Short read: India’s ancient and mysterious ‘dwarf’ chambers
Did you know that in the interiors of Karnataka “Nearly 1,000 Tolkien-esque megalithic chambers dot southern India’s “Hill of the Dwarfs”, and locals believe they were created by a supernatural race of “small people”? Even friends of ours who live in Bangalore have never heard of Hire Benkal. The BBC’s Bansari Kamdar says that a “90-minute hike […]
Short read: How a landmark Kerala High Court judgment recognized existence of transgender families
Away from the mud slinging of mainstream politics, India continues to become a more liberal, a more tolerant society. Vineet Bhalla of Scroll informs us that the Kerala “High Court changed the birth certificate of the biological child of a trans couple so that it lists both as ‘parents’, rather than ‘mother’ and ‘father’.” Zahhad and […]
Long read: If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good For Everything, Should We All Be on Them?
If Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly’s anti-diabetic and consequently anti-obesity drugs (GLP1) came as the blockbuster drugs the pharmaceutical industry was awaiting, they have since surpassed expectations by demonstrating capabilities in various other therapeutic areas from cancer to Alzheimer’s, some even calling it wonder drugs. To help us separate the hype from reality, here’s Derek […]
Long read: What Passive Investing Has Done To Our Retirement
Whilst this might seem relevant to the American market where passive funds are predominant today, the unabated retail flows into Indian mutual funds may not be too far from the price agnostic behaviour this article talks about. A lot of what the author writes about seems to be drawn from (and appropriately referenced to) the […]
Long read: Quality of students from IITs coming down?
Some of us in Marcellus have been recruiting Indian graduates fresh out of university for over two decades. Over the past decade we have seen a sharp dip in the quality of graduates emerging from India’s universities including from the elite IITs and IIMs. Speaking to friends in other firms, we find that the situation […]
The Final Commandment: Nurture the next Generation
Summary: Build a business which has multiple generations embedded in it. Train the next gen to be leaders, to understand the time value of money, to bring a disruptive point of view & fresh talent into the business. [To find out what the Ten Commandments of Indian Entrepreneurship are, please click here: https://marcellus.in/blogs/the-ten-commandments-of-entrepreneurship-in-india/] “The third and […]
Indian Banks Don’t Need More Regulation, They Need More Leverage
Indian banks are often criticized for maintaining higher net interest margins (NIMs) compared to their global peers. However, despite higher NIMs, Indian banks’ average RoE of 6.9% over the past decade lags the average RoE of G7 countries’ banks of 9.2%. More importantly, Indian banks have one of the lowest excess return (RoE less 10-year […]
Long read: Tech Philosophy and AI Opportunity
If your life is anywhere close to the intersection of business and technology, either as an investor in technology or a technology entrepreneur, Ben Thompson’s blog site Stratechery should be mandatory reading. Indeed, we would urge investors and business owners in general would do good to read as well, as technology becomes all pervasive. In […]
Long read: How to Tame the Casino Society
In recent years, a few people in India have begun worshipping a new god: the stock market. In 1986, one of the few contemporary investors who truly understands the nature of the stock market wrote a piece explaining why the stock market almost always turns out to be a false god. Mr. Buffett begins by […]
Short read: The Deception of a Good Outcome
Vishal Khandelwal’s Safal Niveshak is perhaps India’s go-to-site for lessons in investing, especially the behavioural aspects of it – plenty of blogs and podcasts loaded with insights. Here’s one such blog from his series on The Psychology of Investing, that helps us understand the role of skill and luck in investing and life in general. […]
Short read: Writer Gideon Haigh on the foremost rivalry in cricket today
It is tragic on the one hand to see the historic India-Pakistan cricketing rivalry wane partly due to the rarity of the matches but also India’s distinct supremacy over the past decade or so. On the other hand, fortunately, India’s strides have meant that the India-Australia rivalry has been an equally good replacement if not […]
Short read: A Miracle, but a miss
Dr. M. Govinda Rao is one of modern India’s greatest economists. The former Director of the National Institute of Public Finance & Policy now lives on the outskirts of Bangalore and understands the Indian economy better than 99% of India’s economists and C-Suite executives. In this column for the Business Standard, he draws our attention […]
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