Is the dollar being debased right now, or is this simply a rates story that markets have relabelled with a scarier name? The honest answer, going purely by the data, is both, and the distinction matters more than the headlines suggest. What actually happened On August 19, the US Treasury announced it was at least…
Most retail investors think they are picking stocks. They are not. Three structural forces now decide most of the return, and almost nobody names them out loud. Force One: Your Money Is No Longer Yours To Direct Every month, more new savings go into index funds and ETFs than into actively managed funds. In the…
Four hundred and eighty-four companies into the Nifty 500’s Q1FY27 reporting season, the headline numbers look almost too good: revenue up 19.6 per cent, profit margins at 12.4 per cent excluding oil marketing companies, close to record levels. Read the small print, though, and a more interesting story emerges, one about how much of this…
Every Indian intellectual should read it. And the best way to counter the Left and the Anarchists is: “What are you building?” To criticize is the easiest thing. To build takes real work. The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century. The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and…
A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a steady value, almost always one US dollar. It works like a digital dollar that can move instantly across borders on a phone, backed by real assets such as cash and short-term US government bonds held by the issuer. What a stablecoin is and how the…
Greetings to the Orangenews9 Team and its readers. Responding to the Editor’s appeal, I chose to write about how India’s financial architecture has evolved during the last eighty years of Independence. The story of post-Independence India’s financial architecture is a remarkable chronicle of reinvention. Over nearly eight decades, the nation has moved from a rigid,…
In 1973, psychologist Paul Slovic ran an experiment on eight professional horse race handicappers that has become a fixture in behavioural finance research. The design was simple. The implications for anyone who equates more research with better decisions are not. The Setup Slovic worked with men who handicapped races for a living, not casual bettors….
Four weeks. That is all it took for the world’s best-performing stock market to become a bear market. In June 2026, the KOSPI crossed 9,300 for the first time in its history. South Korea had leapfrogged both India and the UK to become the sixth largest stock market on the planet. Then, within a month,…
There is a comforting assumption buried in most retail investing narratives: that the market is, at bottom, an intelligence test. Beat it with enough analysis, enough processing power, enough raw cognitive horsepower, and returns should follow. Three case studies, separated by three centuries, dismantle that assumption completely. Two involve certified geniuses. One involves the most…
The Ayyavole 500, also known as the Five Hundred Lords of Ayyavole, Ainnurruvar (Tamil), or Nanadesi, was a confederation of merchant guilds active in South India and across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal trade arc from roughly the 8th/9th century CE through the 15th century, a run of over 600 years. It was…
