February was busy with dogfights
Introducing MYSTERY POSTS
I wrote about two dogfights in February
Here’s what I would’ve also wanted to write about but couldn’t because time is a limited resource
Byju’s US-entity (called Byju’s Alpha) which was taken over by its lenders filed for bankruptcy.
SEBI writes to the mutual fund industry asking them to protect investors from something called “market froth”.
ICICI Bank wants to delist ICICI Securities while paying its shareholders less than market price.
SEBI penalises stock market “guest experts” appearing on television for (sort of) running a pump and dump.
Why am I telling you about this? I’m not sure. Maybe so that you can add to this list if you’d like? (I beg you to comment on stuff here.) I’m currently able to do only about 2 posts a month1 so I’m always going to have to pick. Probably doing (3) and (4) in March unless something more interesting gets in the way.
A conundrum that anyone who writes about current events faces is: should one prioritise speed or quality? There is almost always a trade-off. Sometimes there is less information that’s out there because events are still unfolding. Other times the information is available but the perspective is not.2
And perspective is really what makes or breaks a story! For example, in the Byju’s story from earlier, I thought it hilarious that publications were reporting “Byju’s board approves its rights issue” when the board entirely consisted of the Byju family. What added to it was that the investors who had a problem with the rights issue had voluntarily given up their board positions. What were they expecting, really?
An interesting perspective is the glue which holds the facts of an episode together. Without the right perspective, the facts fall apart. That’s really all I try to bring to the table.
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Anyway, so what is this MYSTERY POSTS thing supposed to be? I’ll elaborate very soon.3
Cover Photo by cottonbro studio/Pexels
It takes me at least 20–25 hours across a few days to research, write, edit, rewrite, edit and sometimes rewrite again every post before it goes out. I think I can very well do 3 posts every month but sleep often gets in the way.
Of course, another reason is just lack of time. Sometimes a SEBI order comes out and I write about it more than 30 days after it’s published. But people still seem to like it? Does make me feel like a slowpoke though.
Yes this is intentionally self referential.
Quality over speed anyday.
There are 100s of short news, byte news, click-bait news, blatantly false news out there.
But well researched, quality content? Very few.
What you do is not common, it's a rare thing to get users or readers in this fast paced, notification based, short news world. Even rare is to get readers in finance. Rarest is to get them interested in the manner you do.
I, for example am from Engineering background and consumption of financial news always was a bit uncomfortable because of the technical jargon, boring presentation, not enough clarity and usually fake or scam promotions. Thus I dropped it all, but I read your pieces because they offer quality, they offer understanding of the topic, they are about the title and contains more information than the title (some outlets don't have either title or good info beyond the title).
In this modern world I'll try to compare it with YouTube world.
You'll see that actually good content creators (on topic, not click-bait, well researched, having knowledge of the field, and explaining things) put out videos once or twice in a month.
Whereas you'll find videos being uploaded daily from life vloggers, click baiters, TikTok shorts etc
And good creators who put up videos more frequently, they work with a team or organisation with 5-100 people to help them.
Point being, quality takes time, and that quality is reflected in your pieces.
No.3 pls...