Marcellus Insights

Social Media, not Fake News, Damages your Portfolio

Published on: 30 Oct, 2018 Sixty years ago Solomon Asch showed that we start believing in nonsense if enough people around us are believers. Social media has amplified this problem manifold and thus become a hazard to HNWs’ portfolios. Cutting oneself off from social media and using simple behavioural rules mitigates this problem to a […]

Ticketmaster stages fightback against touts

The pop star Taylor Swift’s business acumen is once again in full display as she comes up with a novel way to solve an age old economic problem. The problem is as follows: when the tickets for a rock concert are sold, the fans who buy the tickets tend to span a wide spectrum of […]

Do not believe the hype about artificial intelligence

The author – inspite of running an AI service provider for corporates – says that AI is being overhyped and overpromoted. He believes that: “We have much faster computers, thanks to Moore’s law, but the underlying algorithms are mostly identical to those that powered machines 40 years ago. Instead, we have creatively rebranded those algorithms. […]

Two articles which should be read together: (1) How social democracy lost its way: a report from German; and (2) What the Left misses about Nationalism

In India it is a common refrain that the Congress can’t get its act together whilst the BJP displays its political muscle on a daily basis. However, the challenges of traditional left of centre political parties do not seem to be confined to India alone as these articles in the FT and NYT show. In […]

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 […]