Boring is Beautiful in Investing
It might sound like an afterthought given the crash we have seen this year in ‘exciting’ assets like crypto and tech stocks. But to be fair to the author Ben Carlson, he did write a piece in the middle of the boom on why ‘It’s OK To Build Wealth Slowly (awealthofcommonsense.com)’. Like Paul Samuelson is […]
A sleuth’s guide to the coming wave of corporate fraud
Accounting quality is a key aspect of Marcellus’ investment philosophy and hence detecting accounting fraud is beyond just a skill for the Marcellus analyst. This article is dated 7th November, the day before FTX unravelled. The Economist’s prescience is less to do with the specifics of Samuel Bankman-Fried or crypto in general than the remarkably repetitive […]
Dilip Mahalanabis, paediatrician, 1934-2022
When Dr Dilip Mahalanabis passed away in a private hospital in Kolkata on 16th October 2022 very few of us noticed as we were busy watching the T20 World Cup in Australia. And yet as the Financial Times noted “…the distinguished paediatrician deserved a less muted valediction. His pioneering medical work among refugees fleeing war in the […]
What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About the Frustrations of Modern Work
Cal Newport, the author of the brilliant book – Deep Work, has written extensively about the problems of the current workplace, especially in the context of the knowledge worker and the umpteen distractions she faces from technology (email, instant message, social media) to perform ‘Deep Work’. In this piece for the New Yorker, Newport draws upon […]
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 […]
For more content on our strategy, visit the archives GO TO ARCHIVES