Last week, we featured a piece on how China’s success is underpinned by the social reforms and the unleashing of its human potential the hard way. This piece shows another aspect of Chinese human capital that isn’t as much about its competence as it is about its adaptability and resilience, built through its painful period […]
Rosa Abraham is an associate professor of economics at Azim Premji University and she is the star economist who has published the pathbreaking and much needed ‘State of Working India 2026’ report. This seminal piece of research traces four decades of data on youth employment and education in India and highlights how grim the current […]
Investors consistently earn less than the funds they invest in — NOT because fund managers underperform, but because investors put more money in after strong runs and pull back after weak ones, a behaviour directly visible in the data across most equity categories. This “timing penalty”, which our analysis suggests would be approximately 1% point per […]
The 150-year-old concept of the nation state is steadily being altered by: a) the growing complexity for such states to tax economic activity; b) the fact that barring USA & China, every state has reduced control of the critical technologies which underpin modern economies; and c) the migration of gainful employment away from salaried jobs (which are easy to tax) and […]
Quality investing lagged for five consecutive years (2021-25) as the twin post-Covid booms – Consumption and Govt capex – lifted all boats and investors moved away from expensive Quality names (trading at 50x earnings) to less expensive Value names (trading at 20x). FY26 was the high-water mark of that distortion: the Value factor returned 14% […]
Summary: Our meetings with a dozen large FIIs in North America and UK over the past few weeks suggest that scrapping equity Capital Gains Tax (CGT) for FIIs will trigger 3 different types of benefits for the Indian economy: a) lower borrowing costs for the sovereign and hence for corporates; b) a stronger INR and […]
Marcellus’ Global Compounders Portfolio (GCP) strategically invests in ~40 deeply moated global companies aligned with megatrends, with an aim to provide steady earnings and shareholder wealth compounding. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the world get increasingly intoxicated with the AI narrative. While we certainly see long-term merit in this technology and what it […]
Two in-depth, independently researched publications – our bestselling book “Breakpoint” and Azim Premji University’s “State of Working India 2026” – make three points which have significant implications for everyone reading this note: a) Jobs for graduates have dried up in India; b) Salaries for graduates have been FALLING for the best part of the past decade in real terms; […]
Summer is a great time for a sports fan as most leagues reach their crescendos. This summer would be a particularly happy one for fans of RCB or Arsenal. Even better if like some of us, you support both. Like RCB which first won the IPL last year after 18 years, Arsenal fans have had […]
A fortnight ago, India’s pharma industry enhanced its reputation. From just being seeing as the pill factory of the world which copies drugs discovered in the West, India produced for the first time a new chemical entity (NCE) approved by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA). The firm that pulled off this breakthrough is […]
In this forceful piece, Devdutt Pattanaik calls out Indian society’s tendency to reframe history to suit modern prejudices and convenience. Mr Pattanaik uses specific episodes from the Ramayana to make his case. “When Sita is banished to the forest while pregnant, on the basis of nothing more than public gossip, modern readers recoil. Many quickly […]
In the past, we have featured the work of French social theorist – Rene Girard, whose work on mimetic desires has driven a whole body of work in sociology, to help us understand why we want what we want. Luke Burgis built on Girard’s work in his bookWanting and writes a lovely newsletter called Anti-Mimetic. […]
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