Memo from Howard Marks: Sea Change
Whilst the markets celebrated the last two US inflation prints in anticipation of a pause in rate hikes or even a more accommodative monetary policy, earlier this week, the Fed took another 50bps hike (though less than 75bps of the previous instances) and remarked that it will continue to ‘squeeze the economy in 2023’. As […]
Why everyone should pay more attention to India
Shruti Rajagopalan is an Economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Two weeks ago she published a blog which the whole world seems to have read. In case you haven’t, our recommendation is that you read it not least because the blog presents India’s key numbers relating to its economy, its demographics, its tech […]
The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies
Contrary to what middle-aged men might think after a lifetime of watching James Bond and Mission Impossible movies, in the real world women, not men, make the best spies. This long read in the FT from a former MI6 (also called Special Intelligence Service or SIS) explains why this is so [hint: it has nothing […]
Why Finance is Hard to Decentralize
Over the past two months, the Indian central bank, the RBI conducted pilots around the digital Rupee or India’s CBDC (Central Bank issues Digital Currency) across both wholesale and retail market transactions. These have in-turn triggered debate around whether this can disintermediate the banking system. Whilst theoretically possible, the fact that the RBI chose banks […]
Has private equity avoided the asset-price crash?
The Economist follows up on a theme we have featured twice in 3L&3S this year (see here and here) – how unlike public equities which have been marked down by the market this year, private assets have been stable or atleast based on one report seem to have appreciated this year. “A huge gap between the valuations of […]
Enough longtermism — we need to think about now
Over the past twelve months, Stuart Kirk – former editor of the FT’s famous Lex column and former head of responsible investment at HSBC Asset Management – have become famous for calling out what he says is a racket in which vested interests are riding the ESG investing bandwagon and lining their pockets. In this […]
Jason Kilar on the Chaotic Streaming Wars—and How This Hollywood Story May End
Netflix, the global streaming giant has had a roller coaster ride in terms of its share price – after soaring 25x in the decade preceding the peak of the tech boom last year, it lost almost 70% by this summer. Whilst the fall in shares can be partly attributed to some generic reasons that affected […]
How Top Gun: Maverick shocked the world
In the 27th November edition of 3 Longs & 3 Shorts we had highlighted Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s blog titled “Do things that don’t scale” – see http://paulgraham.com/ds.html . As luck would have it, a fortnight later we came across a perfect case study of an incredibly lucrative business which can’t be scaled (and it is lucrative […]
Rocketing to space: ISRO’s open infrastructure is giving wings to startups
Over the past decade the steps India has taken to methodically build a unique set of digital public assets is steadily making the country more efficient – see our blog https://marcellus.in/blogs/from-aadhaar-to-ondc-indias-methodical-build-of-digital-assets-creates-competitive-advantages/ In this context that the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO’s, remarkable decision to open up its knowledge, its IP and its platform to startups is very […]
MeritorQ: Strength Lies in Numbers
The operational efficiency of the quantitative approach we take in MeritorQ allows us to analyze and rank stocks over a large investment universe on a consistent set of metrics. Ranking over a large peer group of companies magnifiesthe power of statistical analysis and hence the reliability of the screening and selection steps. Another benefit of […]
Haters
Last week we featured a piece by Paul Graham, best known for the start-up incubator, Y Combinator. Last week’s piece was advice to founders on building sustainable competitive advantages whilst this one, albeit a bit dated is also advice to founders, on how to deal with ‘haters’ that inevitably come with success and in particular, fame. First, […]
From GE to FTX, beware the Icarus complex
A few weeks ago, we featured a podcast about the rise and fall of GE, the American conglomerate with a Morningstar analyst. This week’s Schumpeter column in the Economist features the recent book on the same subject – ‘Power Failure’ by William D Cohan, which seems to have the same message as the podcast – Jack Welch […]
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