How Volatile Funds Cost Investors Dear
High volatility in an equity portfolio creates zones of ‘excitement’ and ‘fear’ based on recent performance. This adversely affects the quality of decision making by equity investors. As a result, historically, investor returns in Indian equity funds have been lower than fund returns across different periods. Similarly, a recent example from the US – NYSE […]
Early concepts of intimacy: Young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships
How babies and young children learn about the world around them has been a fertile and fascinating area of research into the human mind. In this remarkable piece of research, six American psychologists teamed up to discover a unique insight: “Young humans are remarkably helpless, relying entirely on the adult humans around them for survival. However, […]
Horses to helicopters, moustache to libraries — Dalit pride in Rajasthan has new wings
At Marcellus, we remain keen observers of social change because far more the GDP growth or the prognostications of economists, social change is often the most telling indicator of lasting economic change. This piece in The Print is in that regard representative of how India is changing. Says Jyoti Yadav: “As media drones circled overhead, thousands […]
The High Cost of an Easy Job
Nick Maggiulli’s from Ritholtz explains in this piece why cushy jobs i.e. jobs where you have to do very little and get paid a lot of money (which are exactly the sort of jobs most people want) can turn you prematurely into a vegetable: “I can see the appeal. Compared to putting in 70+ hour weeks […]
The Trillion-Dollar Gambling Game
Ever since it was created in the early 1990s, the English Premier League (EPL) has had a seedy underbelly wherein black money from Russia and Asia intermingles with betting and cryptocurrency. In this investigative piece, legendary football journalist Philippe Auclair (formerly of The Guardian) digs into the links between the EPL, money laundering, crypto and […]
Inside the mysterious downfall of India’s Cox & Kings
Tea-time chats in our team have, for many years now, focused on the latest annual reports of India’s most corrupt companies. In that regard the annual reports of Cox & Kings provided us with plenty to talk long about long before the company went bust in 2019. In our latest bestseller “Diamonds in the Dust: […]
Asian Paints vs Sherwin Williams: Different Paths to Dominance
The moats created by dominant franchises in India differ from their counterparts in the West due to differences in the underlying structure of the respective markets. We use Asian Paints and Sherwin Williams as examples of how two equally dominant companies in the same industry have followed completely different paths to dominance. The case study […]
How often does Nandan Nilekani check his email? A new book tells you about addiction
A couple of years ago we published a book called “The Victory Project: Six Steps to Peak Potential in which we discussed, amongst other things, steps that all of us can take to improve our ability to focus, to concentrate and to be super-productive. Now Nandan Nilekani and Tanuj Bhojwani have written an entertaining book […]
When hyping technology is a crime
The previous piece segues into this piece. Coming from the editor of Science, the most authoritative of scientific journals, this is a timely warning for many of us (including the team at Marcellus) not to get carried away by overhyped technologies. Whilst Holden Thorp focuses on Elizabeth Holmes, the now convicted CEO of Theranos (the […]
The Crytocurrency Deception
In this day and age of unrelenting hype around cryptocurrency, it is easy to lose sight of some basic facts. In this opinion piece in the Indian Express, Yogesh Gupta, formerly of the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate, reminds us of a coupe of straightforward facts around cryptocurrency.Firstly, by no stretch of the imagination is […]
China Is Watching Ukraine with a Lot of Interest
Vladimir Putin is going eyeball-to-eyeball with America and Western Europe in Ukraine and this article in Atlantic explains why countries China (and therefore countries neighbouring China) are looking at the situation with a lot of interest. Why? Because it will give them a measure of whether the Americans and the Europeans have it in them […]
‘Colonialism had never really ended’: my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes
You might want to have a strong drink before you read this hard hitting piece in The Guardian. This long read comes from Dr Simukai Chigudu, a Zimbabwean academic in Oxford University. It talks about the world from the perspective of an affluent black Zimbabwean but this piece is just as relevant for Indians struggling […]
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