The “Con” in Confidence
For several years now, Vivek Kaul has been writing excellent pieces for the Mint. However, even by his high standards this is an exceptionally insightful piece which is worth reading in full. Whilst Mr Kaul’s piece is ostensibly about conmen, in practical terms it is about four different types of selling techniques. The first technique […]
A Century & Counting
As longstanding Marcellus clients would know, the longevity of successful businesses is a subject which is of great importance for us because it is the stockmarket’s underestimation of this which allows us to identify to great companies which are being undervalued by the market. Outlook Business recently published a thought provoking article on this subject. […]
Learning from history: Discounting in Financial Services is a bad strategy
History shows that competing only on the basis of price either as a lender or as an insurer has inevitably led to heavy losses and in some cases to bankruptcy. In this newsletter, we discuss how PSU general insurers in their quest to gain market share, cut pricing in group health insurance for 5+ years […]
The Octopus Ascends: The Rise of Crazy Rich Indians
A new generation of around 200,000 super rich families (or 1 million individuals) are making their spending muscle felt. Their wealth is a result of: (a) the financialization of physical assets; (b) the networking of India which has resulted in affluence spreading to smaller towns & cities; (c) the rise of a cadre of […]
A Framework For Spotting Value Traps
In their attempt to buy stocks cheap, investors often fall into what are popularly called “Value Traps” – a seemingly good business at cheap valuations becomes cheaper and cheaper as the business destroys value. The folks at Eagle Point Capital provide us a framework to spot such traps and avoid them. They call it the […]
The economics of acting
Much like investing, acting looks but it isn’t easy. In fact, FT columnist, Soumaya Keynes says in this piece, “The problem with the profession is that so many people want to join it. London’s drama school Rada has 121 applicants per place…Early luck compounds. The top parts are only open to those with the top agents. […]
John Warnock, Inventor of the PDF, Dies at 82
John Warnock was the founder of Adobe. It is only upon reading John Warnock’s obituaries a fortnight ago that we realised how much our experience of using a computer owes to Mr Warnock’s multiple innovations. As Clay Risen explains, “Until Dr. Warnock and Adobe came along, desktop printing was an arduous, expensive and unsatisfying endeavor. Users […]
A to Z: what has changed since the last time the World Cup was in India
Many of us have been left stranded in our attempts to lay our hands on tickets for the upcoming cricket world cup in India. But the excitement is clearly building up in the country given that India is hosting the world cup and home advantage has proven to be big in recent times: “The last […]
The Solitaire: Mithun Sacheti & the untold CaratLane story
India’s start-up boom has got a reality check with investors demanding to see profitable business models than the crazy blitzscaling approach till 2021. Amidst this funding winter, we have also seen the largest exit by a start-up entrepreneur after the Flipkart founders. Last month, India’s largest jewellery retailer Titan which had bought a 62% stake […]
Queen mothers and their talented sons – Kasparov, Anand or now Praggnanandhaa
Societies which are strong are societies which revolve around strong women. We have written before about the rise of Indian women – see https://marcellus.in/blogs/educated-employed-and-empowered-the-rise-of-indian-women/ – and you will hear more from us on this subject in the coming weeks. In this outstanding piece in the Indian Express, Sandeep Dwivedi explains how intelligent, supportive and determined mums play […]
Why MeritorQ has 30-45 stocks?
The terms ‘quantitative’, ‘systematic’, and ‘rules-based’ are often used interchangeably as representing an investment approach that is perceived to be in direct opposition to what a ‘fundamental’, ‘discretionary’ or ‘stock-picking’ approach may be. While both quantitative and discretionary strategies can pursue the same objective and both can be fundamentally oriented, quantitative strategies are different from their […]
Unlocking Wealth Creation Through External Capital Allocation – An Underappreciated Phenomenon
Marcellus’ Global Compounders Portfolio (GCP) invests in 25-30 deeply moated global companies listed mostly in developed countries and other global markets. These companies have dominant franchises which benefit from global economic megatrends and rational capital allocation by the management teams running these firms. These elements help the GCP companies drive an annual increase of approximately […]
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