Quietly working his way up, Avinash Sable represents the steady rise of Indian athletics
A guest speaker in one of our recent webinars said India’s progress in the field of sports is an indicator of the strides the country as a whole is making in general. He might not be off the mark but he was clearly coming off the highs of India’s spectacular show in the recent Commonwealth […]
Venture capital’s silent crash: when the tech boom met reality
When the stock market crashes or ‘corrects’, you can see that right in front of you and, if you are so minded, you can do something about it. In the case of VC investing, as this piece in last week’s 3 longs & 3 shorts highlighted, there is very little an investor in VC funds […]
The Kingdom or the Crown: Address the Owner Dependence Dilemma in Your Company
Permanent Equity is a private equity firm based in Columbia, Missouri. In this newsletter they discuss at length which keeps us and many of our clients awake at night – namely, what will happen to a successful franchise when the Founder/Promoter is no longer around. We worry about this both from the perspective of being […]
Three Simple (But Not Easy) Ways to Make Money in India
Marcellus was incorporated exactly four years ago, and the firm opened for business on 1st December 2018. That day Saurabh Mukherjea became Marcellus’ first client. This week, Saurabh’s monthly statement showed that Marcellus’ Consistent Compounders Portfolio – consisting primarily of large cap stocks – has doubled his corpus in 3 years and 8 months thanks […]
You can’t say that!’: how to argue, better
Many of us have been guilty of getting into heated arguments over social and political issues often on social media, only to see neither party budge, instead souring our relationships with friends and family. As a result, some of us have chosen to avoid such arguments altogether preferring to hold onto our convictions depriving ourselves […]
An Economy of Overfed Middlemen
One would have thought that technological developments will bring producers and consumers closer obviating the need for intermediaries taking a cut in between. Indeed, traditional middlemen have been disintermediated, only to allow a much larger and more dominant middleman to emerge – an Amazon or Flipkart displacing traditional distributors, wholesalers and retailers of consumer goods […]
How Bihar’s artists rode out the Covid crisis with tech & tradition
This life affirming story in the Indian Express highlights how the “Madhubani painters in Bihar rose to the challenge and earned a steady income, even during the lockdowns”. The piece begins with a brief primer in Madhubani painting for the uninitiated: “Legend has it that Madhubani paintings originated when King Janak wanted the kingdom of Mithila decked […]
Breaking Points
Many successful investors are known to have capitalised on the opportunities provided by the inevitable dislocations in financial markets. However, here is a perspective from Ted Lamade on how a segment of allocators are now constrained from benefiting from such events, thanks to a structural and significant shift in their allocations towards private markets over […]
The strange case of the cricket match that helped fund Imran Khan’s political rise.
From the time Abdul Rahman Bukhatir took Indian and Pakistani cricketers to play one-day matches in Sharjah in the 1980s, sub-continental politicians, cricket and money of the wrong colour have been umbilically linked. This long read in the FT narrates the colourful story of what Imran Khan and Pakistani tycoon Arif Naqvi got upto a […]
Book review of ‘The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War’ by Malcolm Gladwell.
There are three very good reasons why theoretical arguments and ideological dilemmas are worth discussing in-depth and at length: (a) these arguments impact the lives of millions of people in the real world; (b) your and my wealth & wellbeing can hinge on which side of the argument we take; and (c) events in the […]
Maximise the ‘Signal’, Minimise the ‘Noise’
An investor looking to compound her wealth through equity investments faces two key risks: (a) the risk from short term fluctuations in stock prices (i.e. noise); and (b) the risk of long-term capital erosion/weak returns due to investments in sub-standard companies. To mitigate these risks, the investor can utilize two tools. Tool#1 is to increase […]
Meet Keyence, consultant to the world’s factories
Every now and then we come across global companies which are dominant in their niche but few of us would have heard of as they quietly ply their trade efficiently in the background. We have featured the Dutch semiconductor lithography monopoly ASML here in the past. This piece in The Economist features Keyence, a Japanese […]
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