Newsletters

As we do periodically, we review the quarterly results for the BSE500 ex-financials. The aggregate year-on-year (yoy) growth numbers are a bit surprising. Revenue growth for the quarter ended 30 June 2024 is 5.7% yoy and the EBIT growth is -0.9% yoy. Aggregate revenue growth has been sluggish since June 2023. EBIT growth although weak […]

The Finance Minister presented the budget for the year on 23rd July, 2024 which had many interesting features like a promotion of skilling and prompting the top 500 companies to hire interns from their CSR obligations. However, we want to focus this newsletter on the changes in capital gains taxes which are important for our investors.

As markets both in India and the US stand close to lifetime highs, we thought we would devote this letter to the risks that may exist for investors. It is our duty to warn you about risks to your investments and also a regulatory directive. We know from history that there always prevails a boom-bust […]

As most companies have now reported results for the financial year 2024, we thought we would look at, as usual, our BSE500 universe ex of the financials, to get a gauge of general corporate profitability and would also do a longer-term analysis of the same. Of the 432 ex-financials constituents of the BSE500, we have […]

We thought we will discuss our investment process through the example of the asset management companies (AMCs) that we have held for over 5 years in our portfolio. Why did we buy the AMCs? First, they have a very high rate of profitability as represented by their core Return on Equity (ROE) adjusted for cash […]

In this newsletter, we discuss an indicator of market valuations which is the Market Cap to GDP ratio which is popularly referred to as the Buffett Indicator. In this ratio, we take the total market capitalization of all companies listed in India and divide it by the country’s GDP. “The ratio has certain limitations in […]

We want to talk about patience, an important aspect of the behaviour of investors which is critical to their long term returns from equities. Investing in equities is a volatile journey. When you put money into a bank fixed deposit, you are certain about the return you are going to make. It is a different […]

The market over the last year has been quite strong – the Nifty is up 21.6% yoy while the Nifty Midcap 150 index is up 50.9% and the Nifty Smallcap 250 index is up 56.2%. We had spoken in September 2023 about the strong inflows into mid cap and small cap mutual fund (MF) schemes. […]

HDFC Bank has been a large holding for us for a while and after the merger of HDFC Ltd with it, the position size has become even larger. Given its underperformance over the last 3 years, we felt that this is a good opportunity to discuss why we own HDFC Bank and why we have […]

Charlie Munger, a doyen of value investing, passed away on 28th November, just a month or so short of completing 100 years on this planet. It is hard for us to express in words, the loss we feel, on hearing the news because Charlie was a guru to us and an inspiration, and we learned […]