Anyone who has ever tried to pick a restaurant with five people knows this particular kind of suffering. You ask, “Where do you want to go?” and the entire group suddenly develops the personality of a beige wall.

“I’m fine with anything,” someone says. Which is not only unhelpful, it’s also a lie. (I unfortunately have been this person)

But flip the question. Ask, “Where don’t you want to go?” and suddenly it turns into a press conference. No long drives. No experimental vegan places where the menu reads like a chemistry project. No sushi because “it’s not really filling.” No pizza because “we had that last week.” And definitely nowhere too expensive.

Within two minutes, you’ve eliminated half the city and, miraculously, you’re basically done. That’s inversion. Not glamorous, not complicated. Just figuring out what to avoid and letting the answer reveal itself.

Charlie Munger loved this sort of thing. He once said he wanted to know where he was going to die, just so he could never go there. Which is either very wise or slightly alarming, depending on the day. But the idea sticks. Avoid the obvious disasters and you don’t need to be a genius about the rest.

I’ve realised my own investing style leans quite heavily on this, probably more than I’d like to admit. I find it easier to rule things out than to convince myself something is a great idea. If a business needs too many things to go perfectly, I just sort of… drift away from it.

That’s basically how I approach valuation as well. Instead of building up a story about what a company could be worth, I start with the current price and work backwards. What would have to be true for the current price to make sense? How fast does it need to grow? How long does that growth need to last? It’s an oddly grounding exercise, and I’ve grown to like it. Even if it means missing out on some great ideas.

I’ve noticed this creeping into other parts of life as well, almost by accident.

With friendships, for example, I don’t think I have a grand theory of what makes a great friend. But I do have a fairly clear sense of what a bad one looks like. And most of the time, just trying not to be that person seems to work reasonably well.

Same with decisions in general. When I’m stuck, I’ve found it easier to list what I don’t want than what I do. It’s quicker, and somehow more honest. The answer doesn’t always appear immediately, but the space around it becomes clearer.

None of this is particularly profound. It’s just something I’ve found myself coming back to. A way of looking at things that feels a bit more manageable. Less about finding the perfect answer, more about ruling out the obviously bad ones.

Which, if you think about it, is how that group of five ends up eating anywhere at all. Not because they found the perfect restaurant. Just because they managed to eliminate enough terrible ones.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading.

Cover image taken from Unplash

I’ve tried to be consistent too. Mental models, investment theses, book notes, interesting ideas. The habit has always been there. The system never quite was. Or maybe it was and I just got bored halfway through, which feels more likely.

Recently I came across Andrej Karpathy, who talked about using LLMs not to write code or answer questions, but to act as a kind of librarian. You feed it raw material. It reads everything, builds structured pages, creates interlinkages between related ideas, and maintains the whole thing automatically. The repository gets smarter every time you add something new, which already makes it more dependable than me.

What really stuck with me was one simple idea. The bottleneck to maintaining a useful knowledge base has never been the reading or the thinking. It’s the admin. Updating cross references. Keeping things current. Humans get bored. Or lazy. Or distracted by something else entirely. An AI agent hopefully does not.

So here’s what I’m working on. An Obsidian vault, which sounds more impressive than it is and is essentially just folders on my computer, with a few clear sections, and linkages. Mental models. People and influences. My Value Tortoise writing. Investing research and journals. And a section I’m calling Sparks for things that are interesting but don’t yet know where they belong.

Some of the documentation I still do myself, partly out of habit and partly because some things really do need to stay in my own voice. Investment journals, for instance, only make sense if they capture what I actually thought in that moment, not a cleaner, more intelligent sounding version of it afterwards.

But some of it I’m happy to hand over. If I read something I really like, I’ll just feed it in and let the system turn it into a clean, structured note that lives in Sparks or wherever it eventually belongs.

All of that is useful, but not especially life changing on its own. Where it starts to get interesting is that I can now talk to the whole thing.

Using Claude Code or whatever you prefer, I can ask it how my views on a business have changed over time, which is not a question I could have answered honestly before without a lot of guesswork and selective memory. I can ask it to point out blind spots in my thinking, which feels like inviting trouble but is probably necessary. I can even ask it to read across everything I’ve written and tell me what I actually care about, as opposed to what I’ve just been pretending to care about because it sounded vaguely intelligent at the time.

Has my writing improved. Who do I sound like. Who keeps showing up in my thinking whether I like it or not. (Hello Ana de Armas.) I have my suspicions, but it’s nice to have them confirmed, or gently dismantled.

And it doesn’t have to stop at investing. If you journal, this sort of thing could become quietly indispensable. If I ever get organised enough to document gift preferences for friends and family, I could ask it for suggestions tailored to each person. Which does feel like cheating, but also like a level of adulthood I have yet to reach.

It’s basically a Control F for your brain. Or at least the part of it you’ve managed to write down before getting distracted and opening another app.

Subscribe now

I should probably add that I am very far from an AI person. I don’t really know what I’m doing half the time, and a lot of this is still trial and error. So some of you who work more deeply in this field will probably have better, more efficient ways of doing all this, or might not be nearly as impressed by it as I am.

But if you’re anything like me, this feels pretty freaking wild.

I’m rambling here, but I’ve probably come to the conclusion that the greatest strength of humanity is our ability to build narratives and stories and then, somehow, convince the world to go along with them.

Now of course, we know this. It sounds like something you’d underline in a book. But sit with it for a moment.

Language, for instance. It’s just sounds. Or squiggles. There is nothing inherently “tree” about a tree. No cosmic reason that those four letters should summon up leaves and bark and shade. And yet, because enough of us agree, tree is… well, tree.

Money is even stranger. At least language has some evolutionary charm to it. Money is, when you strip it down, a story we've all agreed not to question too hard. A piece of paper, or increasingly a few digits on a screen, that we have all decided is worth something. Not just something, but time, effort, stress, ambition, and occasionally, dignity. You can spend your entire life chasing it, losing it, multiplying it, or explaining it away, all because we collectively agreed to believe in it.

And then there are the bigger stories. Nations. Borders. Companies. Even markets. None of these exist in a physical sense the way a rock does. You can’t stub your toe on “India” or “the Nifty 50”. Not literally, anyway.

Which brings us, somewhat uncomfortably, to investing.

Because markets are, at their core, giant narrative machines. Prices move not just on earnings or cash flows, but on stories about earnings and stories about the future. Sometimes those stories are grounded, sometimes they are hopeful, and sometimes they are borderline delusional but told with such confidence that they briefly become reality.

A company is “the next big thing” until it isn’t. A sector is “uninvestable” until it quietly compounds in a corner. And occasionally, something genuinely transformative comes along, but by the time the narrative reaches you, it’s already been priced in three times over.

The tricky part is that narratives are not optional. You can’t opt out of them. We like to pretend that there are “story people” and “numbers people,” but in reality, we are all buying some narrative. The spreadsheet just makes it feel more respectable.

This is where I love Aswath Damodaran’s work. His whole point, if you strip away the academic packaging, is that valuation is a bridge between stories and numbers. A good narrative has to be translated into inputs. Growth rates, margins, reinvestment. And once you do that, the story becomes testable.

Because a story that cannot survive contact with numbers is not a narrative. It’s a pitch. And the reverse is also true. Numbers without a story are just as fragile. A model can look precise and still be meaningless if the underlying narrative is confused, borrowed, or simply wrong.

So the question is not whether to believe in narratives, but which ones to treat with suspicion and which ones to tentatively trust. And more importantly, whether the narrative you are buying can withstand even a slightly hostile spreadsheet.

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading.

Second Order Consequences

Mumbai recently built India’s first musical road. A 500 metre stretch on the Coastal Road where, if you drive at the right speed, your tyres play Jai Ho.

On paper, it is delightful. Infrastructure meets culture. A small moment of joy in an otherwise mundane drive. And then reality showed up.

Lane discipline was one issue. But the bigger problem was noise. Not at 6 pm when everyone’s awake. At 3 in the morning, when the same stretch keeps playing Jai Ho and people are trying to sleep. Residents started complaining. A lot. Enough that authorities stepped in. Now, that stretch gets barricaded at night. Not removed. Just… switched off when people actually need silence.

Same road. Same idea. Very different outcome once you follow it a step further. This is the pattern.

First order thinking asks, “What happens next?”
Second order thinking asks, “And then what happens after that?”

Most decisions look good in the first layer. The problems usually sit in the second or third. There is a classic story called the Cobra Effect. During colonial rule in Delhi, the administration wanted to reduce the number of cobras. So they offered a bounty for every dead cobra.

At first, it worked. People brought in snakes and collected rewards. Then people started breeding cobras. When the government caught on and scrapped the program, the now-worthless snakes were released into the wild. The cobra population ended up higher than where it started.

The incentive solved the first order problem and made the second order problem worse. This is something Charlie Munger used to hammer home. Incentives drive behavior. And behavior, when scaled, creates consequences you did not plan for.

You see this everywhere once you start looking.

Cut costs aggressively and margins improve. That is first order. Second order, product quality could drops, customers could leave, etc. Even in markets, this shows up all the time. A strategy works, capital floods in, and the very act of crowding kills the edge that made it work in the first place.

The tricky part is that second order effects are not always obvious. They are slower. Indirect. Often uncomfortable to think about because they force you to admit that a “good idea” might carry hidden costs.

So what do you actually do with this?

First, stretch the timeline. When evaluating a decision, mentally walk it forward. Not just tomorrow, but a year out, five years out. Ask what changes as people adapt to your decision. Because they will.

Second, think in incentives. People respond to what you reward, not what you say. If there is a loophole, someone will find it. Usually faster than you expect.

