Three Longs & Three Shorts

Nov 2019

Week 2
Week 1

Short Read

Published on 10 Nov, 2019

Long Before ‘Netflix and Chill,’ He Was the Netflix ...

In his book ‘Principles’, Ray Dalio talks about the concept of ‘Radical transparency’ as the cornerstone of his...

Published on 10 Nov, 2019

Despatch from Tokyo – The multiracialism of th...

Anyone out there who despairs about the amount of religion, language and caste related bigotry we see in India should...

Published on 10 Nov, 2019

A Long-Only Manager’s Radical, Logical Idea of Zero ...

As some of you might know, at Marcellus we offer clients an unusual fee structure: we charge fees only if we deliver in...

Long Read

Published on 10 Nov, 2019

Non-Intuitive Lessons From the Man Who Solved the Ma...

Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s best performing investment firms ever has been an enigma of sorts with...

Published on 10 Nov, 2019

The giant steps of Yashasvi Jaiswal

Warren Buffet calls it the ovarian lottery. For most of us, the conditions of our birth – financial, geographical and...

Published on 10 Nov, 2019

Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland int...

Nokia, the Finnish pioneer in mobile phones controlled almost 40% of the world’s mobile phone market a little over a...

Short Read

Published on 03 Nov, 2019

Why older people should be allowed to change their l...

Earlier this week IndusInd Bank shares rose supposedly as the bank announced that it has finalised a potential...

Published on 03 Nov, 2019

Gandhi at 150: Icon immortalised in special New York...

We are fond of stories which describe the ascent made by Indians from modest origins. If such stories narrate quirky...

Published on 03 Nov, 2019

The sCAPEgoat: Why Valuations Get More Attention Tha...

Nick Maggiulli comes out with a timely post on the subject of valuations when investors world over are questioning the...

Long Read

Published on 03 Nov, 2019

Be Humble, and Proudly, Psychologists Say

It is often said that in the world of investing, the most important personality trait for success is humility,...

Published on 03 Nov, 2019

Mumbai and Kolkata face the wrath of sea-level rise

Just as a surprise burst of showers sent Mumbaikars scrambling around on Friday, you could hear Axl Rose, Slash and co...

Published on 03 Nov, 2019

How Do You Like We Now

This epic takedown of WeWork will go down in the history of journalism as one of the defining pieces which captured the...

Oct 2019

Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1

Short Read

Published on 27 Oct, 2019

The many beginnings of Diwali

If over a billion people on the planet are going to be revelling in in festivities over the next three days, it is...

Published on 27 Oct, 2019

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on achieving quantum supremacy

It is almost a century since Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics. Whilst applications from...

Published on 27 Oct, 2019

Napster paved the way for streaming-reliant music in...

Spotify has been Godsend for music lovers across the world, especially given its ability to machine learn your music...

Long Read

Published on 27 Oct, 2019

The US has fewer than 400 statues of women—but that’...

Women are not only smashing the glass ceiling in the corporate world but also apparently in the world of statues. Women...

Published on 27 Oct, 2019

NBA exec: ‘It’s the dirty little secret ...

Many of us who endure long commutes and work in businesses where frequent air travel is a must know a thing or two...

Published on 27 Oct, 2019

Airbnb and Uber are chalk and cheese

Uber and Airbnb were both founded around a decade ago and most of us think of them as being synonymous of the gig...

Short Read

Published on 20 Oct, 2019

‘Only Re 1’: Customers line up for sanitary pads as ...

In his book Factfulness, Dr Hans Rosling remarked that the sanitary pads market remained the world’s largest untapped...

Published on 20 Oct, 2019

Findings from Keeladi excavation site have a clear m...

We alluded to Bangalore’s traffic congestion problem in last week’s 3L-3S but it is the city’s ability to deal...

Published on 20 Oct, 2019

How Did Eliud Kipchoge Break the Marathon Record So ...

As an ever increasing number of people across the world take to running citing benefits varying from the physical to...

