Yevgeny Prigozhin: the hotdog seller who rose to the top of Putin’s war machine
Just last weekend, Russia seemed headed into a civil war with one of its prominent private armies ‘Wagner’ fighting in Ukraine rebelling against the official military and marching within 200 miles of Moscow. The mutiny was aborted with no officially stated reason yet with the founder of Wagner leading the rebellion, Yevgeny Prigozhin moving to […]
ROIC and the Investment Process
The most commonly accepted metric to assess the effectiveness of a company’s management team is its return on invested capital (RoIC). Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan of Morgan Stanley are in their typically articulate form in this research paper showing how RoIC should matter for investors and businessmen alike. They sum up the concept of […]
Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why
This FT long read tees up its star protagonist, Shanna Swan, and her life’s research in the following manner: “The mystery is this. Since the late 1930s, sperm counts around the world appear to have dropped significantly. While the decline was initially observed in western countries, there is evidence of the same phenomenon in the developing […]
Forget the frivolous narrative, Bazball is a hard-nosed, winning strategy
We are living in an increasingly disruptive world where incumbent beliefs and approaches are challenged at an unprecedented pace. Not all disruptions work, some do fade away. To figure out ex-ante what’s likely to work and what’s not, we look at various disruptive instances and draw lessons from them. This piece discusses what is perhaps […]
What Role Should Cash Play in Your Portfolio?
Over long periods of time, equities tend to deliver reasonably positive outcomes and outperform most other asset classes, particularly cash. (The article refers to cash as liquid assets for the ease of access such as bank deposits or money market funds and not to currency notes as popularly understood in India). Yet, we are surprised […]
Leela Row Dayal: The first Indian woman to win a match at Wimbledon
As we continue our celebration of the rise of India’s women, we highlight an Indian woman who created waves in Wimbledon nearly a century ago. The BBC says, “A writer, dancer, playwright, mountaineer and a national tennis champion, Leela Row – the first Indian woman to win a tennis match at the Wimbledon – was as […]
Martin Wolf issues a wake-up call on the state of democratic capitalism
This is part of the Author Talks series at Mckinsey. Nienke Beuwer of Mckinsey interviews Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ Chief Economics Commentator on his new book titled: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. As the title suggests, in the book Wolf posits that the combination of democracy and market economy that has delivered global prosperity since WW-II […]
How the US is pushing China out of the internet’s plumbing
Whilst many of us think that data is carried across the world by satellite communication, in reality 99% of the world’s data is carried by subsea cables. After pushing Huawei and ZTE out of the market for networking equipment, China’s geopolitical rivals are now determined to push China out of the market for the subsea […]
College pedigree, daddy’s name, BBC accent no longer golden ticket. India has a growing new elite
Those of us with a little bit of grey hair in Marcellus have realised over the past decade that in the booming cities of Asia, elite education is not worth the paper it is written on. Whilst we have written about this in our books (see Chapter 3 of ‘Unfiltered: the CEO & the Coach’), […]
This is Why You Stay the Course
The past couple of months have seen a sharp recovery in the Indian markets and even more so for Marcellus’ portfolios driven by the return of FIIs (Foreign Institutional Investors) who have pumped in $5bn this financial year after selling north of $30bn over the previous 18 months. However, investors’ activity measured by flows into […]
Compounding Optimism
At Marcellus, we are big believers in the power of compounding (of not just money) as well as big fans of Morgan Housel. So when the concept meets the author, we have to feature it. Housel is at his story telling best to drive home a simple yet powerful but not necessarily intuitive point – […]
Neil Shen goes it alone in China after Sequoia split
Neil Shen, the legendary venture capitalist who built Sequoia’s investing empire in China, is the latest titan to feel the chill winds of Cold War II as China and America slug it out for global dominance. Last week, Sequoia announced that its American, Chinese and Indian venture investing arms would hitherto function as three completely […]
For more content on our strategy, visit the archives GO TO ARCHIVES