What We're Reading #10

A summary of our readings this week: It's a wild, wild world.

May 02, 2026

Hi folks, hope you’ve had a great week!

Our team at Markets is always reading, often much more than what might be considered healthy. So, we thought it would be nice to have an outlet to put out what we’re reading that isn’t part of our normal cycle of content.

So we’ve started “What We’re Reading”, where every weekend, our team outlines the interesting articles — even books — that put our brains in seventh gear (if that even exists).

Today’s edition is, quite appropriately, all over the place. Apparently, Ajinomoto is a key player in the AI race now. And, of course, so is Apple, despite not building any foundational LLM of their own. India still has a long-term capital problem. And, turns out, we might finally be undergoing peak oil (which is weird to say given what’s happening in the world). There’s a lot.

We also host a book club every Saturday that we talk about at the end. If you’d like to read with us, please feel free to join!

We’d also love to know what has piqued your interest, too! Please feel free to let us know in the comments.

What Kashish is reading

Unlocking Patient Capital for Viksit Bharat (link)

This CRISIL report starts with a fairly simple idea that India needs a lot more long-term capital if it wants to grow meaningfully and the interesting part is where that capital already sits. A disproportionate share of managed money in India is with institutions like EPFO, NPS, and insurance companies, pools of capital that are, by design, patient.

And yet, that patience isn’t really showing up where it arguably should.

These institutions are structured around capital preservation, which naturally pushes them toward safer assets like government securities. That’s understandable. But what’s slightly puzzling is that even within their allowed universe, they don’t fully utilize opportunities like high-quality corporate bonds (think AA/AA+). These aren’t reckless bets but sit in a middle ground of meaningfully better yields than sovereign debt, without taking on equity-like risk.

To give you some numbers, only 2-3% of their debt investments are in AA or lower rated corporate bonds. So, I don’t have the numbers, but GPT told me the allocation numbers for foreign pools of patient capital is much higher.

So what you have is a bit of a missed opportunity on both sides.

On one hand, these large pools of capital are leaving returns on the table by staying overly conservative relative to what regulation actually permits. On the other, the corporate bond market — especially in that AA segment — remains shallow because it lacks consistent, long-term buyers.

That’s where the piece gets interesting, even if it doesn’t explicitly go there.

It quietly hints at a circular problem. Without demand from patient capital, market depth doesn’t improve. Without depth and liquidity, these institutions don’t feel comfortable stepping in. And so nothing really moves.

Which is why the most important takeaway here isn’t just the market sizing (which the report does well), but the potential trigger (my belief) that if even a fraction of this institutional capital starts moving slightly up the risk curve, it could set off a flywheel of better liquidity, more issuance, tighter spreads, and eventually a more functional corporate bond market.

It’s one of those pieces that answers a narrow question, but opens up a much larger rabbit hole.

What Pranav is reading

Ashwath Damodaran, To Trillion(s) and Beyond: A SpaceX IPO Odyssey! (link)

As finance-adjacent writers go, I think I’m amongst the least informed in the business. I would struggle to put a Rupee value to your neighbourhood kirana shop. My investment strategy is “mutual funds and move on“; and most shares I’ve purchased have generated negative returns. I’ve had exactly one good investment hunch in my life: which I overthought, became too insecure to act on, and then twiddled my thumbs until the markets caught up.

It never fails to blow my mind that there are people who can do a half-decent job of putting an actual, defensible value to a company that wants to create thinking robots and go to Mars.

It blows my mind even further that someone would choose to do so, and then simply put their analysis out for anyone to see — rather than hiding it behind a paywall that costs two weeks’ rent to access. But then again, we live in a reality where Prof. Damodaran exists.

This is a masterclass in making estimates in a state of absolute uncertainty, where one doesn’t even have a half-decent set of financials to fall back on. He’s quite forthcoming about how these are merely guesses that lack a hard anchor; which survive only if you keep updating them in the face of new information.

That doesn’t disqualify it. In fact, that’s probably the point. Finance is always fraught with uncertainty, even if you’re valuing something as boring as a sock manufacturing company. You fundamentally can’t guess what the future holds. Those numbers aren’t meant to give you certainty; they’re meant to give you perspective. They’re meant to set up scaffolding for the bets you take.

If you, like me, are frequently stumped by finance, it’s worth seeing the master at work.

Stratechery, Apple’s 50 Years of Integration (link)

Stratechery has a nice deep dive on Apple — its history, how it is adapting to the AI era, and how strong its moat continues to be amidst one of the deepest technological disruptions we have seen since, well, the smartphone.

The piece centres on the point of integration. Any tech product is a story of several very different systems coming together. Your computer is the coming together of hardware and software. A lot of the user’s experience depends on how seamlessly these layers come together. Apple’s dominance, Stratechery argues, comes from mastering integration. Its devices have always felt cohesive because of how perfectly they come together.

Apple’s AI question, then, is a question of how well AI integrates with everything else. At the moment, Apple owns the point of integration. It makes the devices; it is the chokepoint through which AI models reach customers, and that lets it dictate terms to AI labs.

Its challenge — perhaps not immediately, but maybe in the five or ten years — is what happens when the point of integration changes? What if the devices of the next era are those where AI systems are integrated deeply into the hardware, without a traditional “operating system” mediating the two?

At the moment, this seems less than likely. Then again, as Keynes said, “The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.”

Anirudh Kanisetti, Corruption was widely documented in medieval India (link)

Some things never change, huh?

Here’s a sentence that will surprise nobody: the Indian government is deeply corrupt. You might disagree on whether there’s corruption in a specific project, or under a particular politician. The broader point, though, is unassailable.

