Sporting Success Captures India’s Rise Better Than GDP Growth
Whilst investors tend to focus on economic metrics such as GDP growth to measure a country’s progress, an equally effective way to assess the rise of a nation is its success in sports – not just highly commercialized sports like cricket but also more physically strenous disciplines like athletics, wrestling, weightlifting, etc. which require intense […]
Three Glorious Years of Compounding
In Little Champs’ third anniversary newsletter, we dissect the portfolio’s performance and the key drivers thereof. On the whole, our stock selection – including the calls on exits and fresh additions – appear to have been on the mark. However, there are important learnings over the last three years around: (1) more robust evaluation of […]
The End of the Manual Transmission Is Near. Here’s Why.
Some readers, especially those who learnt to drive over the last decade or so in India, perhaps two or more in the west, might wonder if the title of this article is a bit redundant. Isn’t manual transmission already dead? Well, for all practical purposes, yes, as its share of new vehicles is already miniscule. […]
Ben Bernanke and Edward Chancellor square off on monetary policy
Central banks in the west, in particular the Federal Reserve have been under attack from critics for keeping interest rates too low for far too long and using unconventional monetary policy tools. In this piece, The Economist reviews too books that represent the views of the critics and the central banks in contrast. First, ‘The […]
Tinder struggles to attract younger users as Gen Z singles look to new apps
In January 2022, we highlighted in 3 Longs & 3 Shorts Jonathan Knee’s book, ‘The Platform Delusion’ – see https://marcellus.in/story/review-of-dr-jonathan-knees-book-the-platform-delusion-who-wins-and-who-loses-in-the-age-of-tech-titans/ .To quote from our Jan ’22 piece: “In specific, here are our key takeaways from this thought-provoking book: Barring Facebook, the FAANGS and other so called “platforms” like Uber and AirBnB don’t seem to benefit significantly from network […]
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
We were discussing the bizarre situation of an impending recession amidst labour shortages in the west with a bunch of clients recently. Soon the discussion moved to how the world, especially the west will likely move from a minimum wage set-up to a minimum work environment to coax people who have excused themselves out of […]
How Serena Williams dominated tennis and transformed it
For several years now, Menaka Guruswamy, an advocate at the Supreme Court of India, has been writing a superb column in that most readable of India’s newspapers, the Indian Express. In this inspirational piece she celebrates one of the most remarkable sporting icons of the 21st century: Serena Williams. After narrating Serena’s mind-boggling career stats (eg. […]
The Immortal Salman Rushdie
Some of us in Marcellus have spent most of our lives reading endless amounts of books – both fiction and non-fiction. For better or for worse, our reading has made us who we are and, at many levels, reading is what we do to earn a living. Our reading has included most of Salman Rushdie’s […]
In a Post-2022 World, the Dollar will have a Different Meaning
There have been doubts raised about the sustainability of the reserve currency status of the US Dollar over the past decade ever since the Fed started printing money to bail out the economy post the global financial crisis. But geo-political issues of 2022 have only amplified those voices as this article in The Market suggests. “A […]
The endless magic of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”
Off late, Netflix has been burning a lot of cash on content, mostly without much gain – mediocre quality despite the big budgets, unsurprisingly hasn’t made a difference to its subscriber additions. This month, another big budget series ‘The Sandman’, supposedly costing a whopping $15m an episode, was launched to rave reviews. Here’s one from […]
Salman Rushdie and the Power of Words
The day after Salman Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly in western New York, we scanned the Indian media to see if any of our “leaders” had anything to say about this atrocity. We couldn’t find any Indian leader – in politics or beyond – having a point of view on what was in practical terms an […]
The private equity club: how corporate raiders became teams of rivals
Private equity as an asset class has taken off in a big way amongst institutional asset allocators over the past four decades or so, with especially the leveraged buy-outs almost coinciding with the low interest rate regime over the same period. This article traces the evolution of the competitive intensity in the private equity industry […]
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