Pranami Hayaran

retail investors, aspiring equity analysts, business & market/macro nerds thanks me later groundamentals.com

literally everyone understands this

not sure about daily protein goal but my daily caffeine goal is never missed

zero marketing btw @groundamentals

have talked to Claude Code more than all the men combined till date

today’s win is not tweeting when claude was down

is it worth losing today’s sleep to read $ANT IPO papers if i slept for 8h last night

brewed up insights #154 Union Bank puts ₹337 crore into SUD Life after solvency fell on 12 November 2026, Union Bank of India said it had put another ₹336.51 crore into Star Union Dai-ichi Life (SUD Life), lifting its stake from 25.10% to 26.24%. a bank buying more of an insurer it likes? not quite. the money seems to be mostly capital, and the bigger stake a side effect. SUD Life sells life and savings policies, mostly through bank branches: they brought in 85.8% of its new individual premium in FY26. Dai-ichi Life of Japan, Bank of India and Union Bank own it. the regulator, IRDAI, wants an insurer's spare capital to be at least 1.5x a set minimum, a multiple called the solvency ratio. that cushion got thinner. ICRA, which rates SUD Life's bonds, says the ratio fell from 2.30x to 1.67x in the year to March 2026. fast growth used up capital, and contracts locking in bond yields for fixed-return policies lost value when yields rose in March. without that loss it would have been 1.90x. the loss reversed in April to June, but profit fell from ₹82 crore to ₹32 crore in FY26, and SUD Life planned a capital raise for FY27. so why did the stake move? if every owner pays in line with its stake, nobody's share changes. Union Bank's rose 1.14 points, so it paid more than its share and someone paid less. in FY25, Bank of India sat out a ₹550 crore raise and its stake slipped from 28.96% to 27.48%. the filing does not say who else paid this time. Union Bank's cheque is 10.5x SUD Life's FY26 profit, and it takes the bank back above the 26% it held in 2009. it pays for capital that an insurer selling through its branches needs, and buys a slightly bigger share of a shrinking profit.

brewed up insights #153 Fusion CX buys Germany's impacx for €2 million, more if profit is high Fusion CX's UK arm agreed on 12 November 2026 to buy 3 German call-centre companies, run together under the name impacx, for €2 million in cash, its stock exchange filing says. they had €11.81 million of sales in 2025. so Fusion pays about 17 cents for each euro the business brings in a year. that looks cheap, and there is a reason: a call centre keeps very little of what it bills. Fusion CX, a listed Kolkata company, answers calls, emails and chats for other companies' customers. its biggest cost is the people who do that work. wages and staff benefits took 67% of its revenue from April to December 2024, says the draft prospectus it filed before its share sale. impacx does the same work in Germany for a few large clients. only part of the price is fixed. the rest depends on impacx's profit in 2026, measured as EBITDA: profit before interest, tax and the yearly write-down of equipment and other assets. for every euro of that profit above €538,000, the sellers get €6.67 more, up to €1.2 million. a price that depends on later results like this is called an earn-out. Fusion has used one tied to profit before, when another of its companies bought Ready Call Center in 2024. the extra payment reaches its limit when 2026 profit hits €718,000. Fusion would then pay €3.2 million in all, or 4.5 times that year's profit. the fixed part can still change after the deal closes, once impacx's cash, debts and the money tied up in day-to-day running are counted. the filing gives no profit figure for impacx, but the bar it sets is low. the starting point is 4.6% of 2025 sales, and the profit that unlocks the full price is 6.1%. Fusion's own profit on the same measure was 14.44% of its revenue from April to December 2024. so the price is low against sales because there is little profit in those sales. even the full price asks impacx for a profit rate well under half of Fusion's own.

typing in all caps on Claude Code to reinforce the power dynamic

if someone is this competent, ousting him based on his personal rigmarole is just unfair to the business

another day on LinkedIn seeing someone post a useless Claude skills file

brewed up insights #152 Oil India's Q2 FY27 profit doubled; its refinery's barely moved Oil India's own profit more than doubled in July to September 2026 (Q2 FY27), up 116% to ₹2,259 crore, says its press release of 12 November, whose headline credits 20% more crude oil. so it simply pumped more? partly. its oil also sold for $92.24 a barrel against $68.19 a year earlier, a bigger rise than in barrels, so the price did more of the work. Oil India pumps crude and gas from old fields, mostly in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, and owns 69.63% of Numaligarh Refinery, which turns crude into fuel. a refinery earns the gap between what its fuel sells for and what its crude costs, not the crude price itself. the group's profit, which counts the refinery, rose 53%. its crude oil business earned 2.7x a year ago's profit before interest and tax. the refinery's barely moved: ₹862 crore against ₹839 crore. and the refinery is past its best quarter. it made ₹1,640 crore in April to June, so July to September almost halved it. on the August results call, Oil India put Numaligarh's April to June refining margin, what it earns on each barrel, at $35.95. for April to September it was $28.24, so July to September's was well below that. so the parent's jump is mostly the oil price at work in its own fields, with more barrels on top. the refinery, the group's other big earner, added almost nothing to this quarter's growth, and the margin that carried it in April to June has already faded.

