Many Indian firms need more leverage
One of the more perplexing things about the Indian business landscape is that even as cost of capital has fallen sharply over the past 20 years (the 10 yr Govt bond yield which was 13% in 2013 is now 7%). Indian corporates now borrow less than they did in the past. In this insightful piece, […]
US scientists repeat fusion power breakthrough
Nuclear fusion is widely believed to be the holy grail of energy security and sustainability. However, despite knowing this for decades, the scientific world had made little progress towards making it practical. The challenge: Nuclear fusion requires temperatures as high as the Sun’s (fusion is what powers the Sun as well) and no material known […]
Western values are steadily diverging from the rest of the world’s
Globalisation drove the world a lot closer with culture spreading from the rich world to the third world, including countries such as China and India with a rich cultural history of their own. However, there seems to be a reversal of sorts with the emergence of hyper nationalist strong men at the helm propagating a […]
There’s more to Assam than Ahoms. Ancient Kamarupa, Bengal challenge assumptions
Over the past few years public historian Anirudh Kanisetti has emerged alongside Manu Pillai as a fresh, new voice helping us understand our many layered past. In this piece Mr Kanisetti helps us understand that India’s North East was just as much of a battleground (between incumbent natives and foreign invaders who later assimilated and […]
Review of Neerja Chowdhury’s book ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’
Award winning journalist & political commentator Neerja Chowdhury has written an outstanding book packed with information, revealing anecdotes and penetrating analysis of India’s PM’s have made critical decisions which shaped their political careers and the country at large. The book is written with pace & verve (Mr Srinivasa Raghavan says that the style of the […]
Invest in Dominant B2B Firms in Highly Profitable Industries
The industry in which B2B firms operate can have an outsized impact on their compounding potential. Over FY14-23, some sectors like IT, Light Industrials and Chemicals have generated twice as much RoCE and share price returns as compared to sectors like Energy and Metals & Mining (which struggle to return even cost of capital). This […]
A moment that changed me: my teacher went totally off script – and opened a door for my life to flow through
Following up on Graham Weaver’s lecture to the Stanford MBA students, here’s another instance of wisdom imparted by a teacher to a class of young students. Colin Walsh, nominated for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for his novel Kala, talks about how his high school teacher taught him the importance of curiosity and humility. “…he […]
How To Live An Asymmetric Life
Graham Weaver is a private equity investor and this is a summary of his lecture to the Stanford Graduate School Business. He begins by talking about how investing is all about finding asymmetric opportunities. “When I started my investing career, I focused almost exclusively on what I believed were the two fundamental rules of investing: […]
Market Scout – On-the-Ground Research In India and China
One of our clients forwarded us this newsletter authored by our friends in Salt Lake City, Wasatch Advisors. The newsletter describes the Wasatch portfolio managers’ observations from travelling around India and China over the past couple of months. Whilst their bullish observations on India (eg. opportunities in Specialty Chemicals & in manufacturing due to China+1, […]
Birth, Death and Wealth Creation
Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan have come up with another brilliant paper building on the now famous research by Hendrik Bessembinder which showed that a handful of companies i.e, 2% of all listed companies were responsible for more than 90% of wealth creation. The authors take this concept and link to longevity of companies (a […]
The Psychopathic Path to Success
While psychopathic tendencies are usually associated with villains like Hannibal Lecter, this article says that psychologists are increasingly reaching a new, more positive conclusion regarding psychopaths: “Some psychologists argue that the focus on violent and criminal psychopathic behaviour has marginalised the study of what they call “successful psychopaths” – people who have psychopathic tendencies but […]
From Choimoola to Dhaka
The southern Indian states are now 4-5x richer than their northern Indian counterparts and each year this gap in widening. [A decade ago, when we wrote on this topic for the first time, the multiple was 2x.] A fortnight ago, Minnu Mani became the first tribal woman from Kerala to represent India in international cricket. […]
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