Nirvana Laha

Curious individual | Student of the equity markets
VP - writer @ Congruence Advisers

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

You can read your entire evolutionary history in what your body does to food. Every gene you carry is a note your ancestors left about what they ate. And what we eat today has left no note yet, because we haven't had time to adapt to it

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

We did it, together.

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

The Arsenal. Your Premier League champions.

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

This belongs to all of us.

[Nirvana Laha @nirvana_laha]

@Arsenal Champions after 22 years! Feels absolutely surreal 😊 It's been a proper rollercoaster since I started watching Arsenal about 20Ys ago. What a day! ❤️

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

For India, the long term dairy preservation tech is Ghee. Dehydrated fat, sterile, lasts years. Ironic how, even back then, we chose to preserve the fat while ignoring the protein 😅

[Tar ⚡ @itsTarH]

Investor Relations Team: Sir, how bullish and filled with buzz words do you want the corporate filing to be?

Management: Yes

[Intrinsic Compounding @soicfinance]

Transformer industry trends from concalls and PPTs post results

1. Lead times have increased for Bushings and insulators.

2. Transformer oil prices have increased. Transformer oil is 8-12% of overall costs. Key suppliers are the likes of APAR and Savita oil.

3. US tariffs have come down from 50% to 25% to finally 10%.

4. Middle East exports have impacted sales.

5. Backlogs are bigger for Power transformers vs IDT or distribution transformers at the moment.

Near term margins can be weak due to the reasons above inspite of a healthy order book & enquiry pipeline.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

Let me explain what just happened today because it deserves so much recognition.

GalaxEye is a Bengaluru startup founded in 2021 by IIT Madras engineers. Today they launched Mission Drishti on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It is India's largest privately built satellite at 190 kg. And it carries a technology that no commercial satellite has ever carried before.

Normal satellites take photos of the Earth using optical cameras. Like your phone camera, but from 500 km up. The problem is obvious. Clouds. Night. Fog. Smoke. If any of these are in the way, the photo is useless. India has monsoon cover for 4 months a year. That is 4 months where optical satellites are partially or fully blind over large parts of the country.

The alternative is SAR. Synthetic Aperture Radar. Instead of taking photos with light, it sends radar waves down and reads what bounces back. Radar goes through clouds, through darkness, through smoke. A SAR satellite can image a flooded village at 2 AM during a cyclone when no optical satellite can see anything.

The problem with SAR is that the images look nothing like photos. They look like grainy black-and-white radar maps. A military analyst or a trained geospatial engineer can read them. A farmer, a disaster response team, or a city planner cannot.

Until today, if you wanted both optical and SAR data for the same location, you needed two different satellites, passing over at different times, at different angles. Then someone had to manually align and fuse the two datasets. Expensive, slow, and the data never perfectly matched because the satellites saw the same spot minutes or hours apart.

GalaxEye put both sensors on one satellite. Optical and SAR, fused into what they call OptoSAR. Three times more information than a single sensor. Processed onboard by an NVIDIA AI chip at 1.8 metre resolution.

Now in practice, during the next cyclone hitting Odisha, one satellite pass gives you a clear image of which villages are flooded, which roads are cut, and which buildings are standing. Day or night. Cloud or clear. In near real-time.

For defence, it means you can monitor a border area 24/7 regardless of weather. For agriculture, it means tracking crop health across an entire monsoon season without a single cloud gap. For infrastructure, it means monitoring construction progress on highways and bridges without waiting for a clear day.

GalaxEye tested their SAR tech on ISRO's POEM orbital platform. The satellite was tested at ISRO facilities. IN-SPACe provided regulatory clearance. NSIL, ISRO's commercial arm, will distribute the imagery globally. And it launched on SpaceX because ISRO's PSLV doesn't have the right orbit slot for this mission.

Yes, four IIT Madras graduates built a world-first satellite in 4 years in Bengaluru.

Take a bow!

[Dhiraj @IndustrlPolicy]

A well-researched article on the notoriety of Korean chaebols and their termite like extractive behaviour in Indian domestic market. They quietly quietly repatriated under the guise of royalties etc offshore to fund heavy capital investments abroad.
https://t.co/okcMs1EOwe

[chess24 @chess24com]

The final moments as @chessvaishali won the Women's #FIDECandidates and earned the right to challenge for the Women's Chess World Championship title!

https://t.co/EyPHYCmWte

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

I’ve never seen a map that makes more sense.

[Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 @JosephPolitano]

the strait of hormuz is in a quantum superposition of open and closed that only collapses when you try to take a tanker through yourself and see if you get shot at

[Kushal Lodha @kushallodha548]

He chose to invest his savings into 3 stocks instead of buying a car in 2011.

Within just 3 years, those stocks (Cera Sanitaryware, Kajaria Ceramics, and Amara Raja) went 5x each.

He transitioned from sales and has generated a massive 30 to 35% CAGR on his personal portfolio over 16 years.

His best investment was identifying APL Apollo Tubes in 2014, which became a 75 bagger.

He is none other than Mr. Kedar B, the founder of Congruence Advisers.

In the latest episode of Konversation with Kushal, we explored the mindset required to survive the cyclicality of micro caps. We discussed the roadmap for the medium-term horizon:

-> Learning to distinguish between a "falling market" and a "fallen market" to time your entries with precision.

-> His investing approach through a mix of 70% Fundamental and 30% Technical strategy.

-> Why businesses with high replacement demand, like batteries, provide a structural floor for returns even during auto down-cycles.

This episode is powered by @_groww.

#investing #smallcap #microcap #stockmarket #wealthcreation #kushallodha

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

After a 7-year hiatus, India is about to import its first Iranian oil. At ~$100 a barrel. Quite the achievement in Washington for the long-term strenght of the economic and financial sanctions regime.

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

Trump on Strait of Hormuz: “At a certain point, it’ll open itself.”

[Abhishek AB @ABsay_ek]

Some stories in cricket don't need a hundred Tests to matter. Swapnil Asnodkar played nine IPL games in 2008 and became a name nobody forgot.

Picture this. A boy from Porvorim, barely 5 & a half feet, walks into a Rajasthan Royals camp with cost of less than a Mumbai apartment. Shane Warne looks at him. Sees something & calls him the Goan Cannon...

The name stuck because it made no sense & perfect sense together. Goa has those old Portuguese cannons rusting near beaches. Small, Heavy, They still work.

Asnodkar opened with Graeme Smith that year. Big man, little man. Smith would block & watch. Asnodkar would slash over point, whip through midwicket, make 60 off 34 balls in his first game like he had been doing this forever...
He hadn't.
He was a Ranji grafter until Warne & Smith told him to stop worrying about his wicket. Imagine spending 6 years learning to stay in, then someone says forget all that, hit everything.
He did. Average of 34.5, Strike rate of 133.5. Average partnership of nearly 60 with Smith, highest among all teams.

In the semifinal against attack of McGrath & Mohammad Asif, Asnodkar smashed 39 in just 21 balls & Royals scored 58 runs in powerplay itself. Royals went on to won the whole thing...

Warne visited his house during a break. Ate prawns with the family. Brought Smith, Watson, even young Jadeja.. The greatest showman of this game sitting in a small Goan home, talking to a player's mother. Asnodkar still remembers that meal.

Then 2009 happened. South Africa. Bouncy pitches. Fast bowlers who had watched his tapes. Short balls at his ribs. He averaged 12 that season. Injuries came & Form went. By 2011 he was sitting out. By 2018, Goa dropped him from the state side to give youngsters a chance...

There's a photo somewhere of him & Dhoni talking. Shadab Jakati made the introduction. Dhoni wanted to know about Warne's methods. How did he make domestic players feel like equals? Asnodkar told him. That conversation probably helped Chennai Super Kings more than it helped Asnodkar...

He is into coaching now, worked with Nagaland & Goa Under-23 sides. Holds a Level 2 certificate. Tried getting back into the IPL as a coach, but that hasn’t happened yet.

But here's what counts. Every time a small town Indian player gets picked in the IPL, some of that started with Asnodkar. The template. The proof that you don't need to be from Mumbai or Delhi. You can be from anywhere.

The cannon fired for one season. The echo never really stopped.

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

For the record, the president of the United States is now simultaneously claiming that he has won the war, is currently winning the war, needs help to win the war, and needs no help to win the war. All to destroy the nuclear program he claims to have already destroyed last year.

[Ayush Mittal @ayushmitt]

BSE @BSEIndia stopped providing updates to BSE Smallcap index. It was a very useful index for investors investing in smallcap space to get a sense of market sentiment.

What is a relevant replacement for this now?

[Caleb @caleb_friesen]

Day 16 of tracking my formally registered footpath complaint.

Case closed.

Here's what "fixed" looks like.

This is the experience of countless Bengaluru citizens who optimistically take time to flag issues for the city to address.

India deserves better from its cities.