Third, invert. Instead of asking “how does this help”, ask “how could this backfire?” It is a simple question that catches a surprising number of blind spots.

And finally, accept tradeoffs. Second order thinking does not mean paralysis. It just means you go in with your eyes open. Every decision has downstream effects. The goal is not to eliminate them. It is to choose which ones you are willing to live with.

The musical road still might be a good idea. It just turns out that joy, when looped infinitely at high volume, becomes noise.

Anyway, that’s my brain dump for today. Thanks for sticking around.

Subscribe now

Cover image taken from Unsplash

And yet there have been moments when I’ve carried a book in a Daunt tote bag on the Tube when a normal backpack would have been lighter, easier, and considerably kinder to my shoulder. I genuinely wanted to read the book. I genuinely needed a bag. All of it was true. And yet the tote was still chosen.

It’s a small thing, obviously. No one is harmed by a tote bag. But it’s also not nothing. It’s a tiny decision in favour of looking like the sort of person who reads, rather than just being one quietly, without any props.

And once you notice that sort of thing, you start seeing it everywhere.

Take the Patagonia vest. Perfectly sensible item of clothing. Keeps you warm without overheating you. No sleeves, which feels efficient, somehow. But at some point it stopped being just a vest and started being… a message. It says, without saying it, that you are both relaxed and competent, the sort of person who can build a financial model and still make it to a bar at a reasonable hour without looking flustered.

Or running. I used to think running was about clearing your head, or punishing yourself, or some combination of the two. Now it sometimes feels like it isn’t quite finished until it’s been uploaded somewhere. The run itself is real enough. The sweat is real. The pain is real. But there’s also this faint second layer to it, like a voice in the background saying: this will look good later.

Which, to be clear, I understand. I’ve done it.

We all want to be seen, just not entirely. We’d like to be seen for the better bits. The version of us that runs, or reads, or drinks the right kind of coffee. Not the version that hits snooze three times or spends an hour scrolling through things we don’t even enjoy.

That’s why those “starter packs” are funny, and slightly horrible. They flatten people into these neat little bundles. The tote, the matcha, the vaguely meaningful slogan about boundaries. You laugh because it’s accurate, and then feel a bit uncomfortable because it’s a little too accurate.

The psychology isn’t new. That part is ancient. Social media may have put it on steroids, but what fascinates me is how quickly capitalism industrializes the signal. The moment enough people want to be perceived a certain way, a product appears. Luxury brands understand this at a molecular level.

A logo says, “I made it.”
A subtler logo says, “I’ve made it so thoroughly I don’t need you to know.”

Even the things that are meant to reject all of this end up becoming part of it. Minimalism, for example, which I suspect was originally about owning less, now seems to involve buying very expensive versions of very plain things. Not caring what people think has, somehow, acquired its own aesthetic.

None of which is entirely ridiculous, because a lot of this isn’t really about vanity. It’s about belonging.

At school, you wanted whatever everyone else had. Not necessarily because you loved it, but because it made things easier. It meant you didn’t have to explain yourself. You were already, in a small way, understood.

And if you didn’t want to belong in that way, you found another way of signalling that too. You rejected the thing, which was still, in its own way, a kind of uniform.

Belonging is expensive because exclusion costs.

I don’t think that’s entirely shallow. It’s probably just how people work. It’s quicker to read signals than to get to know someone properly. A tote bag, or a watch, or a pair of shoes can do a surprising amount of conversational heavy lifting.

But there is a cost, even if it’s a quiet one.

Sometimes the costume starts to matter more than the person wearing it. The run becomes about the upload. The book becomes something you carry rather than something you read. The object stops being a small part of the story and starts trying to be the whole thing.

And that’s when it all feels a bit thin.

I don’t have a grand solution to this, and I’m not entirely convinced there is one. It’s very easy to say “just be yourself,” which sounds nice but isn’t particularly helpful, especially when “yourself” is partly made up of all the same influences as everyone else.

I don’t really mind if people are a bit performative. I’ve made my peace with that. I just hope there’s something underneath it. Otherwise it’s a very convincing impression of a life.

Subscribe now

If you made it so far, thank you for reading. Appreciate the support always!

Cover image taken from Unsplash

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

I have been doing this thing recently where every month or so I read a different book with a different friend. (Hi Sanjit) Yes, I realize that is essentially a book club, but let me have this. February’s book was High Fidelity. So yes, there is probably a fair share of recency bias here, but oh well.

I love writing that feels like someone is talking directly to you. Not performing. Not trying to sound important. Just thinking out loud in a way that is sharp and self aware and occasionally uncomfortably honest. That is what this book does. The voice is so controlled, so specific, that you forget you are reading and feel like you are being let in on something. It’s incredible writing.

The story itself is simple. Rob, mid thirties, record shop owner, recently dumped, decides to revisit his top five breakups to understand what went wrong and possibly mend his most recent relationship. That is it. A man gets left and begins excavating his past. No dramatic twists. No sweeping declarations. Just memory, ego, and slow realization.

And it is funny. Not quite laugh out loud funny, but the kind that keeps a quiet smile on your face while you turn every page. The wow, that is clever writing kind of funny. The wow, that is almost uncomfortably self aware kind of funny.

Rob is a child in a man’s body. Narcissistic. Selfish. Kind of a loser. And the book never really tries to fix that. It simply lets him be all of those things at once. The self awareness, the pettiness, the insecurity. Watching him revisit his past relationships stops feeling like gossip pretty quickly. It starts to feel more like watching someone slowly realize that the common denominator in all of them might be him.

Oh, and the lists. Everything in High Fidelity eventually becomes a top five list. Favorite songs. Worst breakups. Desert island records. Life, for Rob, is something to be ranked, curated, and endlessly reorganized.

At first it is just funny. The way every conversation can turn into a debate about music or taste or cultural trivia. But slowly you realize the lists are doing something else. They are a way of making sense of things that are otherwise messy. Heartbreak is confusing, but a ranked list feels neat. Memory is unreliable, but a list feels definitive. If you can categorize your past, maybe you do not have to fully sit with it.

And that is where the book becomes sharper than it first appears. Rob has spent most of his life confusing taste with personality, building an identity out of cultural knowledge. Even if Rob probably never quite realizes it, as readers we recognize that curating your life is not the same thing as living it.

Some books try to overwhelm you. This one disarms you. It makes you smile, a lot, and leaves you feeling strangely hopeful. I loved it.

And to end this article the only way one really should after reading a book obsessed with top five lists, here is mine: my Top 5 songs to listen to on a road trip with friends.

1. Don’t You Worry Child – Maybe it is just the 2012 nostalgia talking, but something by Swedish House Mafia or Avicii always feels perfect for a road trip.

2. Khaabon Ke Parinday – ZNMD bias? Yep.

3. Heat Waves – Something to be played in the latter half of the road trip, when everyone has settled in. Maybe a little tired, but still vibing.

4. Take Me Home, Country Roads – At some point this song will come on and suddenly the entire car is a choir. Mr Brightside works too.

5. Hot n Cold – Something by Katy Perry, Sabrina Carpenter, or Justin Bieber. The kind of pop you might claim you hate but secretly love. Mostly love, let’s be honest.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Which songs would make your list?

Subscribe now

Earlier last year tensions were flaring again between India and Pakistan, two nuclear armed neighbors who have never exactly been relaxed about each other. Before that and still ongoing Russia invading Ukraine, dragging trench warfare and artillery back into European vocabulary. Of course there’s Israel and Palestine, a conflict so entrenched it feels both permanently breaking and permanently unresolved at the same time. Ongoing devastation in Myanmar, a country sliding further into violence and repression. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, twenty years of war ending not with resolution but with a kind of geopolitical shrug. Syria, which has been in fragments for so long that its war risks becoming background noise, which might be the most damning category of all.

I’m missing a whole lot, so yes, again: These are wild times.

But here’s the uncomfortable question: what exactly is the benchmark?

Because if we’re measuring against “calm, orderly, morally coherent global stability,” I’m not sure that’s ever been widely available. If you widen the lens properly, things do not get calmer. They get bloodier.

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death tore through Europe and parts of Asia and North Africa, killing tens of millions. Entire social orders shifted because there simply weren’t enough people left to maintain them. That qualifies as wild by any reasonable metric.

Move forward and Europe spends much of the seventeenth century fighting itself in conflicts which devastated large parts of Central Europe. Famine, disease, mercenary armies roaming through villages. Not exactly a tranquil age.

The eighteenth century gave us revolutions. The French Revolution did not feel like a gentle policy disagreement. It felt like the old world being dismantled in public. Heads literally rolled. Stability was not trending.

Then the twentieth century arrived and decided to compete with itself. World War I industrialized slaughter. World War II expanded it globally and ended with atomic bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even the relatively recent past resists nostalgia. The September 11 attacks reshaped geopolitics in a morning. The Global Financial Crisis made the global economy look alarmingly fragile.

None of those eras strike me as especially calm. Which brings us back to now.

Maybe what feels unprecedented is not that instability exists, but that we are aware of so much of it at once. A seventeenth century villager did not have live updates from three other continents. A Cold War family did not receive push notifications about five separate conflicts before coffee.

We do.

Maybe the real difference now is sequencing.

We do not experience one crisis at a time. We experience a feed. India and Pakistan. Ukraine. Israel and Palestine. Myanmar. Afghanistan. Syria. Drones over Gulf skylines. Scroll. Refresh. Repeat.

History used to arrive as chapters. Now it arrives as tabs.

