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Today’s unlocked story is Zara taught Zudio how to outdo Zara : Trent-owned Zudio has used the Spanish fast-fashion giant’s playbook to reach such great heights that it makes Zara look quite ordinary
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I remember investment gurus’ oracular statements a year ago that sanity had to return to India’s overheated capital markets in 2025.
But the Nifty 50 rose as much in 2025 as it had in 2024, by 9%. Funds raised through IPOs totalled Rs 1.8 lakh crore, similar to the previous year. Indian stocks, already among the most expensive in the world, have only become more so.
The Ken is not in the business of spotting potential multibaggers or trainwrecks. Instead, we ask questions that few others do, and hold up a mirror to companies, investors, and everyone in between. And we did that consistently in 2025.
Zomato, Firstcry, and others love this ‘magical’ number. You should hate it
This was a meticulous takedown of “adjusted Ebitda”, a metric that makes tech companies’ bottom line look far rosier than it actually is.
“Adjusted Ebitda exemplifies what dyed-in-the-wool accountants have known for eternity,” my colleague Anand wrote. “That they can, if they want, weave numbers and profits out of thin air. Accounting is the art of the possible. If cash is reality, adjusted Ebitda is magic reality.”
The sleight of hand in Physicswallah, Groww’s profits
A fitting companion piece to the first story, Anand’s sharp analysis laid bare what mainstream news outlets missed: that adjustments, one-offs, and other income often dress up IPO-bound startups’ financials.
The Jane Street bug in Nuvama’s money machine
Not only were we the first to blow the lid off trading giant Jane Street’s hold over India’s options market, but we also looked at the second- and third-order effects of Sebi’s crackdown.
A quarter of Nuvama Wealth’s revenue and a third of its profits before tax come from holding assets and executing trades for institutional investors, and Jane Street was one of its largest clients. Aakriti’s story is the best you will find on a firm most people ignored in the Jane Street saga.
Siddharth Bhaiya’s Aequitas is a fund for the ultra-rich that can win by not playing
“Buying is scientific. Selling is an art,” Siddharth Bhaiya, MD and CIO of Aequitas Investments, told Nuha. “While selling, you’re looking at signals—mania in the market, what the management is doing. Our mantra is to do as the promoters do.”
What did it take for Aequitas, a portfolio-management-service firm, to say no to investors when its peers were courting them?
Angry about your mutual fund investing in overvalued IPOs? Calm down
When Lenskart went public, there was no shortage of asinine, moralistic Linkedin posts slamming mutual funds for being anchor investors in the IPO.
With extensive data, Anand made the case that even mutual funds that invested in public issues of companies whose shares subsequently headed south outperformed their benchmarks.
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