There are 2 major cities in India that are cracking down on illegal street vendors
One is BJP ruled Kolkata ... where the eviction drive is being reported like a crime against humanity
Guess which is the other city?
The 2nd one is not even getting a squeak on social media
Kaun hai ye?
You can be either accurate or comprehensive in stock market predictions; nobody catches every big thing that is about to turn ordinary: this person (it he exists) deserves an award called Bellweather of Bellweathers as Contrarian Indicator.
@BaluGorade There is only one guy I know who has pitched for:
1. Quant, at peak performance.
2. Naren's small cap "lock, stock barrel", at peak
3. PPFAS, at peak performance.
4. International diversification (basically AI), which is in play now, and is on its way. 👎
Kamaal ki pakad hai. 😆
This is what Mumbai looks like after 96 hours of non-stop torrential rain.
My city has received 600 mm of rainfall this week, with another 400 mm likely over the next 48 hours.
That’s about 40% of its average seasonal rainfall in just one week. Most cities would come to a standstill under these conditions.
In my Class 9, the French Revolution was the first chapter in my history book. My teacher taught it like it was the best thing that ever happened in the world and was going on and on about liberty, equality, and fraternity.
But, when I actually understood the entire lesson, I felt something was wrong. Yes, the Bourbon monarchy was terrible. But, what happened during and after the revolution was far worse. The radical Jacobin party seized power and guillotined people casually like they cut fruits. They persecuted priests, closed down churches and replaced Catholicism with a "Cult of Reason" (an atheistic civic religion with ceremonies in desecrated cathedrals like Notre-Dame) and even introduced a new calendar with a 10-day week to upset the traditional religio-cultural rhythms. Wasn't all that nuts?
During their Reign of Terror (1793–1794), at least 16,000–17,000 people were officially executed by guillotine after quick trials, with another 10,000+ dying in prisons without trial; broader estimates for Terror-related deaths (including massacres) reach 30,000–50,000 in under a year. This was deliberate de-christianisation and social engineering: thousands of priests were exiled or killed, churches looted or turned into "Temples of Reason," and the new Republican Calendar erased Sundays and saints' days to remake society from scratch. And the violence wasn't limited to Paris. For e.g, in the Vendée region, where Catholic royalists resisted, Republican forces unleashed brutal repression ; estimates of deaths there alone run from 170,000 to over 200,000 (out of a local population of around 800,000), including mass drownings, shootings, and "infernal columns" that burned villages.
And what happened? Another dictator Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and became the emperor of France. He crowned himself in 1804, ended the Republic in all but name, and launched the Napoleonic Wars, which killed an estimated 3–6 million people across Europe (military and civilian) through battle, disease, and famine. And after he was defeated? The Bourbon monarchy was actually restored! Then, France oscillated between other monarchies and republics for a long time. Bourbons from 1814/1815, then more upheaval in 1830, and in 1848, another empire under Napoleon III, and the Third Republic only stabilising later in the 1870s. with the Third Republic.
My point was that if the Ancien Régime was bad, the Revolution's radical phase delivered far more death, persecution, and eventual authoritarianism in a much shorter time. I pointed these out broadly (of course at t that time I did not have exact statistics and just relied on my textbook) and asked my teacher how can this be a good thing if it led to so much chaos and persecution at a scale far worse than the ancien regime. She just parroted back "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" and told that I was making judgements and asking questions beyond my auqaat (so much for liberty and reason, huh!!??).
I think that my questioning of sanitised textbook narratives and pushing back on rote slogans like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" (while ignoring the body count and chaos) showed real critical thinking on my part; which is exactly what the French Revolution claimed to champion. Ironically, my teacher dismissed a student like me with "you're asking beyond your auqaat" while preaching reason. This is ironic. Peut etre, c'est la vie?!
It is true that over the long term, the Revolution led to reforms like abolition of feudal privileges, equality before the law, careers based more on merit than birth, and establishment of secular state institutions but these could have very well happened without the radicalism and violence of a revolution. That was exactly what I was questioning.
Does not matter whether you teach the French Revolution or something else. Make students think critically rather than making them swallow slogans blindly.
People are worried that hyperscaler capex is temporary and that the hyperscalers will pull back on spend if their stocks start to wobble.
But people have short memories.
Satya already tried to balk on capex in November and it represented the pico top of his stock price. MSFT fell behind and has never recovered.
For better or for worse, the capex train is not likely to stop anytime soon.
Even if you didn't notice that episode, I guarantee you every hyperscaler exec did.
