Compounding Knowledge

What I am reading today Chart of the Week: Gender Pay Gaps around the World Are Bigger Than You Think, and Have Almost Nothing to Do with Girls Schooling (Center for Global Development) Better Nutrition In Early Life Could Give India 3.17 Million More Graduates (IndiaSpend)

What I am reading today The Other Free Lunch in Investing (bps and pieces) The Relationship Between Money and Happiness (Visual Capitalist)

What I am reading today How to make a carbon pricing system work (FT: Martin Wolf) Why "The Americans" Is Taking a Big Leap Forward to 1987 (Smithsonian History)

What I am reading today Triassic Park: A Decade-Long Labor To Recreate A Lost World (Discover Magazine) Fewer Than ⅓ of Judges in Lower Judiciary Are Women (IndiaSpend)

What I am reading today Farewell to Winter, Farewell to My Fingertip (The Paris Review) How to Restructure Venezuela's Debt (Oxford Business Law Blog blog)

What I am reading today Alibaba to set up Thai logistics centre, extend deepening investment in Southeast Asia (SCMP: China Tech) personal data and terms of service (Tom Fishburne: Marketoonist)

What I am reading today Nota bene: Caldbeck vs robos (Felix Salmon) Is the market falling? are we in a bear market? (Subramoney)

What I am reading today How economists use Twitter (Marginal REVOLUTION) How Portraiture Gave Rise to the Glamour of Guns (Smithsonian History)

What I am reading today Trump's Latest China Tariffs Could Hurt Tech—and Even Social Media (Wired) Meagre Funds, No Salary: How Tamil Nadu's Women Leaders Still Succeed (IndiaSpend)

What I am reading today Reform council tax and close the generational wealth gap (FT: Martin Wolf) Lesson from a Dozen Angry Men (Safal Niveshak)

What I am reading today The Power of Trends in International Insolvency Law (Oxford Business Law Blog blog) Despite Improvement, India Still Has Most People Without Close Access To Clean Water (IndiaSpend)

What I am reading today Governing Cryptocurrencies through Forward Guidance? (Oxford Business Law Blog blog) Financial Myths in your head (Subramoney)

What I am reading today Rediscovered US Carrier Sank in Historic WWII Duel (Discover Magazine) Ignorance, Debt and Cryptocurrencies: The old and the new in the law and economics of concurrent currencies (Oxford Business Law Blog blog)

What I am reading today Can You Name The Greek Version Of The Roman Gods? (History of the Ancient World) 'Why Earlier Govt Health Insurance Failed? That Is Like Asking a Foster Parent About The Child's Low Grades' (IndiaSpend)

What I am reading today "Buffett's salary, unchanged for more than a quarter century, was about 1.87 times the $53,510 median pay, based on a sample of about two-thirds of Berkshire's 377,000 employees" HT @CJBrigham https://www.reuters.com/article/us-berkshire-buffett-pay/berkshire-says-median-employee-makes-over-half-buffetts-pay-idUSKCN1GS2WC … (Devin Haran) Guide to the classics: The Histories by Herodotus (History of the Ancient World)

This blog post will be an introduction to a fascinating set of books being published as part of a series being curated by Gurcharan Das (one of India's foremost business intellectuals. Yes!, that combination does exist). Das is well known for his books on India's economic transformation:           A few years back, he decided to take a step back from authoring books himself, and directed his attention towards curating stories from Indian economic history. In doing this, he went beyond standard histories of the Tatas and the Ambanis , and decided to tell never-before told tales of India's business communities. He tied up with academic rockstars and started bringing out books on communities such as the Marwaris, Tamils, Parsis and Gujaratis and even managed to mine ancient Sanskrit texts to write about the business acumen of ancient courtesans. The series in question is the Story of Indian Business . In future posts, I will review individual books ...

A look at my Bookshelf would reveal a large no. of history books. Here are a few I have been reading recently: I read history for both pleasure and learning. I have been always interested in stories. As I grew older and read more, I realised that Fact is often stranger than Fiction . The stories I came across in history were much more engrossing to me than anything I ever read in fiction. Let me give some examples which would be of interest to my readers (who I assume have a bent of mind towards finance): The movie  Wall Street , is one of the most popular movies about powerful and unscrupulous financiers from the 1980s. It is a fictional story. But surely the events detailed in  Barbarians at the Gate , are equally or more exciting. Or take the fact that while Gordon Gekko is a fictional character, he is loosely based on a real financier called Ivan Boesky whose exploits are narrated in Den of Thieves . Both went to prison for their efforts. That bri...

