Marcellus Insights
Your Portfolio Needs Protection from Gen Z Borrowing’s Binge
Borrowing used to be a last resort, taken on reluctantly and repaid as fast as possible. For a large part of India’s Gen Z, it has quietly become the default way to live. Five forces explain the shift: Digitisation has removed the discomfort of paying, so spending feels painless. “Present bias” lets todays self-borrow freely […]
How Kings of Capital Beats the Benchmark with Boring, Well-Managed Companies
Our Financial Services Portfolio has beaten the benchmark over the past 1, 2 and 3 years. Now as the interest rate cycle turns upwards, the odds are high that Kings of Capital will outperform by an even greater margin. To invest with us in KCP, click on kcp.marcellus.in Source: Marcellus Investment Managers; Marcellus Performance Data shown […]
Short read: How China Won the Iran War
A recent survey by Pew Research made headlines for it showed that a significantly larger share of people across the world now have a more favourable opinion of China than the US compared to a similar survey from three years ago. Nobel prize winning American economist, Paul Krugman writes about how America has ended up […]
Short read: Let the Bond Market Speak
The burgeoning US government budget deficit problem seems to be coming to a head. Whilst the bond market has been making its point with rising yields, ironically, it is the US government’s reaction to it that looks likely to trigger a crisis. First, its unusual intervention in the currency markets earlier this month, propping up […]
Short read: A day in the life of Haryana’s gau rakshaks
“Gau rakshaks” have probably existed for decades or even centuries. But it is only in the last decade or so that we frequently find them in news reports and even headlines. So, who is a “gau rakshak” and what do they do? Samridhi Tewari of ThePrint embedded with a group of cow-protection vigilantes in Faridabad […]
Long read: Into the griftoverse
A combination of an uncertain future and the ease of social media has allowed new age cults/cultists to develop online, many with the sole interest of monetising their following one way or the other. The author of this Substack post, Erin Nystrom, refers to them as the ‘griftoverse’ – a world where grifters or scammers […]
Long read: Why 4 In 10 Indian Children Go To Private Schools
We have written extensively of how the fading of the nation state due to its increasing inability to collect taxes and control the commanding heights of the economy (which are now in American and Chinese control) have resulted in the state pulling back from the provision of essential public services (click here to read our […]
Long read: Democracy v the machine — the warnings that were ignored
Jill Lepore is a Pulitzer Prize winning American historian, journalist (at the New Yorker) and academic (professor at Harvard). She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics and The Guardian has published a superb essay adapted from her new book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State”. The essay is worth reading in […]
Investing in boring, old-fashioned companies that allocate capital sensibly
Like our favourite cricketer, Rahul Dravid, the 7 companies decoded by us a decade ago in ‘The Unusual Billionaires’ delivered market beating performance by focusing on 3 principles which are simple to understand but hard to deliver on: (a) stick to the core and expand only into adjacencies; (b) focus on deepening your existing moats; and (c) […]
Later Marriage & Lower Fertility Signals the End of India’s Demographic Dividend
At a very early stage in its development, India is tracing the same path that the richer economies did i.e., Indians are marrying later in life & having fewer children. Specifically, these shifts are taking place far more rapidly in the better educated, more employable parts of the Indian economy. As a result, the data […]
Short read: Not all FDI is the same: The country must rejig what statistics capture to focus on the right kind
The sharp depreciation of the Indian rupee in recent times is attributed to an expanding current account deficit thanks to rise in oil and gold prices, two of India’s biggest imports. But it has historically been balanced by a capital account surplus – FPI and FDI inflows, which have worryingly disappeared. Whilst the former is […]
Short read: LinkedIn is where everyone succeeds and nobody ever fails
Have you noticed how everyone on social media seems to be having exotic holidays that you somehow never manage yourself? Or that your spouse has never declared their love, or surprised you with a gift, quite the way the lucky ones on Instagram are by theirs? LinkedIn has become the corporate edition of the same […]
For more content on our strategy, visit the archives GO TO ARCHIVES