The Cashflow Compounding Contest: Rising Giants vs Metals Companies
Revenue growth is an important driver of Free Cashflow (FCF) growth. However, mere top-line growth usually doesn’t bring about non-linear FCF growth (hence the sub-par performance of commodity stocks on a cross-cycle basis). In this month’s newsletter, we deep dive into how the Rising Giants portfolio companies drive healthy FCF compounding through market share gains, […]
An undebatable political decision’: Why China refuses to end its harsh lockdowns
Exactly a year ago the world’s media was falling over itself to cover the ravaging of India by the second Covid wave. Even as many of us lost loved ones in Apr-June 2021, we could not but help feel disappointed by how the global media sought to portray India as a singularly messed up democracy. […]
There are good reasons why Elon wants Twitter
Twenty years ago mega rich people who had risen to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would buy a newspaper or two to satiate their need to control what the world thought in general and, more specifically, what the world thought of them. With the power of conventional media on the wane, Shirin Ghaffary […]
Nobody sells their child’ — Story of MDH, an original Indian ‘start-up’ that won’t go to HUL
At Marcellus we have written books on and built a business around the consolidation of various sectors of the Indian economy around 1 or 2 well-managed highly efficient companies who steadily crush their competitors and make a lot of money for their shareholders. For several years now, we have been looking at the spices industry […]
You have to do things perfectly . . . but it’s so secret’ — how to build an oligarch’s yacht
There was a time when the rich purchased private jets. However, such has been the explosion in prosperity over the past 20 years that the truly rich now have to have a yacht or two to show-off and relax in. Whilst yacht’s that are 40 metres or so are the domain of the mega rich, […]
Five Things I Know about Investing
Forty years ago, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French revolutionised Finance by casting doubt on the CAPM theory: “They wrote a series of papers that cast doubt on the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), which posits that a stock’s beta alone should explain its average return. These papers describe two factors above and beyond […]
Our View on the HDFC Mega-merger
In our May 2020 blog (click here to read), we explained how under Deepak Parekh’s leadership, the HDFC group has become India’s most successful financial services conglomerate by dominating virtually every segment that it has entered. With the HDFC group, capital – both human & financial – has consistently been allocated prudently. Seeding HDFC Bank […]
Mother pushes vegetable cart on Lucknow street, daughter Mumtaz stars in Junior hockey World Cup
Inspite of how the Indian state functions, the remaking of India lives on due to the aspirations of ordinary people and their desire to make a mark in the world. This extraordinary story in the Indian Express put a spring in our step: “ALONG A narrow, bustling street at Topkhana Bazar in Lucknow, Qaiser Jahan stood […]
This Year, 12 States Reduced Education Funding In Percentage Terms
Whilst people like us who work in the stockmarket are busy cheering the booming economy, some of India’s largest states are busy cutting their spend on essential items which have a massive impact on the development of the country. To quote Prafulla Satpute: “Even as most states increased or kept their education budgets similar in 2021-22, […]
ROC Investments Launches the World’s First ‘Return On Character®’ ETF
At Marcellus, we have spend most of the past decade writing books about and investing in clean, well-managed Indian companies with dominant franchises. Hence we were delighted and intrigued to hear that last month in the USA, a fund was launched which focuses on the character of the management team and invests in companies run […]
Putin Lives in Historic Analogies and Metaphors
As per his Wikipedia page Ivan Krastev is “is a political scientist, the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, permanent fellow at the IWM (Institute of Human Sciences) in Vienna,[1] and 2013-14-17 Richard von Weizsäcker fellow at the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Berlin. He is a founding board member of the European Council […]
High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It
For most of us in Marcellus, this is our second go at managing a business. We got our first chance to run a business around 10-15 years ago when we were in our early thirties. At that point one of our earliest learnings was that “if we want to make groups of talented people collaborate […]
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