If you thought this was a reflection of our times, though, or that it was a symptom of this dark, impoverished crack in our otherwise glorious history, this might surprise you: Indian writers have been talking about corruption, and how to deal with it, for as long as we’ve had a written history.

Kanisetti paints a series of quick vignettes: the Arthashastra, and its sordid prescriptions on how to catch corruption; Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsam, which ends on Agnivarma, a descendant of the Lord Ram that neglects his work for pleasure; or this incredible line from the satirical Sanskrit play, Narma Mala:

“Victory to that lord supreme, that illustrious bureaucrat, infallible, who can at will delude the whole world with deceptions.”

Lovely piece.

What Manie is reading

Diego Parrilla and Daniel Lacalle, The Energy World is Flat — Opportunities from the End of Peak Oil (link)

Oh boy, it’s been one hell of a time for oil.

The UAE just quit OPEC, the coalition started (and led) by Saudi Arabia that would control the supply of oil. And this has happened in the middle of the crisis at the Strait of Hormuz. Sure, the UAE isn’t the biggest fish in the (Red) sea, but this could be a sign of many things. Chief among them is the idea (fact?) that OPEC’s pricing power over oil is not what it used to be.

This got me to pick up a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Diego Parrilla and Daniel Lacalle are investment professionals who worked primarily in energy markets. They wrote this book at a time when they saw that the world was awash with a commodity that, previously, wars were fought over. Earlier, I’d seen this cool video featuring one of the authors that explains their hypothesis.

But their belief was that this paradigm would no longer hold true. They predicted that the global oil market will, for the foreseeable future, be in a situation of excess oil supply. There may be fluctuations here and there, but oil overcapacity is now the new normal. It is the mean towards which all reversions will take. And it’s honestly a little wild saying this during the most acute oil shock since the 1970s, but there is a lot of strength in this idea.

Here’s a passage from the opening of their book, which addresses Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, and what it meant for the energy world:

“But not all countries reacted the same way. Fukushima did not change the position of France, which produces over 75% of its own energy needs from nuclear power. And it did not change the position of China either, which maintained its plans to build up to 70 new nuclear plants by 2020.

The nuclear world was polarized, but I was optimistic that common sense would prevail and that short-term knee-jerk reactions would give way to long-term constructive solutions and even safer power generation across the world.

There is, however, no doubt in my mind that Fukushima was a critical milestone towards the end of OPEC’s dominance.”

Since then, we’ve had an explosion in solar and wind energy, the birth of commercial EVs, the shale oil revolution in the US (and the discovery of new oilfields elsewhere), and so on. In that vein, the UAE’s historic decision to quit OPEC is, in my humble opinion, one among many incidents that has proven both authors right.

All of last year, on The Daily Brief, we covered this oil glut. Of course, since the book, there have been other incidents that only deflated oil prices further — like the Russia-Ukraine war. OPEC’s attempts to protect oil prices have only been in vain, as there were enough producers outside of the Gulf to take advantage of those higher prices and pump up supply.

In our story on the petrodollar, we talked about how oil exports, which are always executed in the US dollar, gradually stopped being a powerful prop for the dollar’s dominance. This, in my view, is also a huge affirmation of the thesis underlined by Parrilla and Lacalle.

I’ve just started reading the book, but it’s very fascinating, and highly timely for something written over 10 years ago. To see all that our team has written about it just fold together into this one moment is a little surreal, to be honest.

What Aakanksha is reading

The MSG company and the toilet maker are winning the AI race (link 1, link 2)

I’ve been thinking about how the AI story we keep telling ourselves has these set names that we think are winners, your NVIDIA, TSMC, OpenAI ( I am leaning towards Anthropic to be honest) and maybe add in a few data centre companies or power generation players (gotta keep them data centres running)

But then I read about how in Japan, very unlikely winners of the AI race are sprouting.

Ajinomoto, the seasoning company, has been sitting on what might be the most critical material in the entire AI supply chain, and nobody noticed for years.

You probably already know Ajinomoto makes MSG (the same thing because of which Maggie was banned), but it also makes a specialised insulating film used to form the substrate layers that link chips to devices, and without it, many of the world’s most advanced chips simply cannot be produced.

Every Nvidia GPU running your AI queries depends on this film, which was developed almost by accident as a spinoff of the company’s amino acid research.

And then there’s Toto, a ceramic toilet maker. Turns out their years of experience building ceramic toilets is now also helping them build precision ceramic components used inside semiconductor fabs, holding silicon wafers in place during processing steps that require extreme thermal stability and tolerances that most manufacturers can’t come close to matching.

Their shares are up nearly 40% this year, because the world finally looked up and noticed what was sitting right there.

Neither of these companies set out to be AI infrastructure. They just got very good at a specific materials problem, and then the world built something enormous that happened to depend on that exact problem being solved.

Every great technological wave throws up winners that nobody had on their bingo card. This time, the winners include a 117-year-old company that built its reputation on making food taste better, and another one that perfected the bathroom experience.

We have a book club!

This feels like a great segue to remind you of something that we’re pretty bad at advertising: our book club.

So here’s an image of our fairly-impressive book collection to attract you. Yes, they’re not just for show, and we do read them, alongside some coffee/tea and sandwiches.

The Markets book club has been running for nearly a year. We have some avowed loyalists who come almost every weekend and nerd about their readings with us. But really, it’s become a great spot for many of us to talk to each other - even forge new friendships - without being distracted by any screen. It’s this in-person community that we’re really proud of building.

So, we’d love for you to join us! We host the book club every Saturday, 10:30-1 pm, at the Ditto office in JP Nagar. Unfortunately, this location is fixed - we understand JP Nagar may be far for some. But this is the only place where we can host it smoothly. And we don’t host sessions online, either.

If you’d like to attend the book club, please keep the above in mind, and please reach out to: pranav.manie@zerodha.com!