Short read: K-shaped market: Small cars in slow lane as first-time buyers seek premium SUVs
Most of us have been reading stories regarding India’s K-Shaped recovery from Covid over the last couple of years wherein the rich are killing it thanks to their winnings in the stock market, in real estate and in venture capital whilst the poor are compelled to live off free food from the Government. However, in […]
Long read: Drawdowns and Recoveries: Base Rates for Bottoms and Bounces
Barring the last September to February of this year’s pull back in Indian markets we saw, an overwhelming majority of today’s Indian retail investors (directly in stocks or through mutual funds) haven’t experienced a proper drawdown (deep and prolonged). For the uninitiated, a drawdown is the price decline from peak to trough. Yet, as they […]
Long read: Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?
Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist, is the author of ‘Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time’. In this interview, he explains four different facets of how the human brain comprehends time. He begins with basic concepts and then gradually takes us towards the frontiers of science. Firstly, we need to understand […]
Long read: The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
The rise of the internet has polarized the world of creative arts. Both in writing and in music, the superstars now make more money than ever before and do so on a global scale without precedent (think Taylor Swift, think Salman Rushdie). At the other end of the spectrum, the internet has made it very […]
White Collar Jobs Growth & Wage Growth: Twin Drivers of India’s Slowdown
From Diwali 2023 onwards, Indian companies’ earnings growth has decelerated at a rapid rate. Underpinning this deceleration is a sharp conk-off in consumption growth, long the mainstay of the Indian economy. Key drivers of this consumption downturn are a sharp deceleration in white collar job creation alongside a reduction in real wages for white collar […]
Short read: Gen Z trades stocks the same way it gambles
This piece might as well have been written with an Indian context of the Jane Street saga. Last week, we featured a piece by the great Warren Buffett about the stock market as a casino. As this author writes, trading driven manias (think Tulip mania, South Sea bubble) have existed for centuries. Yet certain conditions that exist […]
Short read: India’s ancient and mysterious ‘dwarf’ chambers
Did you know that in the interiors of Karnataka “Nearly 1,000 Tolkien-esque megalithic chambers dot southern India’s “Hill of the Dwarfs”, and locals believe they were created by a supernatural race of “small people”? Even friends of ours who live in Bangalore have never heard of Hire Benkal. The BBC’s Bansari Kamdar says that a “90-minute hike […]
Short read: How a landmark Kerala High Court judgment recognized existence of transgender families
Away from the mud slinging of mainstream politics, India continues to become a more liberal, a more tolerant society. Vineet Bhalla of Scroll informs us that the Kerala “High Court changed the birth certificate of the biological child of a trans couple so that it lists both as ‘parents’, rather than ‘mother’ and ‘father’.” Zahhad and […]
Long read: If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good For Everything, Should We All Be on Them?
If Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly’s anti-diabetic and consequently anti-obesity drugs (GLP1) came as the blockbuster drugs the pharmaceutical industry was awaiting, they have since surpassed expectations by demonstrating capabilities in various other therapeutic areas from cancer to Alzheimer’s, some even calling it wonder drugs. To help us separate the hype from reality, here’s Derek […]
Long read: What Passive Investing Has Done To Our Retirement
Whilst this might seem relevant to the American market where passive funds are predominant today, the unabated retail flows into Indian mutual funds may not be too far from the price agnostic behaviour this article talks about. A lot of what the author writes about seems to be drawn from (and appropriately referenced to) the […]
Long read: Quality of students from IITs coming down?
Some of us in Marcellus have been recruiting Indian graduates fresh out of university for over two decades. Over the past decade we have seen a sharp dip in the quality of graduates emerging from India’s universities including from the elite IITs and IIMs. Speaking to friends in other firms, we find that the situation […]
The Final Commandment: Nurture the next Generation
Summary: Build a business which has multiple generations embedded in it. Train the next gen to be leaders, to understand the time value of money, to bring a disruptive point of view & fresh talent into the business. [To find out what the Ten Commandments of Indian Entrepreneurship are, please click here: https://marcellus.in/blogs/the-ten-commandments-of-entrepreneurship-in-india/] “The third and […]
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