Marcellus Insights
Long read: Now entering the era of ‘bleh’
Every business in the world today wants to be AI-first. Everyone wants to maximise productivity and get machines to do repeatable tasks. This lovely essay by Aaron Horwath begins with one such firm. Before Lukas Weber writes a word, he checks in with the small army of AI agents he has built: one has combed […]
Long read: Faster! Louder! Brighter! How the attention economy overwhelmed children’s TV
All of us have watched a scene similar to the one the author of this piece opens with. A restless kid at a wedding, or a couple of hours into a long drive, is handed a phone, and almost immediately goes quiet, eyes locked on the screen. Something bright is happening. A character in green […]
Long read: Why Western democracy is ailing, and how to fix it
An equity investor learns early to distrust headlines and headline numbers. Revenue growth tells you little until you know how a company is governed, whether its accounts are clean, and how its managers spend the cash they control. It is a discipline we rarely turn on the countries in which those companies operate. In this […]
How Gold Mines & Nuclear Power Plants Can Help Protect Your Wealth
An investor may be able to reduce their risk without necessarily giving up his return, simply by owning assets that do not rise and fall at the same time. Gold mines, nuclear power and commodities are three such assets: each has compounded in dollars over the past decade, yet each has moved very differently from […]
Short read: Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe
According to Wikipedia, “The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations intended to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. ” The study which began in 2000 and conducted every […]
Short read: Why so many AI researchers think the machines could kill everyone
When we heard from experts that ‘AI will change the world’, no one expected it would mean by them killing all humans! Most industries have their share of critics, but there is something worrying about one whose own builders keep resigning from their jobs because they are frightened of what they are building. But that […]
Short read: Asia’s lonely economy of one
Although India is one of the poorest forty countries in the world (as measured by per capita income), the demographic trends in its big metros and in the prosperous south are already similar to that developed Western countries. Specifically, the proportion of young people not marrying is rising fast, the age at which educated women […]
Long read: Just bury your trash
We have been fed pictures of massive mounds of garbage in landfills to encourage segregating our trash for recycling. However, this article argues that neither is recycling a necessarily viable solution nor are landfills all that bad. “The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally […]
Long read: Should you buy Alien Abduction Insurance?
In our world of personal finance advisory, it is often believed that managing investor behaviour adds far greater value than picking the right investments. This is a result of the development of a new field of economics called Behavioral Economics. It is indeed new in the grand scheme of things as this article reminds us […]
Long read: Will we ever achieve immortality?
Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for working out the structure of the ribosome, and is the author of the blockbuster bestseller, “Why we Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality”. This long piece from him in the Scientific American comes at a time when immortality is turning […]
“Our People Are Our Greatest Asset” – and How to Tell Who Means It
“People first” is the most overused phrase in business, and the least believed. In our new book, The Art of Enduring, we found that the companies that truly live it share two habits: they empower people (and protect them when bets fail), and they expose people to enough roles to grow them into leaders. Bajaj […]
Build a Dravid-Style Global Wealth Building Machine
Most investors chase alpha but good investing is more Test cricket, not T20. Long term wealth creators therefore focus on risk adjusted returns, not alpha. In cricketing parlance, they seek to be more like Dravid rather than Sehwag. Diversifying across the world & across uncorrelated asset classes is a very effective way to generate Dravid-style […]
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