At Wimbledon this July the singles champion took home £3.6mn. The sixty-four players who lost their first match took £80,000 each i.e. the winner earns 45x the losers. That gap is what economists call the ‘Theory of Tournaments’, and two celebrated papers explain why the gap must be that wide. This payoff structure will become familiar […]
Between January-June 2026, South Korean retail investors borrowed their way from US$19bn to a record US$27bn of margin credit to chase an AI-driven stocks. When the KOSPI broke, 1.2 million leveraged accounts were margin-called and roughly 360,000 were liquidated. India’s equivalent instrument, the Margin Trading Facility, has grown 6x in three years to ₹1.43 lakh […]
In our national bestseller, Breakpoint, we explain that three forces are squeezing India’s middle class: quality jobs have become scarce, wages are rising at a slower pace than cost of living, and Indian households have become amongst the world’s most indebted. With Indian entering Sankat Kaal net foreign direct investment has all but disappeared as […]
A ₹1 lakh investment in the Nifty in November 1995 would be worth roughly ₹36 lakh today, assuming dividends were reinvested. However, 2/3rds of that ₹36 lakh has come in the last 10 years (with the first two decades feeling slow, boring and punctuated by horrific years like 2008). That’s why long-term compounding is easy […]
Our bestselling book, Breakpoint, shows that India’s middle class is buckling under a debt load that has no equal in any other large economy — a case we built in no small part using the RBI’s own Financial Stability Reports (FSRs). The RBI’s latest FSR, released in June 2026, keeps ringing the same alarm bells, […]
In January 2025, an AI model built by the research arm of a Chinese hedge fund, for a total compute bill of around $6mn, wiped $600bn off Nvidia’s market value in a single trading day. 18 months on, Chinese AI models have overtaken their American rivals in usage on the world’s largest open AI marketplace, […]
The rupee’s decline since 1991 — from ₹18 to ₹96 per dollar — has been the calmest depreciation in the emerging world, built on three pillars: a state that funds itself in its own currency, a large reserve buffer, and a credible central bank. All three pillars are eroding now. Usable FX reserves are ~US$439bn, […]
Football is by far the world’s most popular and most lucrative sport. The Football World Cup has now been played for 96 years. In those 96 years, India has never played a single match in the World Cup. And yet, every World Cup is actively followed and fanatically cheered on by Indian viewers. The parallels […]
As fiscally squeezed nation states retreat from providing the essentials of life, the private sector steps in to provide public goods. In India, 47% of healthcare is paid out of pocket; roughly half of schoolchildren are in private schools; and 9 million private security guards compare against 2.1 million police. The wealth from this great […]
Investors consistently earn less than the funds they invest in — NOT because fund managers underperform, but because investors put more money in after strong runs and pull back after weak ones, a behaviour directly visible in the data across most equity categories. This “timing penalty”, which our analysis suggests would be approximately 1% point per […]
The 150-year-old concept of the nation state is steadily being altered by: a) the growing complexity for such states to tax economic activity; b) the fact that barring USA & China, every state has reduced control of the critical technologies which underpin modern economies; and c) the migration of gainful employment away from salaried jobs (which are easy to tax) and […]
Quality investing lagged for five consecutive years (2021-25) as the twin post-Covid booms – Consumption and Govt capex – lifted all boats and investors moved away from expensive Quality names (trading at 50x earnings) to less expensive Value names (trading at 20x). FY26 was the high-water mark of that distortion: the Value factor returned 14% […]
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