For many years, for sheer consistency of operations, there was nobody to beat Hindustan Unilever (HUL). Over a decade through riots, drought, flood, plagues, falling governments, foreign exchange crisis and Southeast Asian panic, investment in HUL gave great returns. But economies change, competitive landscape changes and companies have to change too. But HUL hasn’t and that is obvious now....

If you want to splice together a couple of surveys from The Economist and extend it to make a 336-page book on a cutting-edge issue like “the global race to fuel the car of the future”, you have a problem. You need to find another 300 pages from elsewhere. Well, that’s one reason you come across the following sentence in this book: “The Parsees are a Zoroastrian sect, originally from Persia,...

Mutual funds are the best way to invest in the market, say the fund industry and many financial planners because they perform well over time. How do we know? Most fund analysis is selective and is articulated as “If you had invested in XYZ fund, your return would have been…” This kind of logic is enriched with hindsight and does not explain why you would have bought XYZ fund and not ABC which...