Short read: A British governor, Moharram and the origins of the modern Ganesh Chaturthi festival
Much of peninsular India is in the middle of a 11-day celebration of the “elephant God”, Lord Ganesh. Whilst the Lord has been worshipped for time immemorial, the festival in its current form involving public pandals and processions is a more recent phenomenon. Many of us have been under the impression that this emerged during […]
Short read: The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs For Young People Just Got Stronger
In a world where every publication and author have their own strong beliefs and everything they publish is in support of those beliefs, Derek Thompson is a breath of fresh air, in pursuit of the truth, often exploring both sides of an argument. He has been writing about the impact of AI on jobs, especially […]
Short read: Superman entrepreneurs driving the Indian economy
In Chapter 5 of our bestselling book “Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India” we highlighted the rise of a new Indian elite which did not study at the IITs, IIMs or overseas but now control the Boardrooms of the Nifty50 companies. In this stirring piece for the Hindustan Times, Janmejaya Sinha & […]
Long read: The Calculus of Value
In the think of market conditions like the one we are in, few investors are able to think clearly and fewer so articulate the same. Howard Marks is one of those who can do both. In this memo of his, he gives us a primer of value, price and the interaction between the two and […]
Long read: She was one of the first influencers. It nearly ruined her life.
This is the first in-depth account we have read of what happens to an influencer’s life when she actually becomes successful in her job. Rachel Tashjian’s long article on American influencer Lee Tilghman’s life (based partly on Ms Tilghman’s autobiography “If you don’t like this, I will die”) gives us a glimpse into how social […]
Long read: India’s betting app ban will stoke money laundering
ast week we highlighted articles from The Print and Reuters which explained how the vast Futures & Options (F&O) market that has mushroomed in India post-Covid functions largely as a betting ground where the rich & the powerful fleece billions of dollars from the naïve & the poor each year. This sort of wealth transfer […]
Little Champs: Rising Again on its Sixth Anniversary
After enjoying a splendid run in the first three years of its inception, Little Champs portfolio’s (LCP) returns and earnings growth deteriorated from September 2022 – March 2024. On LCP’s 6th anniversary we focus on what went wrong during this period, the lessons learnt and the course correction we undertook around 18 months ago. The steady […]
MeritorQ: Low-Risk Investing with Sound Fundamentals
In this newsletter, we discuss the so called “low-risk” anomaly which posits that high beta (or high risk) stocks underperform low beta or (low risk stocks) over the long term i.e. there is NO extra return to be earned from owning riskier stocks. We show that this low-risk anomaly works in India as well. In this context, […]
Short read: Global Crossing Is Reborn…
If AI’s progress is indeed stalling, what do we make of the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on GPU laden data centers by the hyperscalers, the likes Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google. Here’s Harris Kupperman, the author of the insightful newsletter Kuppy’s Korner, doing the math for us. And it doesn’t look good […]
Short read: What if A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
Last week, we featured Derek Thompson’e piece on how the AI boom is holding up the US economy and markets. The past few days have seen multiple setbacks to the AI narrative. First, the underwhelming response to OpenAI’s GPT-5. Then, its CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that we might be in an AI bubble. Earlier this week, a report from MIT showed […]
Short read: The hybrid human-Neanderthal fossils that shocked scientists
For decades the pre-conceived notion was that homo sapiens and Neanderthals had NOT interbred. Then a groundbreaking discovery in Romania in 2002 changed that. It is worth watching this short video from the BBC to understand just how comprehensively our view of our own evolution changed in the wake of that discovery. The remarkable Oase […]
From China+1 to India+1: Spooked manufacturers scout for foreign factories
Trump’s tariffs on India have driven a dramatic turnaround in India’s prospects of becoming a manufacturing hub. Just months ago, India was hoping to be the biggest beneficiary of the west reshoring its global supply chains away from China in the aftermath of the Covid experience of excessive reliance on Chinese manufacturing. Furthermore, India’s supposedly […]
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