Long Read

Published on 20 Oct, 2019

The Tycoons Behind China’s Gadget Factories Boom Pre...

This is a super piece on how cold calculations – rather than national or ethnic identity – drive FDI. As China’s...

Published on 20 Oct, 2019

Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff: What Business Schoo...

Continuing with heartwarming inspirations from the world of business, Marc Benioff, the iconoclastic founder and co-CEO...

Published on 20 Oct, 2019

From rags to richer

The Economist – normally a champion of full on free market capitalism – has a heart warming story regarding a...

Short Read

Published on 13 Oct, 2019

How Bangalore’s IT sector flowered from a princely s...

One would assume that an article on urban development in Bangalore would talk about the ridiculous traffic congestion...

Published on 13 Oct, 2019

An economic crisis in your teens can alter your beha...

Behaviours of entire generations such as that of the baby boomers and the millienials and their influence on the...

Published on 13 Oct, 2019

The True Cost Of Ignoring True Cost

WeWork’s failed IPO has led to several notable commentators in America highlighting the folly of private markets and...

Long Read

Published on 13 Oct, 2019

Is Amazon Unstoppable?

As we approach the next US presidential elections, the chorus against big corporate will only get louder. Hence, it is...

Published on 13 Oct, 2019

Stephen Schwarzman Hung Out a Shingle.Then He Waited.

The appropriately titled King Capital was a story about Blackstone and how Stephen Schwarzman built a world class...

Published on 13 Oct, 2019

Real Economy Check: ‘Jammed Liquidity’ To ‘Overwhelm...

This insightful interview with Amit Sheth, the promoter of Orbit Lifesciences, is a rare example of a promoter talking...

Short Read

Published on 06 Oct, 2019

AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks

An argument in favour of automation using Artificial Intelligence replacing humans with machines for jobs that are...

Published on 06 Oct, 2019

‘The 3.5% rule: How a small minority can chang...

The arresting piece contends that “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and...

Published on 06 Oct, 2019

Contradictory Figures: Lessons From Uber’s Rise

Ben Carlson, another star commentator from the fabulous Ritholtz stable, discusses one of the best business books he...

Long Read

Published on 06 Oct, 2019

Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping ...

Another masterpiece by Morgan Housel, more so because the subject matter of the blog is the reason we produce Three...

Published on 06 Oct, 2019

Is it possible to disrupt a cow?

We have featured the rise of the fake meat or the plant based protein industry in this space earlier highlighting how...

Published on 06 Oct, 2019

Notes from a Sun Tzu skeptic

In many aspects of our lives, we tend to take certain age-old practices for granted without understanding the...

Sep 2019

Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1

Short Read

Published on 29 Sep, 2019

What former CAG Vinod Rai found when auditing the ac...

t Marcellus we never stop harping on the importance of clean books of accounts and why companies with cooked up numbers...

Published on 29 Sep, 2019

The House Releases the Declassified Whistle-Blower C...

A whistle blower has released a letter that has set off the events that may well end with President Trump’s...

Published on 29 Sep, 2019

The curious case of Bhavish Aggarwal and Ola Electric

More than a decade after the Lehman Brothers bust unleashed the greatest tide of liquidity seen in the history of...

Long Read

Published on 29 Sep, 2019

Facts Don’t Change People’s Minds. Here’s What Does

“When my information changes, I change my mind”, is an oft quoted statement, usually attributed to economist John...

Published on 29 Sep, 2019

Casper Dreams of Being Bigger Than Mattresses

If building a business with strong competitive advantages is tough, sustaining the competitive advantage is many...

Published on 29 Sep, 2019

Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore?

It is fashionable to believe these days that Trump, Putin, Modi, Xi, Erdogan, etc have ushered in a new era of...

Short Read

Published on 22 Sep, 2019

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barel...

An incredible piece in ESPN on what hours of playing chess can do to your body. Aishwarya Kumar highlights research...

Published on 22 Sep, 2019

His bus conductor mother praying back home, Atharva ...