Ranade, Agarkar, Gokhale and Tilak- all giants of Congress before Gandhi were Chitpavan Brahmins… the same blood that defied Tyrannical-Mughal rule and brought them down to their knees…
After Gandhi, Nehru took over, they were marginalised. So much so, after Gandhi’s assassination- there was a Congress-sponsored genocide of Chitpavan Brahmins…. 8000 plus people killed - Men, women and children & lakhs of them displaced and had to change their surnames to hide.
Nehru never apologised or acknowledged!!
Sir ka definition sab alag hota hai. Baaki sab bolte hain 20% down is bear market territory. Nifty is down 11% from ATH, Sir ne bola "full blown" bear market hai.
Sir aap qimaam wagairah khaate raho, kyunki ab Mausam badalne waala hai. 😅
Since this Bear Market started ( and Yes, it's a full blown bear market, not a silly " correction" etc), Indian SM has been calling a bottom for the past 2 years.
That's okay: there is swarth anywhere you look: finfluencers, fund & wealth managers, MFDs, Media, etc.
So they have to believe a bull market is just seconds away.
The real intellectual question to ask is: how do you actually spot when the bear market ends in the Bull market starts?
The methods I have used broadly ( there are nuances- like the SS- Agreement in Motion, the secrets of which shall go to the grave with me, Lake of Returns Theory, explained superficially by me last couple years - etc.)
are:
If a decline in a market, ( say, India) is systemic, accompanied by a widespread decline in most markets ( 2000 bear market, 2008 bear market, 2020 short crash), then a 30-40% decline WITHIN 2 years, is a good enough level to start getting in.
Similarly, if a stock has declined but the entire market has also declined similarly, then that stock or sector becomes a decent buy within a fairly finite level of all - there is also science & data to determine this.
BUT BUT BUT
The falls that should never be bought - not for a long while - are isolated , tanhai-waali falls in a particular country or in a particular stock, without much obvious explanation - while the rest of the world or rest of that market itself is in a bull market
Companion-free falls & underperformances are huge red flags in my book: they point to reasons that are not visible just yet but there is something seriously wrong for a particular market to go in a totally different direction than the overall wind.
India, on all previous occasions, did exactly in line with what the rest of the world was doing: it fell after the NASDAQ crashed in 2000. It fell during 2008 in a global bear market. It fell exactly inline with the Global bear market in COVID.
But this time it IS DIFFERENT.
And that is why this time it is dangerous.
Because India is totally forsaken , desolate in the kind of market performance or the lack of it that it has displayed.
This has never happened before.
The rest of the world has been in a massive Bull market, AI and without AI ( LATAM, CEE eg).
My Global macro fund has never had an easier time making money while doing the least amount of work.
But looking at India you would think that the rest of the world was in a bear market.
But the world Bull markets are breaking open bottles of champagne.
India's bull is reduced to drinking tharra.
Exactly like a stock that does not rise in a broad bull market but keeps falling: never ever get into that stock.
There is something that the market knows that you do not.
India looks suspiciously like that haveli that nobody occupies, while all other havelis have all the lights and parties on.
These havelis are spooky.
These havelis have secrets. They are just not saying them out.
It is best to let Manoj Kumar or Biswajit open the haveli first & pry out evil aatma inside.
It is best to occupy a neighbouring chawl in the meanwhile.
But in my book, my method -
unexplained bear markets when everything around it is going gangbusters...
.I never try calling the bottom to those...
You just never know what lies beneath...
I think someday Musk will admit he is a character out of Rand's book.
And I won't allow Munger to pass a judgment on Greenspan. A lot of what he has made is courtesy Greenspan.
"I sometimes say that Alan Greenspan overdosed on Ayn Rand when he was young. He thought that if an axe murder happened in a free market it was probably all for the best."
-Charlie Munger (2019)
Party needs surgery before cancer in some ministries and states metastasizes nationally.
Return of the barbarian horde to the halls of Dilli just because loyalists were not punished for corruption/incompetence will be a tragedy for India.
“George (Soros), I’m going to sell $5.5 billion worth of British pounds tonight and buy deutsche marks. Here’s why I’m going to do it, that means we’ll have 100% of the fund in this one trade”.
As I’m (Stanley Druckenmiller) talking, he starts wincing like what is wrong with this kid, and I think he’s about to blow my thesis away and he says, “That is the most ridiculous use of money management I’ve ever heard. What you describe is an incredible one-way bet.
We should 200% of our net worth in this trade, not 100%. Do you know how often something like this comes around? Like once every 20 years. What is wrong with you?”