Long read: What can India do to industrialize?
A lot of Indian hopes were pinned on a successfully negotiation of the Bilateral Trade Agreement with the US, which could potentially catalyse a long elusive take off in Indian manufacturing. Whilst we still hope the talks falling through is just a temporary manifestation of Trump’s unique negotiating tactics and we should still be able […]
Long read: Was the Renaissance Real?
Adam Gopik is one of the best essayists in the world. Here he reviews two new books – Bernd Roeck’s “The World at First Light” and Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance” – which question the received wisdom that the 300 years roughly between 1450-1750 AD are a turning point in the history of Western civilisation. […]
Short read: Ozzy Is Gone, but Heavy Metal Lives On, Stronger Than Ever
Last week, some of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s listening to heavy metal music were saddened by the news of the passing away of Ozzy Osbourne, one of the genre’s icons and fondly called the Prince of Darkness, reflecting the genre’s dark themes and ominous sounds. “Osbourne, the front man of […]
Short read: India’s Wealth Management Boom: Growing Riches, Short-Term Thinking, and the Search for Real Advice
The decade long structural trend of Indian households moving away from their historically preferred asset classes of real estate and gold to financial assets coupled with the stupendous and extended rally in the Indian stock market post Covid has triggered an unprecedented boom in its wealth management industry. Whilst the technology savvy younger generations have […]
Short read: K-shaped market: Small cars in slow lane as first-time buyers seek premium SUVs
Most of us have been reading stories regarding India’s K-Shaped recovery from Covid over the last couple of years wherein the rich are killing it thanks to their winnings in the stock market, in real estate and in venture capital whilst the poor are compelled to live off free food from the Government. However, in […]
Long read: Drawdowns and Recoveries: Base Rates for Bottoms and Bounces
Barring the last September to February of this year’s pull back in Indian markets we saw, an overwhelming majority of today’s Indian retail investors (directly in stocks or through mutual funds) haven’t experienced a proper drawdown (deep and prolonged). For the uninitiated, a drawdown is the price decline from peak to trough. Yet, as they […]
Long read: Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?
Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist, is the author of ‘Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time’. In this interview, he explains four different facets of how the human brain comprehends time. He begins with basic concepts and then gradually takes us towards the frontiers of science. Firstly, we need to understand […]
Long read: The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
The rise of the internet has polarized the world of creative arts. Both in writing and in music, the superstars now make more money than ever before and do so on a global scale without precedent (think Taylor Swift, think Salman Rushdie). At the other end of the spectrum, the internet has made it very […]
White Collar Jobs Growth & Wage Growth: Twin Drivers of India’s Slowdown
From Diwali 2023 onwards, Indian companies’ earnings growth has decelerated at a rapid rate. Underpinning this deceleration is a sharp conk-off in consumption growth, long the mainstay of the Indian economy. Key drivers of this consumption downturn are a sharp deceleration in white collar job creation alongside a reduction in real wages for white collar […]
Short read: Gen Z trades stocks the same way it gambles
This piece might as well have been written with an Indian context of the Jane Street saga. Last week, we featured a piece by the great Warren Buffett about the stock market as a casino. As this author writes, trading driven manias (think Tulip mania, South Sea bubble) have existed for centuries. Yet certain conditions that exist […]
Short read: India’s ancient and mysterious ‘dwarf’ chambers
Did you know that in the interiors of Karnataka “Nearly 1,000 Tolkien-esque megalithic chambers dot southern India’s “Hill of the Dwarfs”, and locals believe they were created by a supernatural race of “small people”? Even friends of ours who live in Bangalore have never heard of Hire Benkal. The BBC’s Bansari Kamdar says that a “90-minute hike […]
Short read: How a landmark Kerala High Court judgment recognized existence of transgender families
Away from the mud slinging of mainstream politics, India continues to become a more liberal, a more tolerant society. Vineet Bhalla of Scroll informs us that the Kerala “High Court changed the birth certificate of the biological child of a trans couple so that it lists both as ‘parents’, rather than ‘mother’ and ‘father’.” Zahhad and […]
For more content on our strategy, visit the archives GO TO ARCHIVES