Once upon a time most of the cricketers in the Indian cricket (men’s and women’s) team came from the posh schools...

Published on 22 Sep, 2019

Thomas Piketty Back With a 1,200 Page Guide To Aboli...

It couldn’t have been a better week to be talking about inequality as Thomas Piketty’s new book “Capital and...

Long Read

Published on 22 Sep, 2019

Why rigged capitalism is damaging liberal democracy

Four weeks ago, the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs from the world’s largest corporations issued a statement...

Published on 22 Sep, 2019

He Is Trying To Play A Very Difficult Game”: T...

A fascinating piece in Vanity Fair about the contradiction that Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricketing superstar and now...

Published on 22 Sep, 2019

How a Small-Cap Fund Weeds Out the Worst Stocks

At Marcellus, we are big fans of giant data-hungry quant screens which can rigorously sift through years of data on...

Short Read

Published on 15 Sep, 2019

Human Activity in China and India Dominates the Gree...

Amidst all the doom and gloom around how we humans are destroying the planet in the wake of the Amazon fires, here’s...

Published on 15 Sep, 2019

India’s Moon Mission Was Anything But A Failure. Her...

With the dust now settled around the seemingly tragic and melodramatic episode of India’s failed attempt to put a...

Published on 15 Sep, 2019

The “10,000-hour rule” was debunked again

A decade ago Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller “Outliers” popularised the idea of ‘10,000 hours’: ““Ten...

Long Read

Published on 15 Sep, 2019

Simon Sinek: To Succeed in Business, You Must Unders...

Nine years ago Simon Sinek shot to fame with his incredibly popular Ted Talk which has now had more than 10m views on...

Published on 15 Sep, 2019

The CIA, 9/11 and collective blindness

Diversity in the workplace is no longer a social imperative but a must for businesses who want to avoid blindspots in...

Published on 15 Sep, 2019

Shopify and the return of the merchant class

The old fashioned merchant – who was almost crushed in the 20th century – is staging a comeback, not in the...

Short Read

Published on 08 Sep, 2019

Starbucks, monetary superpower

At Marcellus, our endeavour is to find unusual promoters/companies who look at the industry they operate in very...

Published on 08 Sep, 2019

Burning Man diary: sticking it to the Man with Ray D...

A lively account of her first visit to the ‘Burning Man’ by Hannah Murphy this year, a year when Ray Dalio, the...

Published on 08 Sep, 2019

Thomas Middelhoff reflects on failure in German busi...

Thomas Middlehoff, the former boss of Bertelsmann, has written a book called “Guilty”. Mr Middlehoff who was jailed...

Long Read

Published on 08 Sep, 2019

Superbugs Deadlier Than Cancer Put Chemotherapy Into...

The emergence of super bugs or germs that are resistant to most known anti-biotics has created a quandary among medical...

Published on 08 Sep, 2019

Lessons for Capitalism from the East India Company

In the wake of growing concerns from the rise of the ‘Big corporate’, two weeks ago, an American corporate lobby...

Published on 08 Sep, 2019

The machine always wins: what drives our addiction t...

Richard Seymour has written a superb essay on the destructive powers of social media networks. Such is the power of the...

Short Read

Published on 01 Sep, 2019

Athletes on the outskirts of fame

Last Sunday was yet another super Sunday for sport. India got its latest world champion in PV Sindhu who finally came...

Published on 01 Sep, 2019

UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks...

Most of the press around autonomous vehicles focuses on cars and yet it is in trucking that the most commercially...

Published on 01 Sep, 2019

Long Term Compounding Using Low Volatility & Ot...

My colleagues Saurabh Mukherjea and Rakshit Ranjan co-authored a book titled Coffee Can Investing with a subtitle...

Long Read

Published on 01 Sep, 2019

Blame Economists for the Mess We’re In

In his refreshingly positive book Factfulness, Dr Hans Rosling talked about how people across the world are living...

Published on 01 Sep, 2019

“He’s Full Of Shit”: How Elon Musk...

Last three years have seen Elon Musk’s public perception slide from an iconoclast solving the world’s problems to...

