Marcellus Insights
Long read: We Can’t Let AI Writing Take Over the Internet
We have featured pieces on the “enshittification” of social media platforms with advertising slop degrading the user experience. Now AI is only accelerating it. There is a rapid increase in written content on LinkedIn that most of us can recognise as AI generated. Derek Thompson interviews Max Spero, the founder of Pangram, the most used […]
Long read: Humans did not invent art. It was the other way around
We remember when, not a long time ago, NanoBanana became available and created a buzz in Marcellus, especially with one of our colleagues who helps in refining our written content to by adding visually appealing images. The not-so-creatively-oriented colleagues of ours have also become experts in visual storytelling as progressive AI models have become better […]
Long read: Reassembling Ikea in India
Many globally popular and successful companies and brands have struggled to adapt and adjust to India. Deploying a playbook that has worked elsewhere in the world is a surefire recipe for failure here. Kellogg’s is a classic example of a brand that struggled for years to get Indians to adopt Western breakfast habits. A McDonald’s […]
Your Portfolio Needs Protection from Gen Z Borrowing’s Binge
Borrowing used to be a last resort, taken on reluctantly and repaid as fast as possible. For a large part of India’s Gen Z, it has quietly become the default way to live. Five forces explain the shift: Digitisation has removed the discomfort of paying, so spending feels painless. “Present bias” lets todays self-borrow freely […]
How Kings of Capital Beats the Benchmark with Boring, Well-Managed Companies
Our Financial Services Portfolio has beaten the benchmark over the past 1, 2 and 3 years. Now as the interest rate cycle turns upwards, the odds are high that Kings of Capital will outperform by an even greater margin. To invest with us in KCP, click on kcp.marcellus.in Source: Marcellus Investment Managers; Marcellus Performance Data shown […]
Short read: How China Won the Iran War
A recent survey by Pew Research made headlines for it showed that a significantly larger share of people across the world now have a more favourable opinion of China than the US compared to a similar survey from three years ago. Nobel prize winning American economist, Paul Krugman writes about how America has ended up […]
Short read: Let the Bond Market Speak
The burgeoning US government budget deficit problem seems to be coming to a head. Whilst the bond market has been making its point with rising yields, ironically, it is the US government’s reaction to it that looks likely to trigger a crisis. First, its unusual intervention in the currency markets earlier this month, propping up […]
Short read: A day in the life of Haryana’s gau rakshaks
“Gau rakshaks” have probably existed for decades or even centuries. But it is only in the last decade or so that we frequently find them in news reports and even headlines. So, who is a “gau rakshak” and what do they do? Samridhi Tewari of ThePrint embedded with a group of cow-protection vigilantes in Faridabad […]
Long read: Into the griftoverse
A combination of an uncertain future and the ease of social media has allowed new age cults/cultists to develop online, many with the sole interest of monetising their following one way or the other. The author of this Substack post, Erin Nystrom, refers to them as the ‘griftoverse’ – a world where grifters or scammers […]
Long read: Why 4 In 10 Indian Children Go To Private Schools
We have written extensively of how the fading of the nation state due to its increasing inability to collect taxes and control the commanding heights of the economy (which are now in American and Chinese control) have resulted in the state pulling back from the provision of essential public services (click here to read our […]
Long read: Democracy v the machine — the warnings that were ignored
Jill Lepore is a Pulitzer Prize winning American historian, journalist (at the New Yorker) and academic (professor at Harvard). She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics and The Guardian has published a superb essay adapted from her new book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State”. The essay is worth reading in […]
Investing in boring, old-fashioned companies that allocate capital sensibly
Like our favourite cricketer, Rahul Dravid, the 7 companies decoded by us a decade ago in ‘The Unusual Billionaires’ delivered market beating performance by focusing on 3 principles which are simple to understand but hard to deliver on: (a) stick to the core and expand only into adjacencies; (b) focus on deepening your existing moats; and (c) […]
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