Long read: The India Trump Made: Where American Bullying Is Leading New Delhi
James Crabtree is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Rudra Chaudhuri is the Director of Carnegie India. In this piece, the two foreign policy experts opine on how India is navigating the foreign policy mess that Trump has created. India’s response according to these two experts has three different strands […]
Long read: South rising, west slipping: India’s export map is being redrawn, shows RBI data
In our 2024 bestseller ‘Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India’ we had dedicated a chapter to how southern India is rapidly pulling away from the rest of India in economic growth. (The South pulled away from the rest of the country on social indicators several decades ago.) To our surprise, this point […]
What can we learn from the first investor to diversify globally?
“He taught us that in order to find the best investment opportunities, you must open your mind to all possibilities around the world.” – Mark Mobius on his mentor, Sir John Templeton Sir John Templeton (Source: John Templeton Foundation) Our brain’s craving for dopamine makes diversification really hard. If you have made money on an […]
Short read: ‘It’s the golden age of spreadsheet geekery’
Equity analysts sometimes get accused as ‘drag and drop’ champions alluding to the feature in Microsoft’s spreadsheet tool Excel, when they ‘forecast’ future cashflows often without a strong basis of business understanding. The shortcoming aside, equity analysts like several other professionals have marvelled at the power of Excel to crunch large swathes of data using […]
Short read: What China will dominate next
2025 will go down as the year when China properly flexed its muscles in the global arena. The year began with DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company showing what it had achieved at a fraction of the resources available to the American BigTech. Even better was how China dealt with Trump’s tariff tantrums with its leverage […]
Short read: Neanderthal 1: The incredible discovery that rewrote history
We humans are highly prone to consensus hugging. This hugging behaviour pertains not just to our thinking about financial markets but also in other fields including science. So, until Charles Darwin published ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859, we believed that we have always looked like we look today. However, the first scientific proof that […]
Long read: At home and at school, AI is transforming childhood
Since OpenAI’s breakthrough with ChatGPT in late 2022, the possibilities with AI has created a wave of excitement and apprehension alike. Yet, AI is inevitably becoming part of almost all streams of life. Indeed, the area which met with the most apprehension- education seems to have adopted it more than any field. Recent data showed […]
Long read: Is Macaulay a Villain or a Champion of Social Justice?
As a nation we look for reasons to self-flagellate. Over the past generation or so, as India has shown signs of moving forward as a society and an economy, we have decided to beat ourselves up for being “Macaulay-putras” i.e. brown offspring of Macaulay who are actually British at heart. Therefore, it is important to […]
Long read: India’s Labour Codes: The Shift from Protecting Jobs to Formalising Work
Most employers we have spoken to appear puzzled as to why the Government is positioning the recent notification of four Labour Codes as “reform”. After all, as most employers see it, the cost of employing workers goes up (rather than coming down) on the back of the new codes. Vineet Kaul – formerly CHRO for […]
Volatility underscores diversification benefits
Since inception 15 months ago, Marcellus Multi-Asset PMS (MAP-Balanced) has outperformed its benchmark by 2.44% points and Nifty 500 TSR Index by 4.57% points (annualised, net of fees and expenses). At that time, Indian equities had run up significantly and seemed overvalued when macro growth had slowed, the earnings cycle had already peaked and risk […]
What we learnt from investing in Brad Jacobs’ latest venture, QXO?
I hadn’t heard of Brad Jacobs until Marcellus’ Global Compounders team invested in his latest NYSE-listed venture, QXO. I then learnt that Mr Jacobs has created EIGHT multi-billion dollar businesses in run-of-the-mill industries i.e. he’s not your typical tech mogul doing disruptive things. Six of the eight companies Mr Jacobs has created are publicly traded: […]
Short read: China has brought millions out of poverty. The US has not – by choice
Whilst US remains the poster boy of capitalism, its failings have also been evident, where its benefits have accrued to a handful of its populace leaving plenty behind resulting in the push towards socialism in some quarters, most notably in the recent mayoral elections in New York City. In contrast, China with its own brand […]
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