Indian rugby isn’t elite or male. Sweety, Beauty, Sapna from rural Bihar rule the field
As India changes, every stereotype you and I harboured about the nation is being challenged. You thought Indians didn’t play rugby? You thought rugby was played by the Anglicized elite in the posh schools of India’s big cities? You thought women in India didn’t play rugby? As Jyoti Yadav explains in this piece, you are […]
How football got smart and art got dumb
If your kids watch the Tifo channel on Youtube, they will be able to explain to you the latest tactics in European football in such intricate detail that you will wonder how football became so cerebral. In this intriguing short read, Janan Ganesh explains how the rise of football first led to the rise of […]
How Pathaan scripted history without a roar
Last week, social media was abuzz with comments from those who saw Pathaan on Amazon Prime Video for the first time, questioning how on earth did such a mediocre film become the top grossing Hindi movie of all time? This piece in the Mint digs into what possibly could have been the factors driving the […]
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory
If there is a contest for the most powerful company on the planet, TSMC could be it. TSMC (or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer and at the cutting edge it is almost a monopoly. Given the ubiquity and importance of semiconductors of our day to day lives, TSMC does acquire […]
The Next A.I. Scam Is Here—and It Could Cost You Thousands
Almost every month, AI seems to be getting better, cleverer and faster. Whilst the rise of AI is impacting a broad swathe of our life (from how banks’ credit assessment techniques to how Amazon suggests products for us), criminals are also learning to use AI better. This long read focuses on how powerful new techniques […]
MeritorQ Advisory : The Moneyball of Quality Investing
Just as the Moneyball approach in baseball (as explained by Michael Lewis in his book by the same name) helped a team of seemingly average players consistently win matches, in Marcellus’ MeritorQ, we select good quality and undervalued companies (rather than betting on singular ‘quality’ or ‘value’ investment opportunities) to deliver superior risk-adjusted returns. The […]
MeritorQ Advisory: A Deeper In-Depth Look At MeritorQ’s Forensic Model
MeritorQ uses forensic ratios to evaluate the accounting quality of Indian companies. As we highlighted in our February newsletter – Forensic Accounting Using Quant Methods Boosts Returns – our accounting checks can identify accounting frauds well in advance of the actual drawdown event. Using the specific examples of two companies in this newsletter, we discuss how accounting […]
MeritorQ Advisory:Forensic Accounting Using Quant Methods Boosts Returns
Over the past 16 years, the average return of market cap weighted BSE 500 index has been 10.3% p.a. on a 3-year rolling basis. But the story changes completely when we differentiate between the index constituents based on their accounting quality. There is a clear deterioration in returns and a rapid increase in risk and […]
MeritorQ Advisory: Strength Lies in Numbers
The operational efficiency of the quantitative approach we take in MeritorQ allows us to analyze and rank stocks over a large investment universe on a consistent set of metrics. Ranking over a large peer group of companies magnifies the power of statistical analysis and hence the reliability of the screening and selection steps. Another benefit […]
What KCP Lenders Can Teach SVB’s Management
Even as the global financial system is reeling from the stress created by the sharp increase in interest rates over the past year, the Indian banking system is well placed to overcome this crisis owing to its granular liability franchisee, well matched asset-liability (ALM) schedules and more calibrated monetary policy conduct by the central bank. […]
Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines?
It is incredible that the pipelines bringing Russian gas into Europe were blown up right in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine war and we still don’t know who did it and how. Early last month, an octogenarian Pulitzer winning American investigative journalist named Seymour Hersh wrote a rather elaborate piece on how America was responsible for the […]
Is it Easier for Investors to Forecast the Long-Term or Short-Term?
As Morgan Housel wrote in the earlier read about our inability to accept uncertainty, we exhibit this trait to know for certain even with our investments, as this piece shows: “Forecasting most things is difficult and we are notoriously bad at it. Predicting the behaviour of a complex adaptive system such as financial markets is […]
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