There is another difference, though, and it is not small. For most of human history we were very good at killing each other locally. Swords, muskets, trenches. Grim, certainly, but limited by geography and technology. Now we have engineered the capacity to do it globally. Nuclear weapons sit quietly in silos. Climate systems shift in slow motion. The stakes feel planetary in a way they did not during the Black Death or the French Revolution. Those were catastrophic. They upended societies and erased cities. But they did not come with a shared, press this and it’s over button.

That knowledge hums in the background. Even on ordinary days.

And yet, paradoxically, we also live in a time when life expectancy is dramatically higher than in most previous centuries. When medical science can map a virus in days. When billions have access to sanitation, electricity, education, and yes, hot water at the push of a button.

The same species that once feared crop failure as an existential threat now debates who their favourite Kardashian is and whether matcha is actually pleasant or just a personality trait.

If the standard is absolute stability, history fails repeatedly. If the standard is human flourishing measured over centuries, the present looks surprisingly strong.

So perhaps “wild times” is not a diagnosis. It is just what it feels like to be alive when you can see everything at once and know exactly how fragile it all is.

Smoke drifts past glass towers. Someone, somewhere, refreshes a feed. And for a moment it feels like the world is tilting. But maybe this is what the world has always done. We just have better reception now.

Success = Luck + Skill

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Thanks, Dhruv. I could be watching The Summer I turned pretty, but instead I opened your newsletter and you’re telling me that success involves both skill and luck. Groundbreaking”.

I realize that sounds obvious, but stay with me for a second.

The interesting question isn’t whether success contains skill and luck. Of course it does. The real question, the one Michael Mauboussin highlights in The Success Equation, is how much of each is at play in the game you’re playing.

Because the ratio changes everything.

• Take chess. Stable rules. Minimal randomness. Immediate feedback. Over time, the better player wins. Improvement is visible. Practice compounds. If you lose, it is not because the board had a bad day.

• Long term investing sits somewhere in the middle. Skill matters. Temperament, discipline, cost control, asset allocation. Over decades, good process tends to show up. But even there, luck still whispers. When you were born. What cycle you hit. Whether your prime earning years coincide with a roaring bull market or a lost decade.

• Now contrast that with short term trading. Shrink the timeframe and noise explodes. A good year might reflect skill. It might also reflect favorable conditions. Over short stretches, luck can dominate so thoroughly that it is almost indistinguishable from talent.

• And then there are games like roulette at a casino. Here, the math is structural. The house edge is baked in. You can get lucky on a given night. But skill is mostly absent.

Taleb makes a related point in Fooled by Randomness. Imagine a thousand parallel universes. In each one, the same person becomes a dentist. The outcomes across those universes would not vary wildly. Some differences, sure. Location. Reputation. Financial decisions. Minor execution. But you would not see enormous dispersion outside a few edge cases. The distribution is tight. You are unlikely to see billionaires at one end and abject poverty at the other.

Run that same thought experiment with a trader and the spread gets violent. In some universes they compound brilliantly. In others, a bad sequence ends the game early. Same person. Same intelligence. Different randomness. Here, you are far more likely to see both the billionaires and the bankrupt.

That is the point.

Some domains compress luck. Others amplify it.

So what are some implications?

1. First, know the game you’re in. If you don’t, you’ll misread your own results spectacularly. In luck heavy fields, a hot streak might make you feel brilliant, a slump might make you feel doomed, and the truth is usually somewhere in between, probably closer to “meh.” Before upgrading your ego or downgrading your self worth, just ask how wide the range of possible outcomes really is.

2. Second, try things. A lot of them. If luck exists, and it does, you only encounter it by participating. You cannot get lucky standing still. You have to put yourself in situations where positive variance can find you. Write the piece. Start the side project. DM Ana de Armas. Most attempts will not explode into fireworks. A few might. But zero attempts guarantees zero luck.

3. Third, keep a record. Even when things work out, luck has a way of quietly editing itself out of the story. You remember the win, not the flukes that came before it. Writing down your decisions, your reasoning, your experiments, even the small messy ones, is the only way to look back and separate skill from chance. It does not make the process more glamorous, but it makes it more accurate. That’s literally the reason, I decided to create my own investing journal.

4. And lastly, don’t mistake billionaires for oracles. Take Bill Gates. He became one of the richest people on Earth and he was genuinely brilliant, but it wasn’t just that. He went to a high school with a computer at a time when almost no schools did. He had Paul Allen as a collaborator. And there was Kent Evans, Gates’s close friend, just as brilliant and ambitious, who died in a climbing accident before he could graduate. That is luck or bad luck shaping lives. Trying to copy what he did is tempting. It is a bit like taking swimming lessons from a fish. You will probably learn some stuff but the circumstances are very different.

Subscribe now

This mental model changed the way I look at things. Even if it sounds obvious, it’s probably the one that sticks with me the most. Makes me feel a little less smug when I win and a little less miserable when I lose. Anyway, that’s my brain dump for today. Thanks for sticking around.

Cover Image taken from Unsplash.

One thing does seem fairly obvious, though. The version of the world we are currently inhabiting is just one of many that could have happened. Things tipped this way rather than that, because of a handful of decisions, and an unhealthy amount of luck. If any of those had gone slightly differently, none of us would be reading or writing this. We would be somewhere else, worrying about something else, or not worrying at all. Which is a long winded way of saying that certainty is probably not our friend when talking about the past or the future. The future demands a probabilistic outlook.

When people talk about the future, there is one idea that always shows up early. The reset. The moment where everything breaks. A natural disaster, a catastrophic war, a government with an itchy trigger finger, or a fanatical belief taken too far. In that version of the future, the world does not gently improve or sensibly adjust. It snaps. And whatever comes next is something you cannot easily undo.

The appeal of the reset is that it is dramatic. It looks good on screen. Zombies, asteroids, unmistakable endings. You know exactly when things change. It gives history a restart point.

What is much harder to imagine, and hopefully much more likely, is a future that sneaks up on us. One that arrives through tiny decisions, dull incentives, habits we barely notice forming. The world almost never stops and announces that it has become something else. It just quietly does, while everyone is busy refreshing their phones or arguing about something unrelated.

With that in mind, what follows is not a prediction in the grand, prophetic sense. It is more like a set of guesses. Things that seem likely to happen if we avoid completely wrecking the place.

If the future is split into a hundred different paths, I would expect these ideas to show up in at least sixty of them. Not because they are exciting or inevitable, but because they are already happening. This is not about sudden transformation. It is about imagining a world where today’s slow moving trends have stopped being trends and started being assumptions.

Lets get to it.

Subscribe now

1. Dirty energy is not leaving the party

Every serious conversation about the future eventually trips over the same thing: energy. Not policy. Not good intentions. Not whatever shiny technology is making the papers. Energy. It’s the boring adult in the room. When energy is cheap and plentiful, societies get ambitious. Space programs. Megacities. Crypto. When it becomes expensive or unreliable, everyone suddenly rediscovers the beauty of restraint.

The transition toward cleaner energy does not change this reality. It complicates it. Clean energy reduces some dependencies, but it introduces others, from critical minerals to manufacturing capacity to grid stability. Even the things designed to save us are incredibly energy hungry. Wind turbines don’t grow on trees. Solar panels don’t arrive via good vibes. The steel, the concrete, the batteries, all of it requires enormous amounts of power. This isn’t a light switch moment. It’s a long, messy renovation where you keep discovering new structural issues behind the walls.

Then there’s the awkward bit. The countries that got rich by burning cheap fossil fuels now stand on the sidelines telling poorer countries to do it differently. Preferably cleaner. Preferably faster. Preferably without the same capital, technology, or institutional muscle. For most developing economies, energy access and growth still feel a lot more urgent than abstract climate targets set several conferences and time zones away.

Technology alone won’t fix this because culture has a vote, and culture is stubborn. Agriculture makes this painfully obvious. Livestock emissions matter, and yes, cows burp and fart their way into climate models. But asking entire societies to eat less beef isn’t a technical adjustment. It’s a social negotiation involving farmers, religion, income, and what people consider a proper meal. These are not small asks. These are arguments that last generations.

By 2046, energy unfortunately won’t be fully decarbonized. By 2056, probably still not. Fossil fuels will shrink, but they won’t politely exit the stage. Clean energy will grow, but unevenly, imperfectly, and with its own limitations. The future won’t look like a clean break from the past. It will look more like an awkward overlap, where old systems and new ones coexist, tolerate each other just enough, and occasionally get in each other’s way. Which, if we’re being honest, is how most transitions actually work.

2. The world after Globalization peaked

The modern world is far too complicated and far too intertwined to work without trade, capital moving around, and a lot of shared production. Resources are scattered unevenly. Skills are specialized to the point of absurdity. No serious economy can make everything it needs by itself, unless it is happy with a sharp decline in living standards and a long nostalgic phase. Integration, in some form, is unavoidable.

What is changing is not globalization itself, but what countries want from it and how much discomfort they are willing to tolerate in exchange for efficiency.

The first lesson was fragility.

Recent shocks exposed things we preferred not to look at too closely. Systems that were beautifully optimized in calm conditions behaved badly when stressed. When production runs that close to the edge, failure does not stay contained. It travels. Quickly. The very qualities that once made globalization feel elegant turned out to make it brittle.

By 2046, globalization is likely to feel more supervised. More selective. Countries will remain open where openness clearly helps growth and innovation, but they will want insulation or redundancies where failure carries real consequences. This is not a dramatic rejection of interdependence. It is more like a quiet admission that efficiency without resilience is a gamble, and not everyone is in the mood to keep betting.

The second lesson was Power.

