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. […]
The Democratization of Opportunity in India’s Boardrooms
For the first time in India’s history, a majority of the promoters and executive directors of Nifty50 companies are NEITHER foreign educated NOR educated at the elite IITs & IIMs. Instead, majority of the people running Nifty50 companies now have ‘normal’ Indian degrees. Symptomatic of this transformation is HDFC Bank, India’s second largest listed company […]
Choosing a Discount Rate
We have written about the pitfalls of using price to earnings (PE) multiples as a valuation tool in our blogs and newsletters. The alternative we use, the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model isn’t devoid of shortcomings either – such as the futility in forecasting inherently hard-to-predict long term cashflows or the sensitivity to a somewhat […]
Will India be the breakout emerging market this decade?
“India is known as the market that has confounded optimists and pessimists alike” is the first sentence of this article. It best captures global investors’ view of the Indian economy and markets alike. Fund managers at Capital Group, one of the most admired active investment management companies in the world, have attempted to answer if the […]
China’s data ‘black box’ puzzles economists
As China’s economy slows down, its macroeconomic data is increasingly hard to make sense. As the FT explains, “The country’s gross domestic product had grown 0.8 per cent in quarterly terms and 6.3 per cent year on year in the second quarter. The combined quarter-on-quarter growth over the previous four quarters, however, implied growth of 6.8 […]
What is it like to be intelligent?
Here’s another perspective on the emerging thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI). As discourse on the risks of AI models becoming sentient and potentially posing a threat to humanity gains ground, this piece from a couple of years ago takes a shot at understanding what we mean by intelligence and its inherent link to consciousness, the […]
Bihari Rajinikanth to Pushpa’s Flower Nahi Fire—Mumbai ‘dubbers’ drive new pan-India cinema
The spread of prosperity to the small towns of northern India has created a flourishing industry, primarily in Mumbai, of artists & entrepreneurs who take south Indian movies, dub them into Hindi and then release them in northern India. So, who is the entrepreneur who spotted this opportunity and built a successful business around it? “In […]
Book review – ‘How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine The Fate of Every Project…”
Bent Flyvbjerg, the Danish project management guru who is a professor at Oxford University, and Dan Gardner, the New York Times journalist, have written a superb book. We started reading it on a Sunday morning hoping to learn how to manage our projects and teams better. By teatime we felt significantly wiser thanks to both, […]
Portfolio Performance and Update on Fundamentals – June 2023
*For relative performance of particular Investment Approach to other Portfolio Managers within the selected strategy, please refer https://www.apmiindia.org/apmi/WSIAConsolidateReport.htm?action=showReportMenu Under PMS Provider Name please select Marcellus Investment Managers Private Limited and select your Investment Approach Name for viewing the stated disclosure Consistent Compounders Portfolio (CCP) Fundamentals of CCP companies continue to deliver healthy progress, as reflected in […]
Rebalancing is Often Misunderstood Yet Necessary
Periodic rebalancing or re-alignment of the MeritorQ portfolio is as necessary as watering a plant periodically to help it grow – do it too often and the plant may rot; on the other hand, never do it and the plant dies. In MeritorQ we identify quality yet relatively undervalued companies (our newsletters Forensic Accounting Using Quant […]
My failings as an investor
Whilst the best learnings are from one’s own experience, it is never a bad idea to learn from reading about mistakes of others. Christine Benz is an authority in personal finance having researched and written about the subject for years. In this piece, she writes about her mistakes. Here’s two of them we find often […]
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