How one balance-sheet line — Goodwill on Consolidation — reveals whether Indian companies grew their earnings organically or simply purchased them at a premium. A forensic FY25 walkthrough with an organically-built reference set, including Ind AS 36 impairment-test signals and four common traps.
Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) measures how long a company takes to pay suppliers. Rising DPO can mean franchise-level negotiating power – or hidden liquidity distress. Here is how to tell which, with an FY25 Indian biotech illustration.
SEBI’s most recent investor-protection study found that nearly nine out of ten individual traders in the equity Futures & Options segment lost money in FY24 — a body of evidence that has shifted the regulator’s focus toward investor education on
Between 2019 and 2025, India added approximately 8 crore demat accounts. NSE’s investor base alone expanded from 3 crore to over 11 crore in that window. Yet in February 2025 SEBI re-published the now-infamous finding that 93% of individual traders
The Securities and Exchange Board of India reported that approximately 93% of individual traders in the equity Futures & Options segment incurred net losses, with aggregate losses crossing ₹1.81 lakh crore in recent fiscal years. While retail India chases the
Every Indian retail investor knows the headline risk — a company runs out of cash and the stock collapses. What very few investors know is that a single ratio, often missing from broker reports and CNBC tickers, tells you precisely
India crossed 11 crore unique demat accounts in 2025 — almost a 4x jump from the 3 crore investor base we had as recently as January 2020. Yet the SEBI study on individual F&O traders is unforgiving: nine out of
India’s investing universe has exploded from 3 crore unique investors in 2020 to over 11 crore in 2026. Most of these new investors learn to read a P&L and a balance sheet. Almost none of them learn to read the
Educational reading for serious Indian long-term investors. This is not investment advice and contains no buy / sell / hold call on any company named below. If you had to name the single behavioural bias that quietly destroys the most
Indian retail participation on the NSE has expanded from roughly 3 crore unique investors in 2019 to more than 11 crore in 2026 — a 3.6x explosion in less than seven years. Yet a SEBI study has repeatedly shown that
In January 1972, Warren Buffett wrote a cheque for $25 million to buy a chocolate company. Charlie Munger had to drag him to that decision. Berkshire Hathaway’s books had never seen a price like it for a business with only
In 2011, three behavioural economists at Harvard Business School and Duke University — Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely — conducted a series of laboratory experiments in which participants either folded an IKEA storage box themselves or evaluated
Table of Contents Toggle The Hidden Margin Lever No One Talks About What Exactly is the Employee Cost-to-Revenue Ratio? How to Read the Number Why This Ratio Reveals Operating Leverage The Formula in Practice — A Worked Example Titan Biotech
Almost every investor I meet is obsessed with one half of the economic equation: demand. Demand for cement, demand for chips, demand for credit, demand for chemicals. They build elaborate forecasts about how India’s GDP will compound and how each
Table of Contents Toggle Choice Overload — The Bias That Quietly Paralyses Indian Retail Investors The Underlying Psychology — Why Too Many Choices Demotivate The Indian Manifestation — Four Pieces of Local Evidence The Counter-Measure Checklist — Four Disciplines for