Cersei Lannister put it bluntly in Game of Thrones when she said, “Power is power.” It does not come from participation alone, or from having read the right economic papers. It comes from capability. From having something tangible behind your intentions.

Not very long ago, manufacturing depth, industrial capacity, and control over critical technologies sounded like dry policy phrases. The sort of things people nodded at politely before changing the subject. Somewhere along the way, they stopped feeling abstract and started looking like survival traits. These are not theoretical advantages. They are leverage.

This becomes clearest in places where mistakes are expensive. Military capacity. Energy systems. Semiconductors. In these domains, dependence stops being a neutral condition and starts to feel uncomfortably like exposure.

Large economies with deep domestic markets can afford redundancy. They can decide when openness helps and when it hurts. Smaller economies do not have that luxury. They might have to specialize aggressively or accept a higher degree of vulnerability. In a more fragmented world, the ability to absorb shocks at home becomes a form of power in itself.

Fragility taught states what breaks. Power reminds them what holds.

3. Complaining about immigration is not going away

By 2046, immigration will still be one of the most argued about features of modern societies. Not because the economics are mysterious or unsettled, but because the trade off is unavoidable, and people generally dislike trade offs unless they are the ones benefiting immediately.

On paper, the case for immigration only gets stronger. Much of the world is getting older. Birth rates are falling across developed economies and, increasingly, across developing ones too. There are simply fewer young people turning up to do the work, pay the taxes, and quietly keep the whole thing afloat.

Fewer young workers means slower growth, weaker tax bases, and welfare systems that start to look uncomfortably like a promise no one knows how to keep. In purely economic terms, immigration isn’t a moral stance or a political preference. It’s a patch. One that keeps the system running longer than it otherwise would.

But economics is only half the story, and usually the quieter half.

I say this as someone instinctively sympathetic to the liberal case. The idea of plural societies drawing strength from different cultures, skills and histories is not something I find threatening. It is, in many ways, the ideal. But ideals do not cancel instinct. When growth slows, when jobs feel scarce, when housing tightens and wages stagnate, it is not surprising that people begin to notice who else is competing. Seeing someone who does not look or sound like you succeed in a constrained environment can trigger something older than policy. That reaction may be ungenerous. It may even be wrong. But it is not mysterious.

Part of the tension lies in how immigration is experienced. It is felt long before it is measured. It appears in neighborhoods before it appears in GDP figures. In accents, shop signs, schoolyards, waiting rooms. Even when integration works, and over time it often does, the transition is uneven. The disruption is immediate and local. The gains are diffuse and delayed. That gap is where resentment settles.

This is what makes the argument so stubborn. A country can genuinely need immigration to sustain growth, fund welfare systems and fill labour shortages, while parts of that same country struggle with the pace of change.

Technology complicates the picture further. As automation and artificial intelligence absorb more routine and even skilled work, demand for labour will shift rather than disappear. Care work, services and roles requiring physical presence will still rely on people. Manufacturing and clerical functions increasingly may not. Migration systems will become more selective, more skills focused, more transactional. That may improve efficiency. It will not remove controversy.

By 2046, complaining about immigration will not necessarily signal policy failure. It will signal that societies are still trying to reconcile what they require with what they are prepared to become.

4. Tottenham Hotspur will still not have won the league

Some predictions feel risky because they depend on technology, politics, or human behaviour, all of which have a nasty habit of changing their minds. Others feel safer because they depend on history, which, for better or worse, has a strong preference for repeating itself. Tottenham’s relationship with the Premier League falls firmly into the second category.

Every few years, the conditions seem right. There is a promising squad, young enough to feel exciting but experienced enough to feel serious. A tactically astute manager who says the correct things about process and patience. A season where rivals wobble just enough to create that dangerous feeling known as belief. This is usually the point where supporters begin to explain, carefully and at length, why this year is different.

And then, quietly and without much drama, something gives way. A mistimed tackle. A baffling substitution. A run of games where the ball refuses to bounce kindly. Nothing catastrophic. Just enough to remind everyone of why Tottenham is Tottenham.

By 2046, football will almost certainly look different. Analytics will be sharper. Money will be more global and more obscene. Players will be faster, fitter, and somehow still injured at the worst possible moments. But in a world defined by uncertainty, it is comforting to know that a few constants endure.

5. The monetary shrug

The global economic system currently runs on a kind of collective agreement that feels both powerful and slightly fragile.

Debt keeps rising. Not just household debt or corporate debt, but sovereign debt. Entire countries owe sums that would have sounded fictional a few decades ago. And yet markets mostly carry on. Bonds trade. Currencies fluctuate. Everyone refreshes their dashboards and goes to lunch.

At the center of it all sits the US dollar. The world’s reserve currency. The default language of global trade. Oil is priced in it. Debt is issued in it. Central banks hold it. For decades this arrangement has survived wars, recessions, political drama, and the occasional self inflicted crisis.

But here’s the uncomfortable bit. The system relies heavily on trust. Trust in US institutions. Trust in rule of law. Trust that political volatility remains theatre rather than structural failure. In recent years, that trust has been tested more openly than many would have preferred.

Would I be shocked if by 2046 the financial plumbing looks different? Not particularly. Reserve currencies have changed before. Systems evolve, sometimes gradually, sometimes because someone forces the issue.

Do I know what replaces it? Not even slightly.

A multipolar currency world? A patchwork of regional systems? Central bank digital currencies? Some hybrid arrangement we cannot yet name? All plausible. None obvious.

For now, we seem to be operating on the global equivalent of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” The dollar still works. Alternatives are either smaller, less trusted, or tied to political systems that make investors nervous. And when you are managing trillions, nervous is not a good feeling.

So the system continues. Heavily indebted. Occasionally wobbly. Remarkably resilient. A bit like that friend who insists they are fine while clearly running on caffeine and vibes.

By 2046, the architecture might look different. Or it might look almost the same, just slightly reinforced and quietly adjusted. If there is one safe bet, it is this: money will remain complicated, political, and slightly mysterious. And most of us will still pretend we understand it better than we actually do.

6. Healthcare stops being off the rack

For most of modern history, healthcare has worked like fast fashion.

You show up with a problem. The doctor reaches for the standard size. This drug. That dosage. This protocol. If it mostly fits, we call it success. If not, we tweak. It’s been remarkably effective, but it has always been statistical. You are treated as a representative sample of something.

By 2046, that approach may be changing.

The shift won’t be dramatic. It will creep in through watches that flag irregular heartbeats before you feel them. Sleep trackers that quietly log your bad decisions. Continuous glucose monitors. Smart homes that notice patterns. Affordable genetic sequencing that tells you not who you are, but what your cells are inclined to attempt.

The body is becoming measurable.

Healthcare begins moving away from averages and toward probabilities attached to you specifically. Not a general response to a drug, but your likely response based on genetics, metabolism, history. Medicine starts to look less like fast fashion and more like tailoring.

Tailoring requires measurements. And someone has to hold those measurements somewhere.

Which brings us to the awkward part: the data.

Health data may become the most valuable and most sensitive asset many people own. Insurance companies, whose entire business is pricing uncertainty, will find this hard to ignore.

The more precisely risk can be measured, the harder it becomes to pretend we are all roughly the same. Do we want insurance priced according to our biology? Or according to a broader idea of shared risk?

Personalized medicine promises earlier detection, fewer surprises, treatment plans that adjust before things break. That’s the optimistic version. The other conversation is about ownership, consent, and whether opting out of measurement becomes its own kind of red flag.

By 2046, ignorance is unlikely to make a comeback. The devices are too useful, the incentives too aligned. We might see a quiet normalization of living in ongoing negotiation with our own biology.

7. The AI chaos

I have no freaking idea what AI is going to do. It can already do a frightening amount of what lawyers, accountants, and financial analysts spend their days pretending to do. Some of it is terrifying. Some of it is amazing. All of it is going to feel faster than anyone can comfortably process. I am already learning how to make pizza, in case no jobs exist and I have to open a small restaurant to pay the bills.

This is exactly the kind of period futurist Alvin Toffler described as future shock, the disorientation that happens when change moves faster than we can absorb it. Old habits will falter. Institutions will stumble. Some systems may break. Society may feel dizzyed, anxious, and uncertain. For the next twenty years we are likely to experience that full on “hold on to your hat” dissonance.

But history offers a little hope. When personal computers first arrived, they felt like a tidal wave. (I’m told) Offices scrambled, schools panicked, people wondered how these machines could possibly fit into daily life. Within a couple of decades that shock faded. Computers became ordinary. Social media and smartphones went through the same cycle, first overwhelming, then mundane. The panic does not disappear entirely, but the world adjusts. We adapt.

By 2046 the dust should have settled a bit. AI will be everywhere, still powerful, still shaping work, life, and culture. But it will probably feel less like a tidal wave and more like background infrastructure, something you notice only when it does not work, like electricity or GPS. The headlines will exist, the breakthroughs will exist, but the chaos will feel like history, something we hopefully survived and integrated into our lives.

Or, of course, the other possibility is the Dune option: we remove all AI and hope humanity survives. For now, I’ll stay hopeful and keep practicing my pizza.

8. Inequality

So much of what I’ve written so far, the health tracking, the personalized medicine, the AI chaos, might sound exciting or terrifying depending on your temperament. But let’s be honest, most of it is abstract and not for everyone. Poverty is not going to disappear. Hopefully it eases, but wherever there are shiny new toys, inequality will probably follow.

We’ll have smarter homes and treatments tailored to our biology. Meanwhile, in the same cities, towns, and villages, people will still be juggling basic survival: clean water, reliable electricity, decent food. Access to healthcare, education, and even advanced AI assistants will still be wildly uneven. For some, the future will feel dazzling; for others, barely changed from today. Geography, income, and opportunity will shape how anyone experiences progress.

