Mind Over Markets by Zerodha Varsity
We uncover finance topics, make them insightful in unconventional and fun ways, and deliver them straight to your inbox.
- Top in Finance
- #50
- Followers
- 89K
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other newsletters
What they write about
Educational finance writing from an Indian brokerage's learning arm. Recurring subjects include how to research and discover stocks, India's GDP and economic statistics, foreign investor flows, taxation, personal decisions such as loan prepayment, and long-running debates about passive investing.
- financial education
- indian markets
- economics
- personal finance
- passive investing
- taxation
Recent examples: How Traders Find Stocks Worth Watching · Why isn't AI showing up in productivity? (Yet.)
Written from Mind Over Markets by Zerodha Varsity’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
67K on Sep 10, 2026 → 74K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #50 today · #48 a week ago · #48 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 61 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 10%
- Best rank seen
- #45
- Rank, 7 days
- −2 places
- Rank, 30 days
- −2 places
- Followers added
- +8.8K
- Posts
- 11
- Reactions per post
- 110
- Reactions tracked
- 3.8K
- Tickers covered
- 1
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Nov 3, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 35 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: Managing money in your 20s — 248 reactions on Sep 19, 2026.
Recent posts
- How Traders Find Stocks Worth Watching
An earlier edition of Delta explored different ways to discover stocks beyond familiar names like Reliance, TCS, and HDFC Bank. From companies appearing in the news to IPOs, sectors, and mutual fund portfolios, there are plenty of ways to come across unfamiliar businesses. But discovering stocks is only the beginning. With thousands of listed companies, finding stocks that match a particular trading idea can be difficult. Think about ordering dinner on Swiggy. There are hundreds of restaurants to choose from, but going through every menu would take forever. Instead, selecting South Indian…
- Why isn't AI showing up in productivity? (Yet.)
In 1987, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow wrote: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Computers were on every desk. Offices were buying them by the truckload. And yet, when economists looked at the numbers, output per worker in America was barely budging. It was the Solow Paradox. Here is one chart that captures this, from the post-World War II period to when Solow made that remark. It compares the trend in labour productivity growth to the overall capital share of IT equipment and intellectual property products (IPP). Source: Richmond…
- The other side of no-cost EMI
“What did you buy during Big Billion Days?” “Are those discounts even real?” These are probably some of the most common conversations during the festive sale season, whether it’s Big Billion Days or the Great Indian Festival. As much as you can find some really good deals, it’s equally true that prices are sometimes artificially inflated to make discounts look much bigger than they really are. Of course, these sales also tempt us to buy things we never intended to buy. That’s a different story. But what’s hard to ignore is the scale of these sales. According to Redseer , shoppers placed…
- How to backtest your own trading strategies with AI
About a decade ago, when I was starting my trading and investing journey, “algo trading” was becoming an internet favourite. There were courses promising to teach it for thousands of rupees, often making the journey from beginner to profitable trader sound suspiciously short. The idea was fascinating: turn trading rules into code and let a computer follow them. But knowing markets wasn’t enough. It also meant learning to program, finding and cleaning data, analyzing it, and working out why the code wasn’t doing what it had supposedly been told to do. Somewhere in between, there was supposed…
- Why is India an emerging market?
What do India, Taiwan, South Korea, and Qatar have in common? The answer is that they’re all “emerging markets.” At least, that’s what one of the world’s most-followed stock index providers, MSCI, calls them. Now think about that for a second. Taiwan makes most of the world’s advanced chips. South Korea is home to Samsung and Hyundai; also chips. Qatar is one of the richest countries on the planet (per capita). And India... well, India is the sixth largest economy in the world. They’re all in the same bucket. So every time someone says “India is an emerging market,” it’s worth asking…
- 4 lessons from the book,“Fooled by Randomness”
In 1498, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, discovered a sea route from Europe to Calicut, changing the course of trade and history. But what if the monsoon winds had blown in a different direction, instead of carrying him towards India? Would history have turned out differently? There’s another interesting hypothesis about Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen. What if she had had a shorter nose? Would Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, two powerful Roman leaders, have been attracted to her in the same way? And if they hadn’t, could the course of history have been different? Of course, there are…
- What makes a stock expensive?
In 2000, stock markets around the world were in the final months of one of the most famous bubbles in history. With all the excitement around AI today, that period is being talked about again. It was the dot-com bubble. In the late 1990s, the internet was taking off, and investors believed that technology companies would keep growing their profits for years. They kept buying these shares, and share prices rose much faster than the profits behind them. India wasn’t far behind. On 8 March 2000, Rediff published an article with a striking headline: “Is the P/E dead?” In early March 2000, Wipro…
- Why ₹1 of govt spending doesn’t turn into ₹3 of growth?
One week ago, Robert Hall and Michael Woodford won the Nobel Prize in Economics . The core of their research was something called “ microfoundations ” — it’s how economy-wide models (the macro) should factor in decisions of individuals households and firms. Enough has been written on their Nobel-winning idea of how when central banks communicate expectations around inflation to the public, it can help them set interest rates (monetary policy) more effectively. So I won’t belabour that point. Rather, something else caught my attention in the press release: on how Hall and Woodford’s work…
- Do you know the time value of your money?
Let me ask you something. If I offered you ₹1 lakh today or ₹1 lakh ten years from now, which option would you choose? You’d take it today, right? And there are good reasons for that. This simple idea, that money today is worth more than the same money tomorrow, is called the time value of money . And the longer you have to wait for money, the less that money is worth to you today Now, none of this is particularly surprising. And yet, when it comes to our own money, we often look at the absolute numbers without thinking much about what that money is actually worth. There’s an interesting…
- How to Read a Company During Results Season
Nearly two decades ago, two researchers at Duke University, a well-known university in the US, tried an unusual experiment. They used software to study emotions in executives’ voices across 1,647 earnings calls from 691 companies in 2007. An earnings call is a discussion where a company’s leaders explain its latest results and answer questions from analysts and investors. The researchers wanted to see whether the way a CEO or CFO sounded could tell us something about the company. They found links between these voice signals, how the business performed later and how its shares performed. Since…
- Why the India-US yield gap matters?
Imagine you run a pension fund in Toronto. You have $100 million to park somewhere safe for a few years. Option 1 is to lend it to the US government. A 10-year Treasury (that’s what US government bonds are called) pays about 5.3% now. It’s a good option because your money stays in dollars. You don’t lose sleep over it. Option 2 is to lend it to the Indian government. The yields are higher; a 10-year G-sec (the moniker for Indian government securities) pays about 7.3%. You’ll make a little more money and that’s always an enticing proposition. That 2 percentage points is the US-India bond yield…
- An ‘All Weather’ portfolio. Is there such a thing?
Markets lately have been unsettling. If you track only Indian markets, you already know the story. The Nifty is down about 14% this year, and an SIP wouldn’t have helped the two-year negative return. Foreign investors keep selling, and the rupee keeps slipping. Look beyond India, and it’s no calmer. The US stocks keep climbing, almost as if they haven’t noticed what’s going on around them. Bond yields are rising across the world, meaning governments and companies now pay more to borrow, with repercussions of their own. Even gold and silver, the stars of 2025, have come off their highs. It’s…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Mind Over Markets by Zerodha Varsity. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Nov 9, 2026.