Marcellus Insights

Quant Investor Cliff Asness Hasn’t Smashed His Screen This Year—Yet

Cliff Asness has built AQR Capital Management into a systematic investing giant by capitalizing on two trends: the growing power of computers and the demand for lower fund fees. Today, AQR runs $226 billion in strategies built on so-called factors—behaviors that securities tend to exhibit over time. The problem is the “over time” qualifier – […]

What Sets Successful CEOs Apart

The authors conducted a 10-year study (dubbed the “CEO Genome Project”) to identify what sets successful CEOs apart. They tapped into a database containing more than 17,000 assessments of C-suite executives, including 2,000 CEOs and “sifted through that information, looking for what distinguished candidates who got hired as CEOs from those who didn’t, and those who […]

The end of QE and fund management

Published on: 26 Oct, 2018 Over the last ten years macro factors drove the majority of stock returns in India thus reducing the importance of investors’ skill/judgement. The end of QE is likely to reduce overall market returns but the out-performance of skillful fund managers will almost certainly be higher over the next ten years […]

FY19 earnings growth likely to be pulled back to 8-10%: Saurabh Mukherjea

How tech employees are pushing Silicon Valley to put ethics before profit

To end on a brighter note, whilst the world is understandably worried about rapid groundbreaking technological advancements potentially working against humanity if abused, here is a piece which gives hope, for a better future. To the extent, leaders of large organisations drive culture around ethics, it is refreshing to see employees effecting shared beliefs even […]

The case for drip-feed investing is plausible, but costs more

In his typical style, the Undercover Economist debunks yet another everyday gospel – cost averaging. He shows that it works neither in theory nor has backing from historical data. Yet, he concludes it might still be the best thing to do simple because the alternatives known to us aren’t any better. However, acknowledging the shortcomings […]

Dodgy data makes it hard to judge Modi’s job promises

Some of us in Marcellus were still in primary school when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister. In that era, our parents would give the news broadcast on Doordarshan a miss and tune into the BBC World Service’s 9pm broadcast to understand what was happening in India. Ironically, the BBC reported both Indira Gandhi’s and […]

In the Himalayas, living the crisis that the IPCC report warns off

One of the challenges of our job is that we tend to lose all sense of proportion and obsess about trivialities such as the RBI’s interest rate announcements or the latest sexual escapades of our politicians. Meanwhile, changes take place in the real world which are quite literally earth-shaking. On 6th October 2018, the Intergovernmental […]

Saudi Princes Quest to Remake the Middle East

In the wake of what looks like the murder of Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey, it is worth spending some time to understand how and why the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), is moving at such speed to stamp out all opposition to the […]

The Big Hack – How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate US Companies

This investigative article based on interviews with American government officials and corporates claims that Chinese spies attacked almost 30 US companies, including Amazon and Apple “by compromising America’s technology supply chain”. So how did China pull this off? It appears that China inserted a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, into […]

Fooled by probabilities and by Indian NBFCs

Published on:20 October, 2018 There are plenty of cleverly crafted games in which you win most of the time and are rewarded with small payoffs. However, in such games there is always one scenario (which is not the base case scenario) where you get wiped out completely. Investing in NBFCs resembles these games of chance. […]

What do we expect from a CEO

Published on: 19 Oct, 2018 Rather than being a corporate Superwoman, the Effective CEO is an honest, industrious, well informed executive who is aware of her limitations and understands that her conduct and her incentive structure sets the tone for the rest of the firm. “Buffett manages his CEOs just like he manages his stock […]