brewed up insights #151 Phoenix's malls have paid 89% of a Canadian fund's exit so far the Phoenix Mills, which builds and runs shopping malls, now owns 68.10% of Island Star Mall Developers, up from 58.33%. Island Star is the company that owns 4 of its malls. so Phoenix is buying out its partner? yes, but most of the money is not coming from Phoenix. the partner is CPP Investments, the fund that invests the money of the Canada Pension Plan. Island Star used to be split 51% Phoenix and 49% CPP. in July 2025 Phoenix agreed to buy CPP's part for ₹5,449 crore, in 4 payments over 3 years. the agreement lets the money come from Phoenix, from Island Star, or both. Island Star can pay by buying CPP's shares back, or by cancelling them, which needs a court's approval. either way CPP's shares disappear, and Phoenix owns a bigger part of what is left without paying for it. that is what happened on 12 November, when Island Star paid CPP ₹1,350 crore and cancelled part of its shares. so far CPP has received ₹2,521 crore. Phoenix paid ₹276 crore of it, for shares it bought from CPP in November 2025. the other 89% came from Island Star: ₹895 crore for a buyback in November 2025, and this latest payment. that money was not free for Phoenix. it was Island Star's cash, and Phoenix owned more than half of Island Star. Phoenix also said in July 2025 that Island Star would pay for the buyout from its spare cash, its earnings and new borrowing. the loans at Island Star and its 3 mall companies, before counting the cash they hold, rose from ₹959 crore in June 2025 to ₹1,778 crore in September 2026, before the latest payment. the filings do not say how much of that went to CPP and how much to new offices and hotels at the malls. the latest payment alone is 2.6x the roughly ₹513 crore of cash these malls made in FY25 (the year to March 2025) after tax and interest, by Phoenix's own estimate. so Phoenix is on its way to owning these malls outright without writing a big cheque. the bill sits inside Island Star instead: cash that was more than half Phoenix's, and more debt on malls Phoenix will soon own alone.

when you consume so much financial information that canada pension plan becomes consumer price index in your brain

brewed up insights #150 2 little-known firms registered 27% of September's foreign loans the RBI's table of foreign loans Indian companies registered in September adds up to $7.05bn, 13.3% less than August's $8.13bn. so companies borrowed a little less abroad? far less, in fact: 2 names few investors know make up 27% of September. Mangang Constructions, a private civil engineering firm, registered $1.0bn for 24 years. Danube Industries, a small Ahmedabad trader listed on BSE, registered $921mn for 20 years. both say general corporate purpose, and the RBI names neither lender. take the 2 out and September fell 37% from August. note what the table counts: loans given an RBI registration number in the month. that is borrowing lined up, not dollars that have arrived. Danube's own filings make its loan hard to place. it trades IT hardware and electronics, earned ₹115 crore of revenue in FY26 and had ₹98 crore of total assets on 30 September. the only foreign money its filings mention is a $50mn investment Fox Petroleum Group proposed in June; the loan is 18.4x that. and in November its auditor noted it has been "irregular in depositing statutory dues". so September's slowdown was much deeper than the headline, and over a quarter of the total rests on 2 long loans from unnamed lenders, 1 of them to a trader far smaller than its loan.

brewed up insights #149 A ₹462 crore one-off widened Vodafone Idea's loss; the business held steady Vodafone Idea's loss for July to September 2026 grew to ₹5,975 crore, from ₹5,524 crore a year earlier, its results show. the rise comes from 1 item: a ₹462 crore loss on Vi shares that Vodafone Group set aside to pay a debt it owes the company. companies report items like this, outside the normal business, separately as one-off items. leave them out and the loss shrank a little, to ₹5,513 crore from ₹5,562 crore. Vodafone Idea (Vi) sells mobile calls and data in India. it now earns more from each customer: ₹198 a month on average, against ₹180 a year earlier, which its report puts down to customers moving to better plans. Vodafone Group owned Vodafone India before it merged with Idea Cellular in 2018, and it still owns part of Vi. Vodafone Group owes Vi money because, at the merger, it promised to pay some old tax, legal and regulatory bills from before the merger if they arrived later. on 31 December 2025 the 2 sides settled what was left at ₹5,836 crore. Vodafone Group would pay ₹2,307 crore in cash over the next 12 months. for the rest, it set aside 328 crore Vi shares it owns, for 5 years. Vi can have them sold when it chooses, and the money goes to Vi. so Vi does not get a fixed sum from those shares. it gets whatever they sell for. each quarter it counts them at the market price, less selling costs, and books any change in their value as a one-off gain or loss. from April to June their value rose to ₹4,435 crore, a ₹1,816 crore gain. from July to September it fell to ₹3,972 crore, the ₹462 crore loss. so Vi's reported result now moves with its own share price. when the market thinks less of Vi, the shares set aside for it are worth less and Vi reports a bigger loss, even though the phone business underneath barely changed this quarter.

second order effects