Short read: Meet the Indian ‘tradwives’ who are clocking millions of views online
In Chapter 4 of our bestselling book “Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India”, we explained last year how Indian women are progressing much faster than their male counterparts in a range of areas. What we didn’t highlight in the book is the struggle taking place in millions of households and in the […]
Long read: Intrinsic Value Is Subjective: A Big Problem And A Big Opportunity For Investors
The Indian stock market has been remarkably resilient in the wake of slowing earnings growth and elevated valuations. Experts attribute it to the sustained flows into mutual funds by retail investors who are supposedly less discerning about valuations and fundamentals. But many believe in Benjamin Graham’s quote that the market is a voting machine in […]
Long read: The Electro-Industrial Stack Will Move the World
The remarkable growth in the role of software in our lives over the past couple of decades was best captured by Marc Andreessen. In 2011, Andreessen the founder of Netscape and more famously the founding partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world’s leading venture capital firms, wrote in an essay about how ‘software was […]
Long read: An AI-powered Bhagavad Gita project and a question: Who am AI?
We have been deeply influenced by how Gurcharan Das thinks about and writes about India. So, it was poignant to read his thoughts on how AI is now going to interplay with his authorship to give the world the benefit of his wisdom but in a new avatar (quite literally a “new avatar”). In this […]
Short read: A British governor, Moharram and the origins of the modern Ganesh Chaturthi festival
Much of peninsular India is in the middle of a 11-day celebration of the “elephant God”, Lord Ganesh. Whilst the Lord has been worshipped for time immemorial, the festival in its current form involving public pandals and processions is a more recent phenomenon. Many of us have been under the impression that this emerged during […]
Short read: The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs For Young People Just Got Stronger
In a world where every publication and author have their own strong beliefs and everything they publish is in support of those beliefs, Derek Thompson is a breath of fresh air, in pursuit of the truth, often exploring both sides of an argument. He has been writing about the impact of AI on jobs, especially […]
Short read: Superman entrepreneurs driving the Indian economy
In Chapter 5 of our bestselling book “Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India” we highlighted the rise of a new Indian elite which did not study at the IITs, IIMs or overseas but now control the Boardrooms of the Nifty50 companies. In this stirring piece for the Hindustan Times, Janmejaya Sinha & […]
Long read: The Calculus of Value
In the think of market conditions like the one we are in, few investors are able to think clearly and fewer so articulate the same. Howard Marks is one of those who can do both. In this memo of his, he gives us a primer of value, price and the interaction between the two and […]
Long read: She was one of the first influencers. It nearly ruined her life.
This is the first in-depth account we have read of what happens to an influencer’s life when she actually becomes successful in her job. Rachel Tashjian’s long article on American influencer Lee Tilghman’s life (based partly on Ms Tilghman’s autobiography “If you don’t like this, I will die”) gives us a glimpse into how social […]
Long read: India’s betting app ban will stoke money laundering
ast week we highlighted articles from The Print and Reuters which explained how the vast Futures & Options (F&O) market that has mushroomed in India post-Covid functions largely as a betting ground where the rich & the powerful fleece billions of dollars from the naïve & the poor each year. This sort of wealth transfer […]
Little Champs: Rising Again on its Sixth Anniversary
After enjoying a splendid run in the first three years of its inception, Little Champs portfolio’s (LCP) returns and earnings growth deteriorated from September 2022 – March 2024. On LCP’s 6th anniversary we focus on what went wrong during this period, the lessons learnt and the course correction we undertook around 18 months ago. The steady […]
MeritorQ: Low-Risk Investing with Sound Fundamentals
In this newsletter, we discuss the so called “low-risk” anomaly which posits that high beta (or high risk) stocks underperform low beta or (low risk stocks) over the long term i.e. there is NO extra return to be earned from owning riskier stocks. We show that this low-risk anomaly works in India as well. In this context, […]
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