zipper has profound things to tell us about international trade
Zip manufacturing is not the most often discussed industries in investor forums. Yet this article brings out some key insights about the implications of international trade on competitive intensity and more generally the competitive advantage and its implications on the consumers in the industry. We often think about pricing power as the manifestation of underlying […]
Thousands of Amazon Workers Listen to Alexa Users’ Conversations
Individuals’ right to privacy is one of the most intensely debated issues around the globe as technology has blurred the definition/meaning of privacy. Amazon’s Alexa has become very popular and has entered millions of homes across the world (78m smart speakers made Amazon, Google, etc were sold globally last year alone). Recent revelations that it […]
Two’s Are Now Underestimated – The Mikan Drill For Stocks
This is an interesting and rewarding long read from an investment advisory firm in Houston. The article uses the stats & the history of professional basketball in the US to draw analogies for stockmarket investing. The article appeals to us for the implications it has for our style of investing in well known, widely held […]
For more content on our strategy, visit the archives GO TO ARCHIVES