And then there is gene editing. Humans tinkering with DNA is not science fiction anymore. Ethical dilemmas will multiply. Could we see genetically superior humans? Not entirely out of the question. And yes, that reality will sit right next to people who have none of these advantages. Schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods will be caught in the friction. Social tensions, envy, and resentment could grow, even as technology races ahead.

AI adds another layer. Some jobs will vanish; others will transform. Some people will thrive with AI as a tool, while others may find themselves sidelined, struggling to adapt in ways that no algorithm can fully prepare them for.

By 2046, some of the world will feel astonishing, and some of it will feel painfully familiar. The gap between the two will probably matter more than all the progress itself. Convenience, personalization, and digital brilliance will coexist with stubborn old problems that no algorithm will ever fix.

9. The human touch is here to stay

The world will be smoother in 2046, for those who have resources. In many ways, this is progress. Fewer queues. Fewer wasted minutes. Fewer obvious mistakes. But something interesting happens when everything becomes optimized. You start to miss the rough edges.

Take marathons.

Yes, the shoes are absurdly technical. Yes, your watch will record every heartbeat, stride, and flinch. Yes, the whole thing will be uploaded to Strava. And yet none of that is really the point.

Here is an event where thousands of people wake up before dawn, to run 42.2 kilometers for no practical reason at all. What’s more, they pay for the privilege. They voluntarily experience discomfort, and then celebrate it together.

It is inefficient. It is irrational. It is profoundly human.

And afterwards, no one gathers around to compare recovery scores. They gather to replay the moment they almost quit at kilometer 34. The stranger who shouted their name. The runner who finished with their 1 year old daughter, in their arms. The shared stupidity of having done something so difficult.

Technology is there, sure. But it doesn’t define why they show up. The reason is emotional. Stubbornly emotional. The need to struggle. To be seen. To belong. That instinct predates GPS watches and Strava streaks.

As homes become smarter and entertainment more personalized, the value of places that feel unmistakably human quietly rises. Not because they are efficient. But because they aren’t.

Gyms where the machines wobble and the trainer calls you by the nickname only they know. Small restaurants where the menu changes because the owner felt like it. Bookshops arranged by taste rather than algorithm. Bars with uneven tables and conversations that drift.

Places shaped by preference, not optimization. Technology will still be there. But the reason people show up will not be efficiency. It will be texture. Warmth. The small relief of being somewhere that hasn’t been fully optimized.

By 2046, life may feel increasingly mediated by systems that anticipate our needs. Convenient, yes. Useful, certainly. But occasionally flattening. Here’s to the places that are messy, opinionated, alive, and stubbornly human.

Subscribe now

Many of these thoughts are borrowed rather than invented. They come from reading people who think in systems, constraints, and probabilities. That includes Tim Urban, Alvin Toffler, Nassim Taleb, Ray Dalio, Vaclav Smil, Charlie Munger, and many others. I recommend all their work.

If you made it this far, thank you. Hopefully some of it made sense and not all of it was stupid. Thanks for reading!

Cover image taken from Unsplash.

I recently learned that someone has created a Substack account using my name (Dhruv) and may be reaching out to some subscribers while impersonating me.

Please note that I would never contact you privately to offer financial advice, solicit investments, or request personal information. Any such outreach is not from me.

I am not a financial advisor and will never randomly reach out!

If you receive messages claiming to be from me that don’t come through my official Substack, I’d strongly recommend ignoring them and reporting the account to Substack.

I’m sorry to even have to mention this. As always, I appreciate your trust and support.

Best,
Dhruv

But every now and then, it feels useful to add a little order to the chaos. Last year, I started to write a series about fifty books that stayed with me, and I’ve been really enjoying the process. It’s been slower than expected, more reflective than planned, and I suspect it’ll quietly stretch across a decade, and I am perfectly okay with that.

I felt like trying something similar again.

This is going to be a series on mental models. Fifteen of them. Not because they are definitive or original, but because they have been useful. Some help simplify complex decisions. Some act as filters. Some are reminders of how easily we can fool ourselves.

There is no particular order and no finish line in sight.

Just one mental model at a time.

Here is 1 out of 15.

Ergodicity

Ergodicity is one of those concepts that feels abstract until it hits you in real life: what’s true for a group isn’t necessarily true for an individual.

Imagine a casino. 100 people walk in for a day of Roulette. Five of them go bust. You might be tempted to say, “Ah, the probability of going bust is around 5%.” Sounds reassuring, right?

Now imagine one person goes to the casino for a hundred days. The odds are much worse, in fact, unless they get incredibly lucky, they’ll likely go bust long before the 100th day. That 5% daily probability for the group does not translate into the probability for one person over many trials.

This is the essence of ergodicity: a system is ergodic if the expected value of a process over time for one individual is the same as the expected value across a group at a single moment. Most things in life are not ergodic. Treating them as if they are is where people get into trouble.

The definition sounds abstract, but it shows up in very ordinary places. Investing is one of them. Imagine you’re handed a list of annual returns. Nothing exotic. Just ten numbers. Some good years, some bad ones, a couple of disasters, a couple of bangers.

• +10.51%

• +8.75%

• +19.42%

• +4.32%

• +24.12%

• −51.79%

• +54.77%

• +39.83%

• −24.62%

• +17.95%

Now imagine three parallel universes.

• In Universe A, these returns arrive exactly in the order you saw them.

• In Universe B, all the bad years get out of the way first and the good years come later.

• In Universe C, you get the good years upfront and the bad ones at the end. Same returns. Same years. Just rearranged.

Here’s the deceptively simple question.

Does the order of returns matter?

Case 1 - Lump sum

You invest 1000 once. You do nothing else. You sit on your hands and let compounding do its thing. Run the math. Whether the worst year happens first or last doesn’t change the final number. The multiplication of returns is commutative. The path might feel very different emotionally, but mathematically, it lands you in the same place. This is an example of an ergodic outcome.

Case 2 - Annual Investment (SIP)

Now we change one thing. Instead of investing once, you invest 1000 every year. Same returns. Same three universes. Now run the math again.

Suddenly, the ending balances are wildly different. If bad returns come early, your later contributions benefit from recoveries. If bad returns come late, they crush a much larger capital base. Same returns. Same behavior. Completely different outcomes.

The path matters.

Once you see it in investing, you start seeing it everywhere.

Take health. Smoking a cigarette today doesn’t do much. Smoking one tomorrow doesn’t either. Look at it across a group and at a single moment in time and you might conclude that the damage is marginal. Plenty of people smoke and seem fine. The expected outcome doesn’t look catastrophic.

But health isn’t experienced as a group average. It’s experienced as a path.

The harm compounds quietly. One person smoking for thirty years is not the same as thirty people smoking for one year each. Health is deeply non ergodic. Small, repeated exposures accumulate until they don’t. The same logic applies to sleep, diet, exercise, stress.

And then there’s risk.

In non ergodic systems, survival comes before optimization. You don’t get rewarded for having a high expected return if you don’t make it to the next round. This is why leverage is dangerous even when it looks attractive on paper.

Buffett intuitively understands this when he says “To succeed, you must first survive.”

Nassim Taleb has been circling this idea for years, often without using the word itself. His obsession with fragility, ruin, and survival all links to this. Ole Peters approaches it from the other direction, putting math around something people like Buffett and Munger seemed to grasp intuitively: that time changes the rules of the game.

The common thread is simple. You don’t experience life as an average. You experience it as a sequence. If this mental model does nothing else, let it remind you to respect the sequence, not just the destination. Think about the path. You only get one.

Subscribe now

If you are still reading, thank you! Appreciate the support.

Cover image taken from Unsplash

Instead of getting into a debate about which of these stories is the real one, I wanted to ask a much simpler and much more boring question.

Over a really long time, what has the metal delivered?

So I went and pulled monthly silver futures data going all the way back to 1975 and just let the numbers speak.

The annualized return over those 51 years comes out to about 5.94% in USD. That sounds neat and tidy, but it doesn’t tell the full story. It takes more than half a century of market chaos and compresses it into a single number, quietly skipping over what actually happens along the way.

Because along the way, silver can be… difficult.

There are long stretches, sometimes entire decades, when it does basically nothing. And then there are years like the last one, where if you happened to be holding silver, you more than doubled your money. Depending entirely on when you invested, the experience could have felt boring, frustrating, euphoric, or all three in rapid succession.

To understand what owning silver has really been like, it makes far more sense to stop looking at one big number and start looking at rolling returns.

Rolling returns are basically the market equivalent of asking, “Okay, but what if I had started at a different time?” Imagine taking a one year investing window and sliding it across history one month at a time. Start in January 1975, hold for one year, note the return. Then start in February 1975, hold for one year, note the return. Then March 1975. And so on, month by month, through fifty one years of market history. Instead of getting one clean answer, you get hundreds of answers, each representing what a real investor could have experienced depending on when they jumped in. Some of those investors look like geniuses at dinner parties, some of them quietly question their life choices, and all of them end up with very different outcomes despite investing in the exact same asset. Rolling returns turn long term performance from a single tidy number into a messy but honest picture of what actually happened.

And once we have all these hypothetical investors lined up, some lucky, some unlucky, we can start to make sense of the chaos. By looking at medians and quartiles, we get a picture of what a normal journey looked like for someone holding the asset instead of obsessing over the extreme winners or losers.

So let’s start with one-year rolling returns.

