Why Satan should chair your meetings
There has been widespread concern about the effectiveness of office meetings from even before the pandemic. Now, with the same moved to screens, people are even more weary. Barring a few organisations such as Amazon which insists on a pre-circulated note to improve the effectiveness of meetings, most firms struggle with this issue. In this […]
How FC Barcelona blew a fortune — and got worse
For as long as we have been adults, Simon Kuper has been one of the most erudite football writers in the world. In this piece – which was written before FC Barcelona announced Lionel Messi’s exit – Mr Kuper dissects how FC Barcelona messed up its capital allocation and, in the process, lost its place […]
India must allow children to return to classrooms
When Covid-19 hit the world in the opening months of 2020, most countries shut their schools. But then by the opening months of 2021 most countries figured out a way to reopen their schools and get their children back where they belong – in the classroom. Unfortunately, this has not been the case in India […]
Little Champs Show India Inc How To Diversify
Alongside globalisation (see our July ‘21 newsletter), diversification has been an important feature of Little Champs’ growth strategy. Unlike what we see in the broader corporate world, Little Champs’s diversification strategies have been successful with new forays over the past decade now contributing in excess of 20% of revenues for most portfolio companies and RoCEs sustaining at […]
Tokyo Olympics: India’s Hockey Win Holds Key Lesson For Women’s Sport
The two highlights of India’s Olympic campaign have to be the performance of our hockey teams, promising a path to regaining lost glory in our national sport and how our women athletes have outshone their male counterparts. Whilst the men’s hockey team won their first Olympic medal after 41 agonising years, the women’s team though […]
Extracting Value Vs Creating Value
Aaron Tang is a young Malaysia based founder of mr-stingy.com where he writes about optimizing time, money and relationships — to make the most out of life. His writing is featured in the likes of Business Insider and The Huffington Post. In this blog, Aaron talks about the scarcity mindset which drives extracting value versus the abundance […]
The New Cold War
Last week, we featured a piece on why China is smashing its tech industry which drew inferences from China’s political economy, which can have far reaching implications on the world economy, whether it is investing in Chinese tech stocks or the impact on global supply chains and hence inflation. In this piece, Pratap Bhanu Mehta reviews a […]
Everything Is a DCF Model
The value of a business lies in the cashflows it generates over its life, adjusted for time value or what is called the Discounted Cashflow (DCF). Yet, majority of market participants don’t use it for reasons ranging from the frivolous to somewhat valid. In this article, Michael Mauboussin and his colleague Dan Callahan at Morgan […]
A Scam Unfolds – Extract from ‘Absolute Power’
Sucheta Dalal, the legendary financial journalist who has uncovered several mega scams – including the Harshad Mehta scam and the Ketan Parekh scam in Mumbai’s financial markets – has written a book along with her husband Debashis Basu. Titled “Absolute Power”, the book is about the spectacular rise of the NSE through the late 1990s […]
How the investment bubble in conventional power assets will blow up
Over the past five years Tony Seba has been one of the most prescient analysts of the shift from conventional energy sources to alternative energy sources and from ICE vehicles to EVs. Five years ago when he published a book and a series of notes on why EV will replace ICE much faster than expected, […]
Celebrating Three Years of Marcellus with Three Outstanding Books
“I know where I am going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I am free to be what I want.”–Muhammad Ali As Marcellus turns three, we reaffirm our commitment to our 7,000 clients to make wealth creation simple and accessible, by being trustworthy and […]
Amidst the Covid turmoil, CCPs invested in tech & in institutionalisation
Longevity of free cashflow compounding is the most undervalued aspect of a high-quality stock. Besides strength of the existing business, the sources of longevity for a business include incremental reinvestment in areas which will deliver cashflows beyond the next 3-5 years, and the institutionalization of strategy and business execution. In the recent past, most CCP […]
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