Michael Mauboussin — How Great Investors Make Decisions, Harnessing The Wisdom (vs. Madness) of Crowds, Lessons from Race Horses
The Tim Ferris Show is one of the most popular podcasts out there with a fairly diverse array of guests. But this episode will likely go down as our favourite. We have featured Michael Mauboussin’s essays here in the past. In this podcast, Mauboussin shows what sort of insight, a combination of voracious reading, deep […]
How China is winning the race for Africa’s lithium
As Indian investors and CEOs exult about the China+1 opportunity and the billions that we might one day rake in from this opportunity, China is busy gobbling up the one metal which matters nowadays, lithium. As this FT Big Read explains, “Last month, Africa’s first Chinese-owned lithium concentrate plant started up trial production at Arcadia, in […]
The Age of Average
Last week’s 3 longs & 3 shorts contained a piece by Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times in which he commented on the rise of elite sport and decline of intellectual discourse in daily life – see https://www.ft.com/content/8ecee960-ee87-4328-aa91-2002b63a43ec This week’s first long read from Alex Murrell attacks the same issue from another angle (an angle that […]
Optical Illusions in Equity Investing
Psychological biases tend to affect an investor’s decision making in subtle ways which are usually detrimental to long term investment returns. Several of these biases are better described as optical Illusions. Using the construct of the human brain as described by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman in his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, we highlight a […]
Why Write?
As one of the long reads from this edition shows, AI capabilities have improved dramatically to the extent that a lot of our tasks can now be automated leaving us to do other things of value. If you want to understand how accessible these are, you should watch this video that Microsoft put out a couple of […]
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 […]
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