Case studies

The mirror image of the Airtel story. Airtel grew for a decade and its stock went nowhere. BSE, one of the oldest companies in the country, roughly 13-folded in three years. The difference is the single idea these two case studies teach from opposite ends: a stock follows pricing power and cash economics, not size or age.

A collapse that looked like an auto-cycle story but was really a capital-allocation story. Understand the fall in detail and you understand exactly why today's Mahindra is a different company.

A company worth over ₹60,000 crore whose shares cost about ₹48 each looks like a puzzle, and the answer is the saddest lesson in investing: a business can recover completely while its original owners are quietly wiped out. The weapon that did it was not debt or competition. It was the slow printing of new shares.

The mirror image of the Mahindra story. Airtel's business grew for over a decade while its stock went almost nowhere. The reason is the single most important idea in investing: a growing business is not the same as a rewarding stock.