I have been in the finance education space for more than a decade now.
Through this period, have created some content that may be relevant for people who are planning to build a career in finance, or those who want to learn investing.
As there is some overlap between learning finance for career goals and learning finance for investing, a lot of the content would probably be useful for either segment
Listing down some of these in a thread. Ideally go in that order. The initial bunch of content is all free.
1/6
@askhadilkar Studying a bit around the sector as of now. Not sure of the competitive advantage any firm carries, since there are too many firms of small and mid size..
Superb post, explaining the benefits of industrial clusters.. and it seems we are already trying to replicate this - for example for textiles.
Not sure of the scale of this, but definitely a step in the right direction...
This would be a sector to watch out for, as we push towards more exports..
I ran across this video a few days ago and couldn’t stop watching it.
It’s about something ordinary & boring, a plastic gas lighter. But it changes how one thinks about manufacturing.
That lighter in so many of our homes, holds pressurised gas. It has over 30 microscopic parts, has to pass international safety codes, & travel 10,000 miles by sea, & the total cost of doing all that, materials, labour, freight, every middleman along the way, comes to fifteen U.S cents.
So how does anyone make money on this?
Turns out almost the entire world’s supply comes from one place: a county called Shaodong, in China’s Hunan province.
It wasn’t always there.
But today, Shaodong has 114 lighter-related companies packed into the place & between them they source more than 200 different components from each other, all within a 20-kilometre radius. They supply something like seventy percent of the world’s disposable lighters. And the industry alone employs over 80,000 people locally.
Nobody there is winning on cheap labour anymore. They’re winning by shaving a thousandth of a cent off the thickness of a plastic wall, or redesigning a base so a few thousand more units fit into the same shipping container.
It took my thoughts back to an old professor of mine, Michael Porter.
His 1980 book, Competitive Strategy, is still the 1st book most MBAs read, the one that gave the world the Five Forces and basically invented modern strategic thinking.
But there’s a quieter piece of his work, on industrial clusters, that never got nearly the same attention, and it is the one that explains exactly what is happening in Shaodong.
His argument was that nations and regions rarely win because of cheap inputs. They win when rival firms and specialist suppliers crowd into the same small geography for long enough that they keep pushing each other past what any one of them could manage alone. He found it in the Swiss watchmaking towns of the Jura, in the German printing press industry and in Italy’s ceramic tile and footwear districts (interestingly, it’s the SAME blueprint which built Morbi, in Gujarat, into the world’s second-largest ceramic cluster, now outproducing Italy by volume. I have posted before, about Morbi)
None of these started out as giants. The neighbourhood made them giants.
Which is exactly why it’s so relevant to India’s climb up the global manufacturing table
I’ve also attached a slide with this post that I saw recently and which shows us breaking into the top 5 manufacturing globally. (A quick reference check told me that we may not have overtaken Korea yet, but the trajectory’s clear)
That climb has happened on the back of scale: bigger plants, bigger parks, more FDI.
I should declare an interest here, because the Mahindra Group set up 2 of India’s first integrated, plug-and-play business cities, in Chennai in 2002 & Jaipur in 2006.
Both have been extremely successful. Chennai’s business zone alone today employs 45,000 people..
But I admit that we need to think differently.
A park brings in investors and hands them a ready plot, power, water & roads
A cluster is a completely different animal: hundreds of small, specialised suppliers, each obsessed with doing a tiny thing better than anyone else, feeding off each other’s presence for years until no outsider can compete with the whole.
I think that’s the work ahead of us now.
Not just more factories, and not just more parks.
Policymakers & developers like us need to start consciously pulling as many of the inputs and resources a sector needs, the toolmakers, the component suppliers, the testing labs, the logistics specialists, into the same neighbourhood.
Shaodong and Morbi both got there by accident, one town stumbling onto a way to shave a thousandth of a cent off a lighter wall, the other discovering it had the clay and, later, the gas pipeline for tiles.
We don’t have the luxury of waiting for accidents anymore.
We need to do it on purpose
The one line that is most important here is “The agglomeration economies of cities are geometric not additive”
All infra projects end up doing the same. Even if the standalone project appears expensive, the benefits it can generate could be immense for the users and economy as a whole. High time we build infra looking at the 10-20 years ahead, and not just for today.
