How Niche B2B Franchises Drive Compounding
Given Little Champs’ philosophy of investing in smallcaps which are market leading franchises, the portfolio has a preponderance of niche B2B names. Conventional arguments against B2B companies centre around their weak bargaining power vs much larger customers & suppliers and lack of entry barriers around brands & distribution. However, unlike a typical B2B company, the […]
Does company culture drive stock performance?
Value investing is about buying a stock at a price significantly below your estimate of the intrinsic value of the business, which in turn is the present value of cashflows to perpetuity or atleast a long enough period. Hence, this requires making a judgement on the longevity of moats that can sustain a healthy cashflow […]
Your career is Just One-Eight of your life
A few weeks ago we published a century old essay by John Maynard Keynes about the future of work, in which he prophesied that human beings on an average will end up working 15 hours a week i.e, balancing work and leisure in a way that solves the most fundamental economic problem. The pandemic seems to have […]
Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people
We all knew it was happening but even then, looking at the data on how rapidly the Anglo-Saxon countries are becoming unpleasant and unfair societies is discomfiting. As this piece in the FT explains, if you are in the top 3 percentile of British or American earners, you are living the life of the global […]
A rocker’s guide to management
We are in the age of start-ups, often a bunch of friends getting together to dream up an idea and build a venture out of it. But once the idea gets commercialised, the dynamics among friends turned co-founders play an important role in scaling the business up and critically determine the longevity of the venture. […]
Why A4? – The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size
This is a very interesting piece on the mind bending maths required to answer a simple question ‘Why is A4 paper 210mm x 297mm?”. Ben Sparks, a musician and a mathematician from the picturesque English city of Bath, answers the question and in so doing helps us understand the beauty of the A4’s dimensions. He […]
Whether Russians Like, Comment or Subscribe – Big Brother Is Watching
It is commonplace to bump into people who have a casual attitude to online surveillance and censorship. Hopefully, such people will read this piece by Ms Evdokimova, a New York based Russian journalist and human rights campaigner who writes for the Slate [with the Wire reprinting the Slate’s content]. Ms Evdokimova writes about how Putin […]
From Aadhaar to ONDC: India’s Methodical Build of Digital Assets Creates Competitive Advantages
Over the past decade the Indian economy – fragmented into several regional economies a decade ago – has gradually been integrated by the doubling of highway networks, tripling of local airline traffic, the introduction of GST and – most importantly – rapid digitization of the economy. From Aadhaar (in 2010) to UPI (in 2016) and […]
The Rise of Affordable Housing Finance in India
Urbanization, improved affordability (low interest rates and stable house prices), support from government initiatives (PMAY), and emergence of unique underwriting models has led to the sustainable growth of the affordable housing finance sector in India. Affordable Housing Finance Companies (AHFCs) are solving a large problem for a section of the society which does not have […]
Book review: A trove of insights on how to get India’s institutions future-ready
As Morgan Housel writes in this week’s Long Read 3, the world is at an inflection point where the factors shaping the future are changing. The last four decades of low interest rates and the relatively cordial and collaborative relationship between the west and the east seem to be a thing of the past. This […]
Why Bloomberg lives on and on and on and on and on and on
Amongst the paraphernalia of techy things that we use to invest money, the Bloomberg terminals in Marcellus are the clunkiest, most 1980s-looking bit of kit in our office. And yet we pay a fortune to use these machines. This article in the FT explains why Bloomberg is able to command such loyalty from millions of […]
India seen through the eyes of its young women
More girls than boys go to school in India now and result unsurprisingly is that India now produces more female graduates than male graduates. As a result, women in India are increasingly writing bestselling books about the lives of Indian women. Nilanjana Roy’s article two such recent books. First up is Shrayana Bhattacharya’s “Desperately Seeking […]
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