Anywhere between -12.49% and 23.16% is not out of the ordinary, if we are looking at a 1 year investment horizon. The median is 1.46%. I now look at the same thing across 3, 5 and 10 year investment horizons.

A few things immediately stand out.

• If you are investing for 5 years, anywhere between -4.95% and 12.72% is not an unusual return.

• A decade of no returns is not unusual for silver. (At least when we look at the last 50 years)

• The range of outcomes predictably reduce as we increase the time horizon.

Lastly, I look at the probability that you made no money in silver, while still looking at rolling returns over the last fifty one years.

If you stare at that chart for long enough, one thing becomes painfully clear: silver has not been a “buy it, forget it, and go live your life” asset.

Silver has been more like that friend who is occasionally brilliant, frequently difficult, and sometimes disappears for a decade. That alone should inject a healthy dose of caution into any “silver always wins in the long run” story. Timing, cycles, and macro regimes seem to matter a lot here.

And yet.

What makes this moment uncomfortable in a good way is that the past year does not sit in the middle of history’s distribution. It is not close to the median. It sits well beyond the third quartile of past outcomes. That means something unusual is happening. Not unprecedented, but rare.

So when people start talking about monetary hedges, energy transitions, or silver finally “waking up,” they are not hallucinating. The data agrees that this kind of setup does not happen often. There is clearly some merit in the narratives and the numbers lining up at the same time.

But how should all of that translate into what silver is worth?

I wish I knew.

Subscribe now

As always, thank you for reading. If you are looking for a similar analysis on gold you can head here.

Disclaimer This content is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. While care has been taken to ensure accuracy, errors may exist. The author makes no guarantees and accepts no liability for decisions or outcomes based on this material.

Cover image taken from Unsplash

1. Fantastically fragile

Human progress over the last century has been incredible. We’ve reduced extreme poverty, connected the entire planet, built global supply chains, and unlocked science and technology that previous generations couldn’t dream of. But the same forces that made this possible have also made us structurally fragile.

Oppenheimer is a symbolic turning point. The moment humanity created tools powerful enough to reshape (or end) civilization. But even beyond nuclear technology, we’ve built systems that are deeply interconnected, and heavily optimized.

Deeply interconnected.
Almost every part of the world seems to depend on every other part functioning smoothly. A ship stuck in the Suez Canal can delay factories in Europe, retailers in the U.S., and production schedules in Asia — as we saw in 2020. And in our daily digital lives, a single outage can cascade wildly. If Cloudflare goes down for an hour, suddenly trading platforms, LinkedIn, Substack, etc., become inaccessible. One failure ripples across dozens of industries instantly.

Optimized to razor-thin margins.
“Just-in-time” supply chains work brilliantly, until they don’t. Efficiency has come at the price of resilience. When Indigo grounds flights, weddings get cancelled, business trips collapse, and holiday plans unravel. Small disruptions create outsized chaos because the system leaves no room for buffers.

The world today is like a massive Jenga tower, where each new piece of progress adds height and capability, but also makes the whole structure wobblier. One wrong move, and the effects can cascade far beyond what anyone expects. This is not doom. It is simply the reality of a highly optimized world. We’ve created something brilliant. And brittle.

2. The Return of Muscle

For a long time, progress was framed as a move from muscle to mind. From factories to finance. From making things to designing them. Manufacturing was treated as something to outsource and forget.

That story is beginning to break down. Supply chains are no longer seen as neutral infrastructure. They are instruments of power.

The technologies shaping the next decade are not weightless or virtual. AI, electrification, defense, and energy are deeply physical systems. They require copper, rare earths, lithium, graphite, steel, energy, cooling, and factories that can operate at scale.

Over time, much of the physical backbone that supports these technologies became geographically concentrated. Many economies retained ideas, intellectual property, and financial systems, while the harder work of refining, smelting, and fabrication moved elsewhere. This looked efficient and rational for years. It also created quiet dependencies that are now becoming visible.

Today, the ability to convert raw materials into usable components is far more important than it appears on paper. It is not just about who controls resources underground, but who controls the factories in between. Owning the blueprint matters less if the workshop is somewhere else.

Rebuilding manufacturing capacity is slow, expensive, and politically tricky. These industries are noisy, energy hungry, and not very Instagrammable. Yet without them, even the most advanced economies risk becoming brilliant designers who can’t actually make anything when it matters.

Code still matters. But code without muscle? It’s fragile.

(Yes, I have been rereading the Chip war and the New Map. Recommend them both.)

3. The data centers hype

Everyone’s talking about data centers in India lately. Backed by data localization rules, exploding traffic, and AI workloads that need ridiculous amounts of power, a lot of the hype seems warranted. But the interesting part is how many industries plug into this story.

Real estate developers benefit from long term leases and the growing demand for data center parks. Companies that make electrical equipment see more work, since these massive facilities need a lot of power and backup systems. Cooling and HVAC companies are busy as AI servers push heat loads to new extremes.

Network and telecom providers benefit from the high bandwidth and low-latency connections these hubs need. IT hardware and AI infrastructure makers gain as India builds more local servers, storage, and high-performance computing. Data center operators and telcos see multi-year growth as cloud, enterprise, and AI workloads shift to domestic facilities.

So yes, the space is hot, but it’s not a single bet. It’s land, power, cooling, networks, silicon, and operations. Very emblematic of our modern world: a huge opportunity built on a tightly woven, highly complex value chain. And as investors, it’s interesting because it gives you multiple routes to play a theme.

4. The Middle seems to be Disappearing

Social platforms have turned politics into a kind of arena where only the extremes trend. You either get content from people who sound exactly like you, reinforcing everything you already believe… or content designed to make you furious at “the other side.” Both formats work because they keep you scrolling, reacting, arguing. The algorithm feeds on certainty and outrage. Not on nuance.

And because of that, we start thinking the whole world looks like the far-left vs far-right wrestling match happening on our feeds. We see more AOC or Trump style activism, more hard-edged rhetoric, and almost no one in the middle holding a boring, reasonable line.

The danger is that perception becomes reality. If people believe only the extremes exist, they begin to act like it. Politics shifts. Media shifts. Even policy shifts. And soon the middle isn’t just invisible, it’s irrelevant.

(More on this here.)

5. India will struggle with autonomous cabs even in 2050

Autonomous taxis and ride-hailing services are already taking off. Tesla is pushing forward with its robotaxi plans, and Waymo is making strides too. The technology should not be a problem in the long run.

But in India? The road ahead is far trickier. (Literally and otherwise)

India’s challenge is not technological; it is social and economic. An enormous number of people rely on driving as their primary source of income. Whether it is auto-rickshaw drivers or cab drivers, the massive ecosystem built around transport means fully autonomous cabs would take a significant bite out of employment. Something that would not go down well.

Then there is the issue of entrenched interests. Take Goa’s taxi mafia. Despite years of complaints about inflated fares and poor service, they still wield enormous power. If local transport unions can push back against app based services like Uber and Ola, one can only imagine the resistance to driverless cars.

Regulations, unions, and the sheer scale of employment in the sector mean India’s adoption of autonomous taxis will be slower and messier than in other countries. So even if the technology to handle the absolute chaos of Indian roads is not far off, there are enough challenges to prevent it from unfolding the same way it might for China or the USA.

6. What is it with all these weddings?

I said these were six things on my mind, not six smart things. And right now, a lot of that mental bandwidth is taken up by weddings.

Turning 27 apparently means every other month you’re traveling to another city, reusing the same three outfits, and doing dance practice. What’s strange and beautiful is how weddings sit alongside everything else. Global uncertainty, political noise, technological shifts, and then suddenly you’re arguing about outfits and hotel check-ins. Life doesn’t pause for big structural changes. It just keeps layering moments on top of each other.

Maybe that’s the point. Even in a world that feels fragile, optimized, polarized, and in flux, people are legally committing to spend the rest of their lives with each other. Families are still gathering. Photos are still being taken. Flights are still being booked. (and cancelled)

It’s grounding in a way. Amid all the systems and abstractions, weddings are messy, human, and beautifully imperfect. Just people showing up to celebrate, gossip, laugh, and dance.

And to my friend Mishri, who recently got married, thank you for reminding me that even in the middle of all this thinking and overthinking, some people and celebrations are genuinely, effortlessly, ridiculously wonderful.

Subscribe now

And that, feels like the best possible note to end the year on. Hope you all had a wonderful 2025. This will be my last article of the year. See you in 2026! As always, thank you for reading.

Haruki Murakami is… divisive. To put it mildly. His writing can feel slippery, dreamlike, sometimes frustratingly opaque. His female characters are often criticized, and not without reason. I want to acknowledge all of that upfront, because it’s important context. And yet, Norwegian Wood remains one of the most affecting, quietly devastating books I’ve ever read.

On the surface, it’s a coming of age story: Toru Watanabe, a university student in Tokyo, navigating love, grief, memory, and the strange loneliness of early adulthood. But beneath that, it’s an exploration of loss in all its forms. The kind that doesn’t explode your life so much as seep into it, quietly, relentlessly, until everything feels tinted by it.

What struck me most was how Murakami captures the ache of being young and not having the emotional language for the things happening inside you. The way friendships blur into love, how love blurs into dependency, and how some people walk into your life and quietly rearrange the furniture and you’re never quite the same after.

Some novels demand effort; others are breezy and forgettable. For me, Norwegian Wood sits in that rare, delicate middle space. It’s accessible, heartbreaking without being manipulative, and written with a tenderness that sneaks up on you.

It’s a sad book. Not melodramatic. Just sad in the way life can be. Beautifully so. Of the little fiction I’ve read, this remains one of the best.

