The Recent Birth and Ongoing Decline of ‘The Office’
Across the world, technology is steadily reducing the relevance of ‘The Office’ for white collar workers. As demand for office space in big cities reduces and as work shifts in two directions: a) to ‘Work From Home’; and b) to white collar gig work, demand for residential and commercial space in Tier 2 cities will […]
Foreign ESOPs: Valuable, Illiquid, Tax-Inefficient & Tricky
Summary: The quantum of ESOPs held by Indians in foreign companies is orders of magnitude larger than ESOPs held in desi companies. And yet, this is a mixed blessing because foreign ESOPs are illiquid, tax-inefficient and tricky to manage. Marcellus recommends 3 simple steps which can help Indians make the most of these stock options: (1) Move portfolio […]
Parents Are Dipping Deep into Their Retirement Savings to Pay for their Kids’ Education
Summary: With 1.3 million Indians studying at Western universities, India leads the world in sending its kids to study abroad . While you would expect that of the world’s most populous nation, what is unexpected is the level of financial stress that Indian parents are bearing to finance their children’s dreams of a better life. Most Indian parents […]
A Quadruple Shock to the Cost of Living
While the rising price of Brent crude features prominently in media reports, there are 3 other less reported inflationary shocks moving towards the Indian economy – the rising cost of imports, the soaring cost of edible oils and the likelihood of a poor monsoon – which are capable of delivering a punch as powerful as […]
Retirement Planning: Tackling the Hardest Problem in Finance
Summary: Across the world, retirement planning is viewed as one of the most complex problems in Finance due to the multitude of unpredictable variables at play. In India, this problem is made more complex by the high and variable inflation in the cost of living. The problem is made even more challenging for the Indian middle […]
AI is Birthing a New Middle-Class Elite: Evidence from the West
Nearly four years since the launch of ChatGPT, what has AI done to middle class jobs and incomes in the West? Our literature survey (using AI) suggests: 1) Middle class white collar jobs – especially entry level jobs – have collapsed in the West; 2) Most middle class white collar jobs in the West are […]
Drug Discovery is Being Revolutionized & What It Could Mean for Investors
Google DeepMind’s success in using AI to crack protein folding (one of the hardest problems in science) has revolutionized medical research. Research that used to take decades now takes a few years. This makes it likely that the speed of new drug discovery will increase. To gain exposure to this combination of AI & medicine, […]
Who Will Win the LLM Wars and How Can Investors Benefit from the same?
Tempting as it is to declare a winner in the LLM wars every week or month (depending on the latest capability demonstrated by Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT), such predictions are a waste of time because of just how fluid the AI landscape is. All we know for sure is that AI is an important […]
Every Country Now Wants to be Atmanirbhar. How Can you Participate in this trend?
Industrial policy refers to government officials channelling resources to particular industries that the market would not. What India’s leaders understood many decades ago was acknowledged a fortnight ago by the World Bank – that every country should now have an industrial policy. Companies in our Global Compounders Portfolio are well positioned to potentially benefit from […]
Economic Warfare is Now a Daily Reality. Is Your Portfolio Ready for It?
Over the past 20 years, America has led the world in using economic chokepoints to hurt its rivals. First China (using rare earths) and now Iran (using Hormuz) are returning the compliment. It is all but inevitable that every significant economy will now use economic warfare to attain its goals. To protect your wealth in […]
We Didn’t Start the War. So Why Are We Being Fried?
Although India doesn’t have anything to do with the war in the Middle East, over the past month, the Nifty is down 11.7% in $ terms, 3x more than the S&P500 (down 3.6%) and nearly 1.5x more the European index (European Stoxx 600 Index down 8.1%). So, why is India so exposed to events in […]
This is the Biggest Boom Ever in Global Capex. Are You Profiting From it?
A confluence of factors – surging power demand, higher defence spend, climate change, AI, shortage of oil & gas – is driving an unprecedented burst of global capex with Europe and America at the vanguard. This surge in capex, which overshadows the scale of capex seen even during World War II, has over the past […]
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