Arvind's Newsletter

1.Indian stocks that were among the biggest winners last year are seeing a poor start to 2025: Bloomberg

Investors dial up scrutiny of whether reported earnings warrant the market’s lofty valuations. New-age technology favourite Zomato, which more than doubled in 2024, has nosedived 20% since the start of the year with a push from disappointing results. Real estate star Oberoi Realty is down 23%, with losses accelerating after it missed profit expectations. The reversals come amid a broader selloff in Indian stocks.

Meanwhile, Rs 51,748 crore is the money foreign portfolio investors (FPI) have taken out of the Indian markets so far in January. This has affected India’s both the Nifty 50 and the Sensex. This is a continuation of the sell off that began in late 2024. One of the highest FPI outflows was seen in October with an offloading of Rs 94,017 crore of domestic stocks. Several factors such as a slowdown in India’s economic growth and lower Q3 earnings have impacted foreign investor sentiments. And it is unlikely to get better with the new Doland Trump government at the helm of America and a weakening rupee.

India is now among the least-favoured Asian stock markets, with 10% of fund managers underweight on Indian equities for 2025, according to BofA Securities. The survey, covering $513 billion in assets, attributed this sentiment to high food inflation, rising US bond yields, and a strong dollar. In contrast, Japan remains the top pick in Asia, with 53% of fund managers overweight, followed by Taiwan (20%). Analysts, including BNP Paribas, expect single-digit returns for Indian equities as broader APAC markets face muted economic sentiment.

2.World starts waking up to Indian coffee, exports cross $1 billion first time

Traditionally a tea exporter, India is making significant inroads into the global coffee export market with total exports during the current financial year up to November crossing the $1-billion mark for the first time, according to data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).

The sharp growth is partly attributed to a surge in Robusta coffee prices, which account for over 40 per cent of global production, and partly due to stocking ahead of the European Union’s new deforestation regulation that could raise the cost of coffee as well as several other agricultural exports to the EU.

India’s coffee exports rose to a record high of $1,146.9 million between April and November in FY24, compared to $803.8 million during the same period last year, registering a 29 per cent rise. This figure is nearly double the exports during the same period in FY21, which stood at $460 million.

3.Indian politicians are becoming obsessed with doling out cash: The Economist

Indian politicians have indeed turned to using handouts. Ahead of local elections in Delhi next month, promises of cash transfers for women (along with other freebies) have dominated campaigning. Transfers have become standard practice. In the past five years, alongside Delhi 11 states have implemented some sort of giveaway for women. Such schemes are sold as welfare-enhancing policies. But they are also powerful political tools. 

In some ways this is a welcome development. Elections contested over policies like cash transfers are undoubtedly better than those fought along caste or religious lines. Handouts are also cost-effective because the administrative expenses are small.  And cash itself is a good way to improve welfare. It not only boosts consumption, but it does so in a way that gives people a choice about how to spend their money (and, no, it is not splurged on booze). 

Yet cash transfers come with risks. Fiscal sustainability is a big concern. Governments in some states spend around 10% of their budgets on handouts. This means less money is available for other crucial things such as energy and health. 

Some political scientists argue that cash transfers can lead policymakers to neglect other responsibilities. Throwing money at citizens will do little to fix India’s underlying structural issues. After all, there is no point having money to spend on health care if the country’s hospitals are terrible. Nor do the amounts being doled out help create high-quality jobs. 

In many instances conditional cash transfers, linked to something specific such as school attendance, work better.

4.Investors’ interest in weight-loss drugs is waning: Financial Times

In a few short years, excitement about groundbreaking anti-obesity drugs made Novo Nordisk Europe’s most highly valued company and Eli Lilly the biggest pharma group in the world. Just as quickly, investors are losing their appetite for the trade.

After a disappointing trial of a new Novo Nordisk drug last month and lower-than-expected sales figures from Eli Lilly for two consecutive quarters, shares in both have come down from all-time highs.

Some investors are also unconvinced that the market will be worth the $100bn plus by the end of the decade that analysts predict. The result for now is that Novo Nordisk is no longer the most valuable company in Europe, and anti-obesity specialists have entered bear market territory. 

Sachin Jain from the Bank of America points to the growth potential of the market as one of the main unknowns that worries investors. There’s a “big debate”, he said. “Is [the market] $80bn across Novo and Lilly, or are we just having the wrong debate and the pie is a lot bigger? There’s a huge range, no one knows what it could be.”