What I am reading today Make Me Smile (Trends... Find them, ride them and get off.) Last, Best Chance for Food Aid Reform? (Center for Global Development)

What I am reading today How the HNI invest (Subramoney) Diesel will continue to play key role, nobody can change over the weekend: JLR CEO Ralf Speth (Economic Times)

What I am reading today Investor Summits: Supply Side Item Songs (IDFC) These Two China Banks Lent More To Global Energy Projects Than The World Bank (BRIC Breaker)

What I am reading today BookMyShow eyes the big picture (Forbes India Magazine) The winds of change in Sri Lanka? Rajapaksa's charisma and foreign factors in Sri Lankan politics (India at LSE)

What I am reading today Hydrogen trains one of our focus areas: Alstom CEO Henri Poupart-Lafarge (Economic Times) Take a Private Road Out of India's Banking Bog (Gadfly: Andy Mukherjee)

What I am reading today The surprise vacation (markets in everything) (Marginal REVOLUTION) .@ChicagoBooth's Luigi @zingales and @GeorgeMason's @tylercowen discuss the market power wielded by digital platforms, and how to promote competition http://ow.ly/hRCB30ixNl0 pic.twitter.com/2FWGGa4VfX (Chicago Booth Review)

What I am reading today Dow 12,000, Then Bitcoin $30,000 (Daily Reckoning) Dumb IT service play (Views on Life & on Equity Investing)

What I am reading today Practicing What We Preach: 5 Ideas to Promote Gender Equality within and among Development Organizations (Center for Global Development) Is the Future of Ecommerce in Drone Deliveries? (Visual Capitalist)

What I am reading today How Bengaluru's hyperlocal genie Dunzo is changing with funding from Google (FactorDaily) Can Theresa May find time to be her own housing supremo? (Spectator: Martin Vander Weyer)

What I am reading today The Fed Must Have Inflation. Failure Is Not an Option (Daily Reckoning) Ola scales back electric fleet plans – becomes the first casualty in India's EV plans uncertainty (FactorDaily)

What I am reading today A Quick Guide to Dividend Taxation (Daily Reckoning) This remote Chinese school has just three students. But with live streaming technology, they share a classroom with hundreds (SCMP: China Tech)

What I am reading today The path is never smooth (Dr Muthukrishnan) a16z Podcast: Space — the Near Frontier (Andreessen Horowitz)

What I am reading today The contributions of Rene Girard (Marginal REVOLUTION) From South Asia @ LSE archives: 10 articles on Sino-South Asia relationship (India at LSE)

What I am reading today China's Staggering Demand for Commodities (Visual Capitalist) What rich people do 2 of n (Subramoney)

What I am reading today What Rich People DO ….1 of n (Subramoney) T. Boone Pickens' New ETF And 7 Most Undervalued Stocks (Vintage Value Investing)

Warren Buffett's shareholder letter for the year 2017 was released a few days back. I am going to take some of the themes in this year's letter and provide an Indian context and takeaway. (For a collection of past shareholder letters organised and annotated around major themes, please check - ' The Essays of Warren Buffett ' by Lawrence Cunningham ). 1. Valuations are expensive. So Buffett didn't do any big deals last year. Others may ignore the level of prices and pay any price to do deals. But not the Oracle of Omaha. - Indian valuations are stretched too. The Sensex P/E currently stands at 23.xx. High PEs tend to foreshadow lower returns in the next few years, till valuations moderate. A wonderful table compiled by Stableinvestor.com  shows this trade-off very well. With a starting PE of 24+ (which is very close to current levels), the 3 year return has been -5% historically. The takeaway for Indian investors is: valuations are stretched. The thing to do now...

What I am reading today Is India's Growth Bounce Big Enough? (Bloomberg View: India) Why Timing Is — Almost — Everything (Knowledge@Wharton)