Marcellus Insights
Short read: Why get an MBA when you can watch a sports documentary?
Recently released documentary about the tennis legend Novak Djokovic – Wolf in Winter is made by Jason Hehir, who shot to fame with his documentary of the Chicago Bulls team of the 90s – The Last Dance. That documentary is considered a lesson in management in many ways. This article argues there is plenty to […]
Short read: India’s textile parks are half empty. Do we need more?
There is a familiar ritual to Indian industrial policy. A minister announces a bold new scheme, a ribbon is cut somewhere, and a few years later the same announcement is quietly made again as though for the first time. When Nirmala Sitharaman used the 2026-27 budget to propose mega textile parks “in challenge mode”, she […]
Short read: How to future-proof your wrists
One of the great joys of cricket is watching VVS Laxman or Mohammad Azharuddin execute their signature flick shot. A ball is coming in at the stumps, and with a late roll of the wrists, they flick it off the pads through midwicket to the boundary with almost no visible effort. It is not power […]
Long read: The mind virus: Why you should care whether you read AI-generated content
Marcellus’ Three Longs and Three Shorts newsletter was born out of an informal habit of sharing amongst ourselves what we found as good reads on the internet. In recent years, the likelihood of finding a good one has paradoxically reduced significantly despite or rather because the volume of articles online at the likes of Substack […]
Long read: Slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence
AI bulls believe Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is around the corner. AGI refers to the form of AI which beats human cognitive capabilities across any domain. Whilst AI is already beating humans at certain tasks, the comparison of machine intelligence with human intelligence has sparked a debate on what defines intelligence or cognition in […]
Long read: Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score
If you are looking for a profound and immersive read on a Sunday morning, this article is it. In fact, this article is about exactly such experiences and why they are central to mental health and healing. Have you noticed how much of modern life now comes with a score attached? “We track our sleep […]
The Rebuilding of Indian Consumption Has Three Pillars
In Breakpoint we showed that India’s middle class has been pulverised — white-collar job creation has stopped, real wages have gone backwards for nearly a decade, and the gap has been plugged with debt. That damage is now visible in the numbers that used to define Indian consumption. FMCG volume growth has fallen from 12% in FY11 to 3% […]
Why Divi’s Never Made a Pill: The Quiet Power of Focus
In our new book “The Art of Enduring: How Great Companies Turn Crisis into Opportunity”, Divi’s Labs is one of the five extended case studies. The stock also happens to be one of earliest holdings of Marcellus’ Consistent Compounders Portfolio which owns around 20 high quality Indian companies. CCP’s wealth creation track record since inception […]
Marcellus Portfolio Updates & Insights – September 2026
marcellus.in From Our CIO’s Desk How Does Kings of Capital Beat the Benchmark with Boring, Well-Managed Companies? Over the past 1, 2, and 3-year trailing periods, our financial services strategy—the Kings of Capital Portfolio (KCP)—has outperformed its benchmark. Our investment process avoids chasing short-term market momentum, focusing instead on well-managed businesses that allocate capital […]
India’s Exports Are Rocking and We are Loading Up
For half a century, India has struggled to export manufactured goods. That is now changing; merchandise exports in the first four months of FY27 are up 17% on last year and July alone set a record at US$44.2bn. There are four things that have swung in India’s favour: the rupee is at its cheapest in […]
From 500 to 5: The Brutal Filters Behind The Art of Enduring
In “The Art of Enduring” we applied a set of brutal filters (see chart below) to identity the 51 best franchises in the BSE500. Reassuringly, 5 of the 7 companies from our 2016 bestseller ‘The Unusual Billionaires’ made the cut. So did 5 more franchises around whom we built the “The Art of Enduring” and […]
Short read: Macro is just chemistry
A few years ago, the idea of capitalism without capital was trending as the world’s largest companies had no tangible assets but ran on intellectual property, network effects, brand, etc. Now, the same companies are spending on physical assets like never before. And it is not just semiconductors. With GPUs turning out to be energy […]
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