‘They want toys to get their children into Harvard’: have we been getting playthings all wrong?
This long read is a tribute to capitalism’s ability to tap into our insecurities by using pseudoscience and thereby persuade us to spend tens of billions of dollars every year on useless bits of plastic. The author is a father of a 10-year old child in the UK and begins by noting that like him, […]
Four years of CCP: 98.2% total returns, 18.6% CAGR
A review of the last four years of CCP returns highlights the consistency of performance across investee companies – almost all constituent stocks have compounded their share prices at 15-30% annually demonstrating that stock selection contributed significantly to portfolio returns. Additionally, portfolio management tools such as the Longevity Framework and Margin of Safety & Sustainability […]
Powering Through the Slowdown
In 2QFY23, Little Champs Portfolio (LCP) witnessed median revenue growth of 24% and PBT growth of 14%. However, some portfolio companies did face headwinds around revenues (Covid-19 related revenues tapering off, impact from price hikes) and margins (raw material and energy costs up). However, these headwinds have been abating in recent months which should aid […]
Boring is Beautiful in Investing
It might sound like an afterthought given the crash we have seen this year in ‘exciting’ assets like crypto and tech stocks. But to be fair to the author Ben Carlson, he did write a piece in the middle of the boom on why ‘It’s OK To Build Wealth Slowly (awealthofcommonsense.com)’. Like Paul Samuelson is […]
A sleuth’s guide to the coming wave of corporate fraud
Accounting quality is a key aspect of Marcellus’ investment philosophy and hence detecting accounting fraud is beyond just a skill for the Marcellus analyst. This article is dated 7th November, the day before FTX unravelled. The Economist’s prescience is less to do with the specifics of Samuel Bankman-Fried or crypto in general than the remarkably repetitive […]
Dilip Mahalanabis, paediatrician, 1934-2022
When Dr Dilip Mahalanabis passed away in a private hospital in Kolkata on 16th October 2022 very few of us noticed as we were busy watching the T20 World Cup in Australia. And yet as the Financial Times noted “…the distinguished paediatrician deserved a less muted valediction. His pioneering medical work among refugees fleeing war in the […]
What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About the Frustrations of Modern Work
Cal Newport, the author of the brilliant book – Deep Work, has written extensively about the problems of the current workplace, especially in the context of the knowledge worker and the umpteen distractions she faces from technology (email, instant message, social media) to perform ‘Deep Work’. In this piece for the New Yorker, Newport draws upon […]
Do Things that Don’t Scale
When we set up Marcellus four years ago, we relied on wisdom from people/sources far smarter than us eg. Peter Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’, inputs from Mohandas Pai, Charles Ellis’ book on ‘Capital’ and Paul Graham’s blogs (such as the one highlighted above). Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator and is a great […]
The helpful delusion
Every so often we come across a piece which takes conventional wisdom and then turns it on its head so logically that we end up asking ourselves “why didn’t I think of that?”. This piece by Justin Garson – professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York – […]
China’s Unravelling Creates a $300 Billion Opportunity for India
As China’s economy is pulverized due to its never-ending Covid lockdowns, its beleaguered banking system, and the country’s face-off with Europe and America, India is well positioned to gain share in the global market for knowledge intensive manufactured products such as smartphones, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), and medical devices. Cumulatively, these sectors can create an […]
Separating the Men from the Boys
Financial services companies in general and Indian NBFCs in specific tend to encounter a crisis every few years. High-quality management teams not only deal with such crises but actually benefit from it. NBFCs in India have seen three challenging events in the last six years – demonetization, the failure of a large NBFC (leading to […]
MeritorQ: The Moneyball of Quality Investing
Just as the Moneyball approach in baseball (as explained by Michael Lewis in his book by the same name) helped a team of seemingly average players consistently win matches, in Marcellus’ MeritorQ, we select good quality and undervalued companies (rather than betting on singular ‘quality’ or ‘value’ investment opportunities) to deliver superior risk-adjusted returns. The […]
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