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 […]
Long read: Beyond words: The 200-year-old hidden languages of dating
In this fascinating piece, Molly Gorman & William Park describe how Europeans have been flirting and propositioning each other over the past couple of centuries. The remarkable thing is that not much has changed over those five centuries. 18th century England is where the idea of a “marriage market” i.e. a market where men & women […]
Ninth Commandment: Build trust with relationships & experiences outside your comfort zone
Summary: Build relationships with a broad range of people especially people who are outside your community and/your comfort zone. [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/] “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying […]
Portfolio performance and update on fundamentals – June 2025
Global Compounders Portfolio (GCP): June was a constructive month for the portfolio and the broader index. However, the portfolio underperformed the index by approximately 190 bps, as markets were led higher by a sharp rebound in a handful of large-cap semiconductor names—despite elevated valuations. In contrast, our more defensive holdings, including Waste Connections, Berkshire Hathaway, […]
Short read: Russia is paying schoolgirls to have babies. Why is pronatalism on the rise around the world?
The title might sound like an extreme case of pronatalisim – a policy that supports higher birth rates. But it is on the rise across the world – from Chief Ministers of South Indian states to Donald Trump himself – governments are exhorting people to have more babies. “In some parts of Russia, schoolgirls who […]
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