Long read: Electric cars are already upending America
Saahil Desai begins by saying that electric cars have reached tipping point in USA: “…electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million […]
A Retailer’s Path to Consistent Compounding
Over an extended period of time, it is hard to make money in Retailing. In this newsletter, we discuss a subset of retailing – apparel retailing – and how the principles that underpin the business models of consistent compounders in general are of relevance for success in apparel retailing as well. Two key variables – […]
Short read: Byron Wien’s 20 Life Lessons
On the back of Sam Altman’s ‘What I Wish Someone Had Told me’ list blog going viral, a reader shared this ‘Life Lessons’ list from Byron Wien, the nonagenarian ex-vice chairman of Blackstone’s Private Wealth Solutions group. Wien first created this a decade ago when asked to speak to an audience at a conference on what he […]
Short read: LVMH Prize semi-finalist Kartik Kumra of menswear label Karu Research on the recipe behind his bestselling Kantha fits
Whilst the global luxury brands were able to crack the East Asian markets without really incorporating Asian designs into their collections, they have realised that such a tactic won’t work in a civilisation like India where the local design aesthetic still plays a central role how the elite like to dress. Therefore, as the number […]
Long read: How Putin’s Right-Hand Man Took Out Prigozhin
The dramatic rise and the eventual fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin has been well documented, including a couple of pieces in the 3L&3S. For the uninitiated, Prigozhin, an ex-convict who rose to running a private army (Wagner) including running missions for Vladmir Putin in the ongoing war in Ukraine. On the back of his growing power, […]
Long read: Some UPSC aspirants don’t quit Mukherjee Nagar even after failing. They become the bhaiyas
Many of you would have heard about Kota, the place where IIT aspirants go to spend the best years of their lives swotting for IIT entrance exams. Mukherjee Nagar, a suburb in the northern part of Delhi, is the equivalent of Kota for the UPSC (Union Public Service) exams which determine the identities of the […]
Long read: Lindy Effect in Investing
One of the most common fallacies in business life and in investing is that change is all around us and that everything is changing and therefore, by deduction, all of us need to hyperventilate about whether our investments are on the bleeding edge of change. A decade ago, in his book ‘Antifragile’, Nassim Taleb popularized […]
The phrase that ruled the Indian internet in 2023
Barkha Dutt explains in this piece how the phrase “Looking like a wow” came to rule India, why the rise of this phrase captures much of the change that is taking place in India. The phrase itself comes from an unlikely source: “At its heart, this is a story of how technology and social media — […]
How Will Equity Markets Perform in 2024?
It is that time of the year when reports such as ‘Market Outlook for 2024’ show up in our inboxes. Joe Wiggins of Behavioural Investment reminds us of the futility of making such forecasts about entities such as the market which are inherently in the short term (yes, one year is by any measure a […]
Why you age slower on a plane (and other incredibly strange effects of relativity)
Chris Lintott is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a lecturer at Gresham College. He Chris Lintott informs us that “a core principle of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which is that time is not universal. The faster you travel, the slower time will pass for you”. He then says that scientists have proven […]
The Revenge Of The Ottoman Empire
Amidst the slew of reports in the Western media about how the Chinese economy is unravelling, Louis-Vincent Gave of Gavekal research, a China focused research outfit has been putting out contrarian arguments. Here’s another piece on how China is holding up with rising trade surplus offsetting the decline with the west with rapid rise in […]
The Rise And Fall Of The ‘IBM Way’
Deborah Cohen, a professor of history at Northwestern University reviews the book ‘The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived’, a biography of Thomas Watson Jr, the CEO of IBM in the middle of the 20th century. Under Watson Jr, IBM rose to being a computing giant in the post war era, before succumbing to the innovator’s dilemma […]
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