Published on 01 Sep, 2019

The Red Queen of Investing

The author is yet another high-quality writer from the Ritholtz stable and he has produced a really interesting piece...

Aug 2019

Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1

Short Read

Published on 25 Aug, 2019

On floccinaucinihilipilification

Central banks’ influence on the global economy has been on the rise over the past few decades with ultra-low interest...

Published on 25 Aug, 2019

Why Complexity Sells

For most physics students, the introduction of Richard Feynman’s lectures would have made learning a joyful adventure...

Published on 25 Aug, 2019

The Bond Raters Still Need to Be Fixed

Barry Ritholtz has written this article in the context of the US Financial Services industry but he might as well be...

Long Read

Published on 25 Aug, 2019

Sports Cars, Psychopaths, and Testosterone: Inside t...

We would like to believe a lot of investing success can be attributed to behavioural aspects or psychology than subject...

Published on 25 Aug, 2019

How Scientists Built A ‘Living Drug’ to ...

This piece in the WIRED is an adaptation from the book The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer....

Published on 25 Aug, 2019

Was e-mail a mistake?

Cal Newport begins by telling us for most of human history, messaging was synchronous by default i.e. in an office or a...

Short Read

Published on 21 Aug, 2019

Starbucks v Dunkin’: how capitalism gives us t...

At the core of Marcellus’ investment philosophy is the hunt for quasi-monopolies i.e, companies that dominate their...

Published on 21 Aug, 2019

WeWork Stands Before Us in All Its Naked Glory

How to spot the peak of a market bubble? WeWork’s planned IPO might just give you the template – a flawed business...

Published on 21 Aug, 2019

Dopamine Fasting – The Hot Silicon Valley Trend

Given the lifestyle of most professionals and the way they deal with broadcast & social media “many of us are...

Long Read

Published on 21 Aug, 2019

The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maxi...

‘Learning how to learn’ is arguably the most important skill that any of us can master. Furthermore, once you...

Published on 21 Aug, 2019

Disintermediating your friends

You would think that whilst financial markets can change rapidly, social change takes place more gradually. This...

Published on 21 Aug, 2019

In Sua Causa: What the judiciary has done to itself

Whilst political corruption is extensively discussed in India, the corruption of the Indian judiciary is both reported...

Short Read

Published on 13 Aug, 2019

What makes a fulfilling career? Ask a teenager

Featured in the 24th March edition of 3L&3S When we are young, we want to do something creative, something fun in...

Published on 13 Aug, 2019

Jack Bogle: the selfless preacher of the passive rev...

Featured in the 20th January edition of 3L&3S We had to pay our respects. And the FT Editorial does the job in a...

Published on 13 Aug, 2019

Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance

Featured in the 5th May edition of 3L&3S Farnam Street’s reiteration of its 2014 blog about a concept that we...

Long Read

Published on 13 Aug, 2019

Return on Capital Super Heroes

Featured in the 2nd June edition of 3L&3S American fund manager, Tom Machperson of Nintai Partners, highlights...

Published on 13 Aug, 2019

Not Caring: A Unique and Powerful Skill

Featured in the 3rd March edition of 3L&3S Morgan Housel may not come up with radically original thinking in...

Published on 13 Aug, 2019

Adm. McRaven Urges Graduates to Find Courage to Chan...

Featured in the 2nd December edition of 3L&3S As a start-up, we run into people every now and then who try to use...

Short Read

Published on 07 Aug, 2019

Can an algorithm determine just how rich an Indian i...

William Shakespeare famously wrote in Romeo and Juliet “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any...

Published on 07 Aug, 2019

This Is the Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry

This should bring cheer to those disappointed with the beef bans in places across India. The plant-based meat...

Published on 07 Aug, 2019

Winner-Take-All Phenomenon Rules the Stock Market, Too

At the core of Marcellus’ Consistent Compounders investment philosophy is identifying monopolistic franchises which...

Long Read

Published on 07 Aug, 2019