The Mumbai Pune bullet train (with extension to Hyderabad on Pune side, and of course Gujarat on Mumbai side - eventually NCR) will be the single most important infrastructure project in the history of Maharashtra.
The agglomeration economies of cities are geometric not additive. If you could go from BKC to downtown Pune in 48 mins, that completely changes the business and financial landscape of not just the state but even the country.
The talent pools of both the cities can suddenly - and realistically - access both the cities. One spouse working in Mumbai and one in Pune becomes feasible. Let us hope we accelerate this project and not fall for purists who say the distance is too short for a bullet train etc.
To all the IT bulls, I'll say just one thing - please industry mein thode senior logo se baat karo before building large positions.
Lot of pain still left, which is not captured in the trailing numbers.
Don't be contra for the sake of being contra. 🙏🏻
disc: no reco
@bharatbetpf People pay to get away from all the infrastructure trouble.. Reaching office is a project..
If we have good infra, prices will settle themselves.. Unfortunately, it will take ages for good infra to develop..
Agree with Abhishek here..
I do not know what will happen in the short run, maybe the rupee will go to 100-110.
But there could be many forces that may lead to appreciation in the medium term.. or atleast stopping the depreciation of INR..
- We could (rather will) export more..
- US AI could end up in a bubble, thus capital flowing back to safer shores driven by consumption
- Oil prices could stabilize, or even fall, as dependence on oil slows over the next decade..
The point is - currencies are complex beasts..
Too many variables...
And simple demand supply of dollar vs rupee is one of them..
Just because 60 has become 90 over 10 years, does not mean it has to repeat... Just for the memory, rupee went from 45 to 38 between 2005 and 2007...
Some interesting stats on Shipping
- Shipping costs can be as low as $0.03 per ton mile, much cheaper than air freight, which is about $0.80 per ton mile
- 80% of the world's trade by volume moves via sea routes
- 11-12 billion tonnes of goods get transported by sea every year
India's current account deficit is actually a surplus in the Jan-Mar 2026 quarter, around $7 billion. This is pretty good for a quarter that saw oil spike and the rupee drop to the big 90s.
AI subscriptions are dead
Claude Fable 5 will only be on the Anthropic subscription until June 22nd. After that, you will need to pay for usage per token
This will be the start of a much larger trend
Frontier models will no longer be included in subs
You’ll pay a fee and it will only get you access to older, much cheaper models
If you want access to that dank AI sour diesel, you’re going to need to pay for every token you use. No more subsidies
And it make sense. The subsidies were just a Ponzi scheme
For those that don’t know, when you pay $200 a month for an AI sub, you get thousands of dollars of tokens
These AI companies actively lose tremendous amounts of money because of these subscriptions. GDPs of most countries every year are lost on your $200 Claude Max sub
The investor money is running dry. IPOs are coming because of this. And with IPOs need to come profitability
The golden age of paying $200 a month and being able to code on 40 Claude Code instances and getting a usage reset every 5 minutes are about to die
The party couldn’t continue ever. You can’t just leverage the entire global economy for years and expect nothing to break. Now it’s time to pay up
Means a few things:
1. Time to be responsible when it comes to which models you use. You don’t need Fable 5 for GPT 5.5 Xhigh for everything. Build the skill of knowing when to use cheap models
2. Local LLMS/hardware will come even more in demand. I’m currently running GLM on my Mac Studio. It’s great. Is it Fable? No. But it gets the job done for free on simple tasks. Learn about local LLMs
3. This is the beginning of the wealth gap expansion. Those that can afford to spend $10,000 a month on Fable 5 will build incredible products that eat up more and more of the economy. Those that can’t afford Fable 5 will have an insane disadvantage
4. The government will need to step in eventually. There will be too much civil unrest. I hope the answer isn’t free money. That won’t do anything. I hope the answer is education/access to AI resources for ALL. Universal Basic Opportunity
5. You need to seriously reconsider where your money goes every month. If you are complaining about AI prices and in the back of your mind you know your skill set is becoming quickly irrelevant, all while spending money every month on Netflix, Xbox Live, Paramount +, drugs, DoorDash, Uber, and other things that bring nothing positive to your life, you are simply doing it wrong. AI is an investment in yourself. It’s an investment in your relevance to the global economy. You need to make sure you make that investment
The pieces on the board are quickly moving around. The rules are changing. The battlefield is shifting. If you’re not strategizing accordingly, you’re cooked.