Marcellus Portfolio Updates & Insights – April 2026
marcellus.in From Our CIO’s Desk The Case for Multi-Asset Diversification in Volatile Times The ongoing Middle East conflict is a stark reminder that global economies react differently to the same shock. In my recent conversation with Manish Hemnani, we explored why the “old rules” of domestic-only investing must evolve to preserve wealth in this […]
Short read: Your clout is a depreciating asset
The influencer economy is booming. People write blogs on substack or do podcasts to build a following so as to be able to influence them to buying a product or a service or at the least influencing their opinion on a subject which matters to them or someone deploying them. The followers are a measure […]
Short read: Pessimism is the world’s main economic problem
There’s plenty of gloomy thinking in the world today not least because of the ongoing war, as this piece in The Economist published much before the war began, suggests. And this has ramifications for the global economy as people’s thinking tend to be self-fulfilling. “In the late 1970s, as America grappled with an energy […]
Short read: ‘A remarkable time capsule’: The enchanting history of Oxford University’s 750-year-old medieval library
While debate has raged over the past two centuries as to which is the oldest library in the world, there is no doubt that the one at Merton College in Oxford is one of the contenders for the title (although in true British style, Merton College’s librarian, Dr Julia Walworth, downplays such claims to antiquity). […]
Long read: How an Oil Refinery Works
As oil prices continue to soar on the back of the West Asia war, there is plenty of anxiety about how lives of common folks like us get impacted. Given oil’s use in transportation fuel and more ubiquitously plastics amongst a host of other chemicals, it affects all of us. “The world consumes over 100 […]
Long read: Labour unrest exposes deeper economic fault lines
While researching our now bestselling book, “Breakpoint: The Crisis of the Middle Class & The Future of Work”, we realised for those Indians earning at least Rs 5 lakhs per annum the possibility of getting a white-collar office job is heading rapidly towards zero even as cost of living doubles every 8 years or so […]
Long read: ‘Lawrence is karma’: the gangster who became an icon
In a country where nearly 20 million people are joining the labour force each year and where most of them can’t get jobs, it is but natural for disenchanted Indian youth to look to anti-establishment figures for inspiration. Atul Dev’s brilliantly written long-read for The Guardian is a report from the badlands of Punjab, Haryana […]
Retirement Planning: Tackling the Hardest Problem in Finance
Summary: Across the world, retirement planning is viewed as one of the most complex problems in Finance due to the multitude of unpredictable variables at play. In India, this problem is made more complex by the high and variable inflation in the cost of living. The problem is made even more challenging for the Indian middle […]
AI is Birthing a New Middle-Class Elite: Evidence from the West
Nearly four years since the launch of ChatGPT, what has AI done to middle class jobs and incomes in the West? Our literature survey (using AI) suggests: 1) Middle class white collar jobs – especially entry level jobs – have collapsed in the West; 2) Most middle class white collar jobs in the West are […]
Short read: Rs 25 lakh for coaching, 99 percentile in JEE Mains, yet no IIT
It is that time of the year when lakhs of Indian 18 yr olds who have sacrificed four precious years of their childhood and spent a fortune of their parents’ savings on coaching classes preparing for JEE – the entrance exam for India’s prestigious engineering colleges – IITs, await their fate. Deebashree Mohanty who has […]
Short read: The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State
This is the “largest-ever experimental study on the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state”. Here is the summary of this remarkable experiment: “Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit Facebook and Instagram for 6 weeks Depression dropped. Anxiety dropped. Happiness went up. Women under 25 on Instagram saw the biggest gains.” Now here […]
Short read: The Big Squeeze
One of the hardest things to understand in a vast, developing country is the true level of inflation. An accurate estimate of inflation is necessary for many economic agents including households who are trying to plan their finances. Noted economist, Ajit Ranade, who was for many years the Chief Economist of the Aditya Birla empire […]
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