Afroz Shah’s New Year Lesson
Priya Ramani, the Mint columnist whose spunk catalysed the “Me Too” movement in India last year, profiles a very different type of Indian – Afroz Shah. Unlike people like us who sit in air-conditioned offices and fulminate about the challenges facing India, Afroz hits the beaches and riverbanks of Mumbai to deal with messiest of […]
Dharavi Diary – What happens when girls in one of the world’s largest slums start coding and building apps
Part of India’s renaissance is ordinary people making extraordinary efforts to life of the people around them. This, in a sense, is the continuation of the million mutinies that VS Naipaul wrote about in his 1990 book. Here is one more example if India’s million mutinies. “Dharavi Diary, a non-profit organisation run by documentary filmmaker […]
Kotak Lawsuit: Will It Finally Make RBI Accountable?
A pioneer in investigative journalism in India, Sucheta Dalal, has written a thought provoking piece on what is probably the most important court case in RBI’s history – it’s tussle with Uday Kotak on the matter of Mr Kotak’s shareholding in Kotak Bank. If the RBI loses this case it is hard to see how […]
Marcellus: The Big Shift in Small Town India
Published on: 2 Feb, 2019 With potentially $500 billion per annum of financial savings arising from annual income and with potentially another $100 billion per annum arising from the balance sheet shift (from physical to financial), our visits to India’s smaller cities suggest that the annual flow into financial savings could triple over the next […]
Why India is Blessed with Consistent Compounders?
Marcellus’ Consistent Compounders Philosophy identifies firms with high pricing power that helps sustain a wide gap between returns on capital employed and cost of equity. The portfolio holds such firms for 8-10 years on average and aims to deliver healthy returns with volatility like that of a government bond. We also made the first churn […]
Marcellus: A Cynic’s Guide to Reading Indian Newspapers
Published on: 25 Jan, 2019 80% of the content in Indian newspapers is irrelevant for investors; the other 20% is very useful. The latter 20% focuses on: (a) the actions (not words) of Indian promoters and politicians; and (b) narratives about the majority of Indians whose lives are less comfortable than ours. Furthermore, these narratives […]
Why you gotta love Jasprit Bumrah
Rohit Brijnath is the sort of sportswriter who can make a sportslover love sport even more. But this one is about Jasprit Bumrah. And Brijnath in his typical style invokes the legends…from a Messi to Nadal to Warne to Federer. Bumrah has a long way to go before he can be quoted in the same […]
Jack Bogle: the selfless preacher of the passive revolution
We had to pay our respects. And the FT Editorial does the job in a nice, succinct way. Jack Bogle, the father of passive investing, arguably the most impactful innovation in the investment management industry, passed away last week. The editorial aptly starts by quoting Noble Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson’s article in which he argues […]
Robots will help Chinese firms cope with wages and the trade war
Esquel, a Chinese company, is a leading manufacturer of shirts for Western brands like Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger and also for its own brand, PYE. The firm has 56,000 employees but is constantly focusing on mechanising tasks in the shirt making process so that its employees can focus on more value added work. The […]
I saw the making of Cheteshwar Pujara
From patience in maths to patience in life and on the cricket field, this outstanding piece on Cheteshwar Pujara has to be read and savoured. The author, Sandeep Dwiwedi, grew up with Pujara in the Indian Railways compound in Rajkot. He saw the grind that the now legendary test batsman’s parents – Arvind and Rina […]
Volatility: how ‘algos’ changed the rhythm of the market
The single most frequently asked question to a stock market professional is “where do you think the markets are headed?”. A seemingly more pertinent question asked by clients is “shouldn’t we wait for xyz event (election, rate hike, missile launch, etc) for a better entry point?” Our own experience as market participants have made us […]
Shareholders dethroned as rulers of value
In this sublime essay, John Plender explains how capitalism has changed in the last 100 years and the implications it has for how companies will be run henceforth. “When Thomas Edison’s General Electric was at its most innovative in the late 19th and early 20thcentury, manager and proprietor were one and the same. Control rights in the […]
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