And lines worth starring? Many. But I’ll leave you with this one:

“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”

Oh, also

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only arseholes do that.”

Subscribe now

The Business of the NBA teams

Just like other major sports leagues, NBA teams rely on a variety of revenue sources to stay profitable. Broadly speaking, these include:

• Broadcast Revenue: This is huge, especially with the NBA’s massive national TV deals. The league signed a $24 billion deal with ESPN and TNT back in 2014, and that ensures teams see a chunk of that money. On top of that, teams also negotiate local broadcast rights. The big-market teams like the Lakers pull in much more from their local deals, thanks to their larger fan bases and media markets. In contrast, smaller teams, don’t have the same earning potential from local broadcasts. To help level the playing field, the NBA works to redistribute some of the revenue across the league to make sure smaller-market teams can still compete financially.

• Ticket Sales: Every home game generates revenue for teams through ticket sales. This of course can fluctuate based on the team's performance, star players, and the overall popularity of the team in its local market.

• Merchandise Sales: Jerseys, hats, shoes, and other team-branded products are sold through a mix of official stores, online platforms, and partnerships with retail chains.

• Sponsorships and Partnerships: Major corporations pay to have their logos displayed on uniforms, in arenas, or across digital platforms. These sponsorships can range from the NBA’s official partners to individual team-specific deals.

• Arena Revenue: Revenue generated from events held in the team's home arena, including non-NBA events like concerts, conventions, and other sporting events, also contributes to a team's income.

One more thing worth noting: the luxury tax. To help maintain competitive balance, the NBA imposes a luxury tax on teams that exceed the salary cap. It’s basically a financial penalty for spending too much on players, but some teams are willing to pay it if it gives them a better shot at winning.

Decline in viewership

So, why is NBA viewership dropping, even with some of the most recognizable athletes on the planet? There’s no single answer, but here are a few key factors:

• First off, people just have a lot of options, but limited time.
  With so much entertainment competing for attention, most fans want the best content, fast. And sometimes, NBA just might not be that.

• The rise of highlight culture.
  Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, clips are everywhere. You can catch the best the game has to offer in under 60 seconds. For casual fans, sitting through a 2+ hour game just doesn’t feel necessary anymore.

• Modern NBA games feels repetitive.
  Most teams now play a similar style: launch a ton of threes, switch everything on defense, and optimize for efficiency. It’s smart basketball, but also predictable. When every team plays the same way, the product starts to feel stale.

• Games only feel meaningful in the final minutes.
  A lot of viewers check out early because they feel like nothing truly matters until crunch time. The first three quarters can feel like a warm-up to the real action, which means fewer people stick around, or tune in at all.

• Too many stoppages.
  Between timeouts, fouls, and commercials, the flow of the game is constantly interrupted. It breaks momentum and stretches out the experience, especially for younger fans with shorter attention spans.

• Access to games is frustrating.
  Half the time, fans can’t even watch their own teams without paying for extra streaming packages. Games are split across different networks, and it’s confusing, especially for casual fans.

Some of these issues are structural problems that can hopefully be tweaked, like making content more accessible and streamlining the broadcasting process. Others, like the overemphasis on three-pointers, might just be the “old heads” complaining. One thing I personally keep coming back to, which I think could make the game more exciting, is the scoring system itself.

Tweaking the scoring system

I'm fascinated by how different sports use various scoring methods, and how that shapes overall engagement.

For instance, some sports are strictly time-based, meaning the contest runs for a set duration, and the team with the most points (or runs) at the end wins. Others are organized around sets or rounds, where players or teams must win a certain number of segments to claim victory. There are also hybrid systems that mix elements of both approaches.

Consider these examples:

• Tennis: Matches are scored in sets and games. Players must win a predetermined number of sets (typically best-of-five in Grand Slams or best-of-three in other tournaments). Each set is made up of individual games, and the match is decided by who wins the required number of sets.

• Basketball (Current NBA): The game is strictly time-based. The clock runs for four 12-minute quarters (48 minutes total), and the team with the most points when time expires wins.

• Football: Also a time-based sport, with ninety minutes of action.

• Cricket: In limited-overs formats (like One Day Internationals or T20), matches are based on a set number of overs rather than a time limit. In Test cricket, however, the game is played over five days, and the team that scores the most runs across two innings wins. Or the match can end in a draw if time runs out.

One thing I’ve always admired about tennis is how its scoring structure preserves competitive tension almost indefinitely. Even when a player is down two sets, the match isn’t functionally over because each set is scored independently and there is no cumulative margin that carries over. This creates what you could call reset equity: after every set, the trailing player starts from zero with a fully renewed chance to flip the momentum. The point by point structure also means that there is virtually no garbage time because every point materially affects the pathway to winning the next game, which affects the next set, which affects the match. Tennis uses a kind of modular scoring architecture, where each segment is self contained but consequential, ensuring that the match is not decided early unless one player actually earns it. That is part of what makes big comebacks feel so possible and why viewers stay locked in: mathematically and psychologically, the door is never closed until the very end.

Now, imagine a NBA scoring system that blends elements of time-based and set-based formats, similar to a concept from boxing. Instead of having four quarters, the game could be broken into five 10-minute quarters, with each quarter counting as a set. The team that wins three out of the five sets wins the game. (Or think 7, 7 minute quarters and first to four)

This creates a sense of urgency in each quarter as every minute counts. It’s not about staying in the game. It's about winning that quarter.

This system also mimics the NBA Finals series, where it’s a first-to-four-wins format in a best-of-seven series. But the beauty of this would be that it’s condensed into a single game, keeping the excitement up throughout.

Of course, this kind of change would be a bold move. Very bold. It would drastically alter how stats are compared and how the game is played. For example, moving from 48 minutes to 50 minutes is a small change, but the real shake-up comes in the structure itself. Teams would need to adjust their strategies in real time, and the current metrics (like individual points per game) could become harder to compare. Some games would end in three quarters and others go till five.

Food for thought, I guess?

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

If you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last decade, you’ve probably bumped into Allie Brosh’s work. Bright, chaotic drawings paired with an almost unnerving ability to articulate what it feels like to be human. Her book Hyperbole and a Half is exactly that.

I can’t really classify this book. It is part memoir, part comic, part therapy session disguised as a cartoon. One moment you are smirking about a cake obsessed child version of Brosh staging a rebellion, and the next you are reading one of the most honest depictions of mental illness you have seen anywhere. It is that tonal whiplash of funny, then profound, then funny again that makes the whole thing work. Life is often like that. Brosh captures it.

Her illustrations are expressive in a way that sneaks up on you. A crude, wide-eyed drawing of despair communicates something that paragraphs may not. Its art and it works.

By the time you are done, you may notice something subtle the book encourages. It lets you laugh at yourself without being cruel, and it lets you take your own struggles seriously without feeling self important. Brosh’s honesty and humor sit side by side, and the result is a kind of gentle permission to see your flaws without judgment. For me, it was a reminder that everyone is dealing with something, everyone feels strange or broken or ridiculous at times, and that this is simply part of being human.

It’s the kind of book you finish in an afternoon, then think and smile about for weeks. And like the best books, it’s impossible to read without feeling a little more human afterward. I loved it. Maybe you will too. That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

Subscribe now

The first bite of a warm chocolate chip cookie. The smell of rain on concrete. Singing off-key at karaoke, a little too loud, with people you adore. They’re not big milestones. Just the little in-betweens that make life feel alright. That’s what this deck is about.

Each card has a doodle. Scrappy little sketches of things I’ve noticed, remembered, or stumbled across over the years. Most of them are objectively terrible drawings, but maybe they’ll make you smile. Or at the very least, make you feel better about your own drawing skills.

I’ve printed around hundred decks. Just something I wanted to put out into the world. If this resonates with you, and you’d like to buy one, you can fill this form, and I can get back to you.

As always, thank you for the support, and if you are a new subscriber, Sorry!! Something more investing related will be coming out soon.

Crazy, right ?

The narrative behind this surge is familiar by now. General uncertainty across the world, America’s widening fiscal deficit, and central banks steadily adding gold to their reserves may all have played a part.

Whatever the case, the returns over the year are remarkable. But before getting carried away by the headlines, it is worth remembering that gold’s journey has not always been this smooth or one directional.

From February 1, 1975 to October 1, 2025, the CAGR stands at 6.38% in USD terms. That is over nearly five decades. Respectable, no doubt, but it still does not tell us the full story.

Which is why it is always worth looking at rolling returns. I specifically focus on one-year, five-year, and ten-year holding periods. To calculate rolling returns, we look at how much an investor would have earned if they had bought gold at the start of any given month and sold it after one year, five years, or ten years. Doing this for every possible month over the past five decades gives a clearer picture of how often gold has actually made or lost money over different time horizons.

Between 1975 and 2025, if you invested in gold on the first day of any random month and held it for one year, the odds of losing money were around 41%. That probability falls to 33% if you invested for 5 years and 27% over ten years.

I then examine the 25th to 75th percentile of the rolling returns across the same three time periods. This range captures the middle half of all outcomes, showing us what a typical experience for investors has looked like, without being skewed by extreme highs or lows.

Three things stand out to me in that chart.

• The range of outcomes narrows as the investment period lengthens. This is common and seen in equities as well. Longer holding periods tend to smooth out short-term volatility.

• In the last fifty years, you could have invested in gold for a decade and still see no return in dollar terms. This is not an outlier. In fact, it falls around the 25th percentile when we look at gold’s performance over the last fifty years, which is quite sobering. You could argue that we live in different times and this may not repeat, but the data is there for everyone to see.

