How to play the long game
Jeff Bezos reportedly said that the easiest way to eliminate competition is by prolonging your time horizon of focus, as very few businessmen tend to think long term. Ditto for investing, where majority of the market participants have investment horizons of days or weeks or months at best. Warren Buffett put it another way by […]
iPhone repair is Apple’s long overdue innovation and a welcome change of course
You don’t have to be environmentally minded to hate throwing away stuff. Common sense suggests that discarding phones every other year, discarding clothes after a year and discarding cars every five years is a bad idea for your finances (remember, if you are a Marcellus client, every rupee you spend is a rupee you could […]
Richard Rusczyk’s Worldwide Math Camp
If you have passion, purpose and the courage to walk down the path less trodden, the internet gives you ways to the live the life of your dreams, make a lot of money and get the intellectual kick that you crave. This life affirming piece from the New Yorker shows what is possible in today’s […]
Why India Beats China Hollow on Consistent Compounding?
Amongst Emerging Markets, India and China have produced the greatest number of Consistent Compounders (i.e., companies which have delivered 10% YoY revenue growth and 10% RoCE consistently over a decade). However, not only does India produce more Consistent Compounders than China, Indian Consistent Compounders have also delivered more than twice as much shareholder return as […]
In praise of my favourite athlete – the amateur
Some of us are fortunate enough to continue playing amateur sport well into our 40s and can relate to this delectable piece of prose from one of the best sports writers of our times – not so much to bring out the nuances of professional sport as much as to make sport romantic as it […]
How to Stop Caring What Other People Think of You
Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor on leadership and also hosts a podcast series titled How to Build a Happy Life besides writing this column for The Atlantic. In this piece, he tackles a problem most of us face to varying degrees – worrying about what others think of us, which in turn inhibits us from being […]
GE and the Belief in Management Magic
At Marcellus, we look for three characteristics in companies before investing – clean promoters (being fair to minority shareholders), prudent capital allocation and sustainable competitive advantages. The last of them is somewhat widely appreciated by investors (though not the easiest to assess) thanks to Buffett’s moat analogy. The former tends to come into focus in […]
The Exponential Age Will Transform Economics Forever
Albert Einstein is often attributed with the quote of compounding being the eighth wonder of the world. Wonder, because plenty of research has shown that the human mind struggles to get exponentiality. And exponentiality in the context of technology is why we are seeing massive disruptions and why most of us have under estimated the […]
How Arvind Lal built a single lab into India’s most valuable diagnostic services powerhouse
We have a significant stake (by our standards) in Dr Lal Pathlabs and have as a result had the good fortune to meet the Founder, Dr Lal, and the firm’s CEO, Om Manchanda, several times. As middle class Indians hailing from families with little or no business background, we believe that stories like Dr Lal’s […]
Why are we underperforming the Bank Nifty?
Since its inception about fifteen months ago, the Kings of Capital Portfolio (KCP) has delivered annualized returns of 34% vs. 54% for the Bank Nifty. The underperformance of the KCP portfolio is a factor of: (i) fund composition vs. that of the index – Bank Nifty consists of only banks vs. KCP has an allocation […]
The welcome spread of assisted dying
Euthanasia or ‘assisted dying’ as it is called these days is becoming legal in more and more countries. Liberals believe that freedom should also include one’s choice of the manner and timing of their death as well. Whilst many countries are legalising it, the debate is far from over, argues this piece in The Economist, […]
A look at the metaverse through four lenses of a metamorphosis
We have featured pieces on the Metaverse in recent months, about what they mean by it and what implications it may have for all of us. But with Facebook diving right into it by going as far as changing its name to Meta, interest has shot up even more in the past few days. Jaspreet […]
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