Marcellus Insights
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 […]
Short read: India has the world’s costliest rocket launches
For a decade, India has prided itself for the low-cost space missions launched and successfully completed by ISRO. Most famously, ISRO’s 2014 Mars mission cost less than the Hollywood space adventure film Gravity. In that context a new report is bound to create a flutter. A peer-reviewed study by economists Alessio Terzi (Cambridge) and Francesco […]
Short read: A Billion Dollars
Very often you meet someone who is always chasing a moving life goal. An SUV after having bought a sedan. A house with an additional room. Or a higher retirement corpus after having accumulated one large enough. In this interesting essay, Kevin Kelly a founding editor of Wired and the writer of books like “1,000 […]
Long read: We Can’t Let AI Writing Take Over the Internet
We have featured pieces on the “enshittification” of social media platforms with advertising slop degrading the user experience. Now AI is only accelerating it. There is a rapid increase in written content on LinkedIn that most of us can recognise as AI generated. Derek Thompson interviews Max Spero, the founder of Pangram, the most used […]
Long read: Humans did not invent art. It was the other way around
We remember when, not a long time ago, NanoBanana became available and created a buzz in Marcellus, especially with one of our colleagues who helps in refining our written content to by adding visually appealing images. The not-so-creatively-oriented colleagues of ours have also become experts in visual storytelling as progressive AI models have become better […]
Long read: Reassembling Ikea in India
Many globally popular and successful companies and brands have struggled to adapt and adjust to India. Deploying a playbook that has worked elsewhere in the world is a surefire recipe for failure here. Kellogg’s is a classic example of a brand that struggled for years to get Indians to adopt Western breakfast habits. A McDonald’s […]
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