Side Notes by Zerodha Varsity

Salomon Brothers was one of the largest investment banks in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. It was the first bank to sell mortgage-backed securities. The head of the government bond trading desk at Sa…

Bernie Madoff ran an investment management firm that was not open to all - it was an invite-only club. That is what made it aspirational. Many investors saw it as a sign of status if they got to inve…

Seven women from a housing society in South Mumbai started Lijjat Papad in 1959. It started as a co-operative and has since onboarded more than 45,000 member sisters. Interestingly, Lijjat also runs …

Nick Leeson was a young trader at Barings Bank who was tasked with setting up a trading desk in Singapore. He was an aggressive risk-taker who told small, harmless lies that soon became big enough to…

A company usually creates reserves from share premiums and retained earnings. However, not all reserves are liquid. Companies use reserves for various purposes. If not used well, excessive reserves h…

Ryanair offers extremely cheap flight tickets in Europe. They sell most tickets for £15 or less, which is roughly ₹1600. You hardly ever find those fares, even in India. Indigo is said to have emulat…

Crazy Eddie was an electronics retailer in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. It was very famous for its catchy TV commercials but soon became infamous for the scams by its founders. This is a crazy ta…

Jio Financial Services was spun off from Reliance Industries. Reliance is a part of the Nifty 50 index. Does that make JFS a de facto member of the index? JFS became part of the index for 13 days. Wh…

Warren Buffett called airlines a cursed sector. Kingfisher, Jet Airways, and Go Air in India, and many other airlines worldwide, have gone out of business. Even Indigo, India's most successful airlin…

A Kolkata-based group of brokers, often called the bear cartel, was shorting Reliance stock. As the stock was getting hammered, Mr. Dhirubhai Ambani apparently sought help from a group of NRIs to ste…

Hong Kong's central bank does not print its currency. Instead, three private banks are entrusted to print Hong Kong Dollars. This arrangement is as good as handing over the monetary policy to private…

The Harshad Mehta scam of 1992 exposed massive loopholes in India’s banking and stock market systems, leading to a series of crucial financial reforms. Faster adoption of digital banking and demateri…

A SEBI rule in 2019 mandated mutual funds to change how they benchmarked their performance to an index. An understanding of price return (PR) and total return (TR) indices explains how the reported o…