5.Google’s Gemini is already winning the next-gen assistant wars: The Verge

One of the most important changes in Samsung’s new phones is a simple one: when you long-press the side button on your phone, instead of activating Samsung’s own Bixby assistant by default, you’ll get Google Gemini. 

The switch to Gemini is an even bigger deal for Google. Google was caught off guard a couple of years ago when ChatGPT launched but has caught up in a big way. According to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai now believes Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and he wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It might just get there one Samsung phone at a time.

Gemini is now a front-and-center feature on the world’s most popular Android phones, and millions upon millions of people will likely start to use it more — or use it at all — now that it’s so accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of every single one of its products, that brings a hugely important new set of users and interactions. All that data makes Gemini better, which makes it more useful, which makes it more popular. Which makes it better again.

6.Bipolar Disorder Decoded

An international team of researchers has pinpointed 36 genes linked to bipolar disorder in the largest study conducted to date on the biological mechanisms underlying the condition. The findings could potentially help doctors intervene early and better diagnose and treat individuals at risk. 

Bipolar disorder is largely genetic, with an estimated heritability of around 80%, meaning there is a significant genetic predisposition to developing the chronic mental health condition. The disorder is characterised by intense mood swings between manic and depressive episodes, which can alter a person's energy levels, behaviour, thinking patterns, and ability to function in daily life. Around 40 million to 50 million people worldwide experience bipolar disorder.

The findings also identified 298 genomic regions—specific locations in our DNA sequence—associated with bipolar disorder, of which 267 are newly discovered. Roughly 158,000 individuals with bipolar disorder and 2.8 million healthy individuals worldwide participated in the study.

7.Drugs made with the help of artificial intelligence will begin human trials this year, the CEO of Google DeepMind predicted in Davos.

Demis Hassabis, who also leads a drug discovery startup owned by Alphabet, said machine learning could speed up drug development — which typically takes five to 10 years — to a tenth of that time, potentially saving pharma company millions, The Register reported.

Hassabis, who won last year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry, envisioned using AI for “personalised medicine where it’s optimised… for your personal metabolism,” while acknowledging the limits of AI in science. The tech won’t fully replace researchers any time soon, he said, because AI isn’t capable of true invention or crafting new hypotheses.

8.The origins of Wokeness : Paul Graham

Wokeness refers to an extreme form of political correctness which has gripped the world at large and the west in particular. Whilst there isn’t anything wrong with political correctness by itself, it is the enforcement of that in turn curtailing freedom of speech is what the opponents of wokeness argue. One such opponent is Paul Graham, who in this long essay traces the origins of wokeness and ends with what should be done to ensure the sanctity of freedom of speech.

“There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it's social justice.

….Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.”

“Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.”

“In the early 2010s the embers of political correctness burst into flame anew. There were several differences between this new phase and the original one. It was more virulent. It spread further into the real world, although it still burned hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick.

The second phase was, in multiple senses, political correctness metastasized. Why did it happen when it did? My guess is that it was due to the rise of social media, particularly Tumblr and Twitter, because one of the most distinctive features of the second wave of political correctness was the cancel mob: a mob of angry people uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired. Indeed this second wave of political correctness was originally called "cancel culture"; it didn't start to be called "wokeness" till the 2020s.

Since then wokeness has been in gradual but continual retreat. Corporate CEOs, starting with Brian Armstrong, have openly rejected it. Universities, led by the University of Chicago and MIT, have explicitly confirmed their commitment to free speech. Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it. I'm not going to claim Trump's second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was more charismatic; but voters' disgust with wokeness must have helped.”

9.Scientists are under pressure to “publish or perish” in order to further their careers, undermining the scientific process. 

Nearly three-quarters of biomedical scientists recently surveyed said the “reproducibility crisis” — whereby many research findings don’t stand up to scrutiny — is real, with 62% citing the fact that their career depends on publishing research regularly as a key driver of the problem.

Many journals avoid publishing negative findings, and scientists are incentivised to find something, even when there might not actually be much there. Respondents also flagged cherry-picking data and small sample sizes as compounding the crisis. One 2016 study found that more than 70% of scientists had had trouble reproducing their peers’ work.

10.2025 Oscar Nominations: ‘Emilia Pérez’ Leads the Way With 13

“The Brutalist” and “Wicked” secured 10 nominations apiece in a year with a wide-open best picture race. Acting nominees include Demi Moore, Cynthia Erivo, Adrien Brody and Timothée Chalamet.