Do Things that Don’t Scale
When we set up Marcellus four years ago, we relied on wisdom from people/sources far smarter than us eg. Peter Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’, inputs from Mohandas Pai, Charles Ellis’ book on ‘Capital’ and Paul Graham’s blogs (such as the one highlighted above). Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator and is a great […]
The helpful delusion
Every so often we come across a piece which takes conventional wisdom and then turns it on its head so logically that we end up asking ourselves “why didn’t I think of that?”. This piece by Justin Garson – professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York – […]
China’s Unravelling Creates a $300 Billion Opportunity for India
As China’s economy is pulverized due to its never-ending Covid lockdowns, its beleaguered banking system, and the country’s face-off with Europe and America, India is well positioned to gain share in the global market for knowledge intensive manufactured products such as smartphones, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), and medical devices. Cumulatively, these sectors can create an […]
Separating the Men from the Boys
Financial services companies in general and Indian NBFCs in specific tend to encounter a crisis every few years. High-quality management teams not only deal with such crises but actually benefit from it. NBFCs in India have seen three challenging events in the last six years – demonetization, the failure of a large NBFC (leading to […]
MeritorQ: 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 […]
The Rise of Influencer Capital
We have all heard of influencer marketing. But influencer capital is on the rise where celebrities not just endorse the brand but enhance the value of an asset with their association and take a share of the profits from the inflated transaction proceeds. This piece in the NY Mag shows the concept while on the […]
The market failure approach to executive pay
Compensation paid to CEOs have risen faster than company earnings across the globe, according to the author of this blog, suggesting that the original hypothesis set out three decades ago to use executive pay to drive financial performance hasn’t particularly worked out. Whilst the blog doesn’t offer an alternative, it does dig into what is […]
The Role of Luck
Plenty has been written over the past week or so on the FTX debacle including how this could be the Lehman moment of the cryptoworld or how this is many times worse than the dotcom bust or how the world’s best known venture investors got lured into it. But if you are looking for a […]
Pratilipi is the biggest boom for women writers. Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi rule
India’s women are ascending at a rapid rate although you would not know that if you relied on mainstream media commentary in India. Our colleague, Nandita Rajhansa, wrote a piece on this subject a fortnight ago – see https://marcellus.in/blogs/educated-employed-and-empowered-the-rise-of-indian-women/ Validation of Nandita’s point of view comes from an unusual source. As this piece in The Print […]
The New York City Marathon Is an Engineering Marvel
In last week’s edition of 3 Longs & 3 Shorts, we had a piece which delved into the physics of the tragic stampede in Seoul three weeks ago (see https://www.wired.com/story/how-peaceful-crowds-turn-into-a-deadly-crush/). In response, one of our clients shared a piece on how mega events like the New York Marathon are carefully planned so as to avoid mishaps. […]
Are we really prisoners of geography?
Across the world, a wave of bestsellers – from a variety of authors – is spreading the message that a country’s geographic location defines its destiny. As this long read in The Guardian says “…as faith in an open, trade-based international system falters, map-reading pundits such as Tim Marshall, Robert Kaplan, Ian Morris, George Friedman and […]
Rising Giants’ Road to Antifragility
Brinton Johns & Brad Slingerlend’s 2014 paper, ‘Complexity Investing’, discusses how it’sfutile to forecast extreme event like pandemics, stockmarket crashes and tech disruptions. These events belong to complex ecosystems with unpredictable outcomes and a tendency towards polarization i.e. a few winners prevail – those who constantly adapt, keep building on their strengths and thus end […]
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