LME finds bags of stones instead of nickel in metal warehouse
The forensic accountants in Marcellus have to work hard to identify the latest greatest tricks being used by Indian promoters to steal money from their lenders and shareholders. However, as crooks across the world have shown for centuries, stealing money is not very difficult – sometimes it is just easy as telling a buyer that […]
Courting India — the unpromising origins of British power
Anybody who goes to school in India is taught that 1757 (the Battle of Plassey) and 1857 (the Mutiny) are the two key dates which nailed India to the cross and subjected the country to almost two centuries of colonisation. Rockstar historian William Dalrymple says that to these two dates we should add an even […]
From bank runs to a credit crunch, the financial future looks bleak
In last week’s edition of Three Longs & Shorts, we had highlighted a blog by Marc Rubinstein in which we had explained that what is unique in the latest wave of bank runs in America is that depositors no longer have to queue up to get their money back and that makes the banking system […]
Rapidly Rising Profits Alongside Falling Share Prices
Over the last decade, while the BSE Small Cap index constituents have grown operating profits in low teens, the Little Champs constituents have consistently delivered 20%+ EBITDA growth. This has resulted in superior, consistent long term returns alongside sharper recoveries post drawdowns than the BSE SmallCap index. In recent quarters, while the fundamentals for Little […]
How Williamson looks at big moments and takes their power away
The ‘Fab Four’, as the four greatest cricket batters of the current generation are called, refers to Steve Smith, Joe Root, Virat Kohli and Kane Williamson, with just one test century separating each of them in that order. Williamson not only has the least of them but is also less celebrated than the others. Yet, […]
Some jottings on Pulak’s book
Some of us at Marcellus had the good fortune of serving the team at Nalanda Capital from our previous stint on the sell-side and have been great admirers. Anand Sridharan, one of the team members at Nalanda, through his brilliant essays, has helped us get a deeper understanding of their investment approach. This week saw […]
Long live Humanities
Nigam Nuggehalli is the Registrar of the National Law School in Bangalore. He seems to have written this piece in the Indian Express to a piece published in the New Yorker recently: “Last week the New Yorker published an article titled ‘The End of the English Major’, that discussed dramatically lower enrollment rates in the humanities […]
The Demise of Silicon Valley Bank
Over the past two weeks, bank stocks have taken a beating across the globe triggered by the bankruptcy of a couple of US banks, most notably Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Plenty has been written and plenty more will be written over the coming weeks. But this piece from Marc Rubinstein, a former hedge fund manager, […]
Producer of original ‘All Quiet’ saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazis
In case you have not watched the latest version of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, we would strongly recommend that you read Erich Maria Remarque’s book by the same name which was first published in 1929. Remarque, a German veteran of World War I, describes in the book the German soldiers’ extreme physical and […]
Atiq Ahmed was shipped out of UP. But this is how he ran his empire from Gujarat jail
People like us who live in modern India’s bustling megapolis’ sometimes tend to forget that the old, corrupt, feudal India continues to thrive in the midst of all the tech fuelled Unicorns and UPI and the much hyped ‘India stack’. This evocatively written piece from The Print describes how infamous gangsters from the Hindi speaking […]
What they don’t tell you about high P/E stocks
P/E multiples are deceptively damaging for anyone seeking long term gains from equity investments. If we take the 21 stocks which have had consistently “high P/Es” over the past 13 years, their median compounded returns have been 17% p.a. (vs the Nifty’s total return of 11% p.a.). Furthermore, if we were to look at a […]
MeritorQ: 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 […]
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