• The median gold return is consistently lower than the long-term CAGR of around 6 percent. This suggests that gold’s return distribution is skewed, with a few strong periods pulling up the average while the typical experience has been more modest. The chart below demonstrates the same.

I belong to the Aswath Damodaran school of thought, where if an asset cannot generate cash flows, it's hard to value. So, I don’t know what gold is worth, and I won’t pretend to know what it could be worth.

But if the question is whether gold deserves a place in a portfolio, I do have a personal view on that. Yes it does. Certainly for me.

Gold is an asset that is easy to buy and has consistently shown low correlation with equities, which is always handy when building a portfolio. Its long-term returns aren’t bad, and the fact that it tends to hold up well during uncertain periods is an added bonus.

Having said all that we shouldn’t ignore the fact that it can go through long periods of underperformance. Will I bet the kitchen sink on gold? Absolutely not. Will it be a small part of my portfolio? Yes. Should you buy gold now? No clue. I’m not an expert and have no idea what lies ahead.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, and want to support the page, consider exploring the Value Tortoise Investment Journal. Its a resource designed to minimize biases while investing.

Subscribe now

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These views are personal and should not be construed as recommendations or guidance for any investment decisions. I have made every effort to ensure that the data and calculations presented are accurate, but errors may occur and past performance is not indicative of future results. Readers should do their own research and consult a professional before making any investment decisions.

Cover image taken from Unsplash

Why time felt slower when we were kids
Yana Yuhai blends some neuroscience, internet culture, and a quiet kind of philosophy to explain how time hasn’t sped up, we’ve just stopped noticing stuff.

mindbox

why time felt slower when we were kids (and how to get it back)

I’ve been noticing a trend on social media, nostalgiacore. Hazy, sun-drenched photos of childhood bedrooms, the glow of a boxy TV playing Cartoon Network, the pixelated interface of an old computer game. There’s always ambient music humming softly in the background, something melancholic (like a lo-fi remix of a Nintendo soundtrack…

Read more

a year ago · 39779 likes · 355 comments · yana yuhai

Delhi, BJP and India in 2050
What happens to Indian politics twenty-five years from now? Siddharth (a dear friend, so yes, I’m biased) takes a smart, speculative look ahead. From a possible Green Party to a libertarian revival to an even more hardline right. Thoughtful, sharp, and genuinely fun/scary to imagine.

Local Hero

Delhi, BJP and India in 2050

I have recently been thinking a lot about the future of Indian politics after AAP’s defeat in Delhi. Here are three questions: Has Modi’s BJP fundamentally changed the terms of electoral politics? Would it be wiser for opposition parties to move closer to or further away from the BJP model? What might Indian parties look like in 2050…

Read more

a year ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Siddharth Khare

An Existential guide to Making Friends
This article blends humor, brutal honesty, and a kind of tender philosophy to guide us on friendship. Wild, funny, and strangely comforting. Its probably the best thing I’ve read this year.

The Shadowed Archive

An Existential Guide to: Making Friends

The first thing you need to know is that friendship is not natural. If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn’t have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse. But you, unfortunately, are not a moss. You are a person, and…

Read more

7 months ago · 5790 likes · 378 comments · The Shadowed Archive

The Bhagavad Gita: Explained

I’m no expert, so finding an article that you can read in under fifteen minutes and still come away with real, practical wisdom feels like a small marvel.

The Itihāsa Imprint

The Bhagavad Gita: Explained

XXXX BCE, Kurukshetra, India…

Read more

9 months ago · 193 likes · 20 comments · Cultural Chronicler

Youth

A stunning piece on ageing, ambition, and the quiet heartbreak of losing your “youth capital.” It starts with a timeline of literary prodigies and ends in that tender space where acceptance meets nostalgia.

Tolstoyan

YOUTH

When he was in his early-20s, he hung a timeline above his desk. He had drawn it himself, meticulously, with a ruler and professional illustration pen. It spanned from 18 to 30, and he glue-sticked little pictures of his favorite authors next to the age at which they’d published their first novels. At 21, Bret Easton Ellis…

Read more

a year ago · 1628 likes · 178 comments · Jared Young

Why Warm countries are poorer

A data-rich exploration of why societies closer to the equator tend to be poorer. Tomas Pueyo moves from temperature and disease to mountains and trade, making a surprisingly elegant case for how geography shapes prosperity. Of course, you want to be careful about causation, and you may not agree with it all, but it is deeply thought provoking.

Uncharted Territories

Why Warm Countries Are Poorer

Today I bring you what I think is a ground-breaking article. I have never seen this theory anywhere. I hope you find it as exciting as I do…

Read more

7 months ago · 2058 likes · 370 comments · Tomas Pueyo

The epidemic of constant communication

Amanda Brown examines how the constant availability demanded by today’s technology can overwhelm relationships, and why trust and space often matter more than instant responses or perpetual proof.

good riddance

The epidemic of constant communication

I went to my first college party in September 2023–an apartment crowded with bodies and laughter, the air thick with the faint smell of sweet perfume and sweat. There was a table of Jell-O shots, vodka, and mixers. Music throbbed through the walls, bass-heavy, a blend of 2010s nostalgia and rap songs that made the floor rumble. My roommate and I sank in…

Read more

a year ago · 49300 likes · 699 comments · Amanda Brown

Oh and if we were interested in the investing/finance world I enjoyed reading Mauboussins note on drawdowns. Its always good to go through the Indus Valley annual report. I also came across a lengthy note on The Evolution of Alpha. It’s especially interesting if you’re curious about how investment decision-making itself is changing, not just which stock to pick. When it comes to news publications, I’ve found the Financial Times to be consistently strong, particularly compared to many other finance publications.

Rereading these pieces has been such a joy. It’s humbling to be reminded of how powerful good writing can be, how a few well-placed words can quietly rearrange something inside you. So here’s to good writing.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading. Take care.

Cover image taken from Unsplash

In the old days (like a few months ago), I’d start with the big heavy DRHP. Now? My work begins at on the door of an LLM. (Gemini, in this case)

I’ve been messing around with prompts, and I think I’ve stumbled on something pretty useful. You can have different prompts for different purposes, such as analyzing financials, exploring how the industry has evolved, or zooming in on specific competitive advantages.

The prompt I’m sharing below is meant to help better understand the business. It is not a substitute for the real documents, but it’s a great way to get an overview and build context before diving into the details.

You are an equity research analyst in India. Analyze the company [Company Name] using only credible sources such as annual reports, investor presentations, DRHPs, earnings call transcripts, reputable equity research, Screener.in, Trendlyne, and other industry reports. If information is not explicitly available, mark it as inferred.

Follow the structure as mentioned below.

1. Basics

Explain how the company makes money in very simple, child-level terms. Include its founding story, who started the company, when, and why, and describe how the business has evolved over time.

2. Products and Services

Describe the company’s products or services in detail, and explain how they are made or delivered. Highlight the key raw materials or inputs, how exposed they are to commodity cycles, and whether volatility in these inputs poses a risk to margins. For services businesses, focus on key operational costs (e.g., employee expenses in IT services).

3. Supply and Cost Structure

Explain the supply chain and key suppliers, noting dependencies and bargaining power. Discuss the overall cost structure—what portion is fixed versus variable—and assess whether the business is capital-intensive. Also describe the level of debt and leverage risk.

4. Customers, Pricing, and Revenue Model

Explain who the company’s core customers are and whether demand is concentrated or diversified. Discuss whether the product or service is a must-have, who makes the purchasing decision, and whether switching costs exist. Then describe the company’s pricing strategy (premium, competitive, regulated, cost-plus), its revenue mix (domestic vs exports, product vs services), and clarify whether revenues are one-time, recurring, or seasonal.

5. Porter’s Five Forces

Apply Porter’s framework specifically to this company’s industry, keeping the analysis brief (two to three sentences per force):

• Barriers to entry

• Bargaining power of suppliers

• Bargaining power of customers

• Threat of substitutes

• Intensity of rivalry

6. Moat

Discuss whether the company enjoys sustainable competitive advantages such as brand, scale, technology, regulation, or network effects. Comment on whether it possesses pricing power.

7. Management and Ownership

Provide a short background on the founder and current management team, including whether the founder is still running the business. Summarize promoter holding levels and highlight any governance issues or legal cases linked to management.

8. Growth Drivers and Risks

Explain the key drivers of growth—such as pricing power, volume expansion, new products, entry into new geographies, or acquisitions. Then outline the main risks the company faces—whether business, operational, regulatory, cyclical, or technological disruption.

9. One-Sentence Summary and conclusion

Wrap up your research by writing a one-sentence summary of what the company really does and how it makes money. Follow that with a very short overview of its strengths, weaknesses, biggest risks, and growth drivers.

Finally, end with an investor takeaway paragraph that projects where the company could realistically be in ten years. You can have multiple paths here. Keep it balanced and objective—less “hot tip,” more “clear picture” for an investor deciding whether the business belongs on their radar.

Give me the report where you : -

• Use clear section headers for each part

• Cite sources where possible.

• Flag assumptions as “inferred” if not directly stated

Of course, mercilessly edit the prompt and shape it to your own investing process. But seriously, try it out on Gemini with deep research. Just keep in mind that AI can be wrong, which is why I do not put much weight on the numbers, the analysis, or the conclusions it generates. I use it mainly to understand the business, its context, and the big picture rather than as a source of hard data.

And if you are looking for a solid investment checklist to integrate into a prompt, a great place to start is The Investment Checklist by Michael Shearn. You could also check out the Value Tortoise Investment Journal, which I put together to help structure the process.

Subscribe now

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Please do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

Cover image taken from Unsplash