January 2024 update:

India’s overall exports(merchandise and services combined) during Jan 2024 is estimated at USD 69.72 Billion, exhibiting positive growth 9.28% over Jan 2023.

Merchandise exports during Jan -24 is USD 36.92 Billion compared to USD 35.80 Billion in Jan-23 up by 3.12%.

Services sector export during Jan -24 is estimated at USD 32.80 Billion compared to 28.00 Billion USD during Jan-23.

Merchandise imports during Jan 24 is estimated at USD 54.41 billion compared to 52.83billion during Jan 23.

Overall trade deficit during April- Jan23 improved by 37.11% from USD 111.99 Billion to USD 70.43 Billion April-Jan 24.

Coffee exports increased by 7% compared to flat no”s during previous month.

Rice exports’ downtrend continues during Janaury month.

Marine products exports down by 13%.

Iron ore exports increased more than 100% for the month.

Ceramic products and glassware export turned negative during Janaury.

Pharma exports continue to grow 8% for Jan month and 12% so far in FY24.

Chemicals exports grow at 2%( positive growth after many months)

RMG of textiles remains negative.

zudio is pure hype, just look at their catalog – there is literally nothing in terms of designs or assortments. besides, world over, there is no moat in that ultra fast fashion market, today zudio, tomorrow there will be another story. zudio is like the worst of the fast fashion of the lot. temu, shein, etc. atleast have more assortment, what does zudio have? hype only.

page of course has to now show revenue growth, else derating will pickup, but on balance I do think they are well placed to scale up from these levels. Even in a real tough market, they actually have held up well vs. competition on growth and profitability and like the management keeps saying they dont want to play the discount clearance game, that is strategic. Page commands a premium for these reasons, but yes, growth now is imperative

Seriously? Blockchain tech has been around since the 80s, although the buzzword gained prominence only during crypto mania. There’s certainly merit in the tech, but it can move on by itself without Bitcoin.

Yes, encryption, chaining, merkle trees, etc have been there since the 80’s. Proof of Work was proposed by Adam Back, published in 2002, which has been referenced by Satoshi. Satoshi’s genius lies in putting all pieces together to create a decentralized, censorship resistant money. But Bitcoin needs a certain level of internet penetration, as well as improvements in network speed, storage, and computation. So even if somebody invented Bitcoin in the 80’s, a practical implementation would only be possible in the 2000’s. Its similar to how neural networks were proposed in 1975, but without all that data and computation power, the present ML applications would not be possible earlier.

Mixing money with tech only leads to perverted incentives, lack of innovation and stagnation.

Banning experimentation in the market, fixing price through decree instead of supply demand dynamics in the market is what leads to lack of innovation and stagnation. Development of human civilization to the current point was only possible through capitalism and at the core of capitalism is a common unit of account which is money. But if the value of money is given by fiat and not through market dynamics, then is it still capitalism? Ergo, free money is probably the greatest invention of all time.

I only see price rising. Where is the mania? Surely this thread won’t be so dead if there was a mania.

I am rooting for Bitcoin due to my libertarian views, but couldn’t build any meaningful allocation to bitcoin. Certain government remarks back in 2017-18 created a strong negative perception of Bitcoin in India. The result, as you can see, there is no reliable and trustworthy means of getting bitcoin exposure in India. The biggest exchanges like WazirX and Zebpay moved abroad, including founders, core employees, and their families. They can very easily run away with customer funds, As such, it is risky to do high value transactions with them. Same with peer to peer trading. I am waiting for perceptions to change and more clean and transparent means being available. No doubt change will come. We cannot afford to keep falling behind like this when the rest of the world is moving ahead. Hopefully this won’t be a repeat of history where the world moved to the gold standard while India, China remained stuck on the silver standard.

Recently I came to know how easy it has become to take exposure in US markets from India by using IndMoney. Apparently Microstrategy is also listed on it. Taking bitcoin exposure by buying a US stock through SEBI registered Bangalore based startup which is being used by many retail investors in India – it couldn’t get any cleaner than that and I don’t think there is any better way of building meaningful exposure. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about it a year earlier. Now the stock which used to trade at discount to its bitcoin holdings during bear market is trading at over 50% premium. So I plan to wait until the next bitcoin crash.