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.
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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: What makes a stock expensive? · Why ₹1 of govt spending doesn’t turn into ₹3 of growth?
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 · #49 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 42 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 10%
- Best rank seen
- #46
- Rank, 7 days
- −2 places
- Rank, 30 days
- −1 place
- Subscribers added
- +7.0K
- Followers added
- +7.0K
- Posts
- 12
- Reactions per post
- 111
- Reactions tracked
- 3.2K
- Tickers covered
- 1
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 29, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 29 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: Managing money in your 20s — 248 reactions on Sep 19, 2026.
Recent posts
- 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…
- Technical vs Fundamental Analysis
Technical versus fundamental analysis is one of the longest-running debates in the stock market. Spend enough time around investors and traders, and you will hear someone explain why their approach works and why the other one is a waste of time. :) Rakesh Jhunjhunwala had a more practical way of looking at it. In a 2009 interview, he explained that trading helped him generate money to invest. When studying a business, he looked at its growth opportunities, competitive strengths and the quality of its profits. When trading, he studied price movements. But the two were connected. He explained…
- Why do we pay tolls?
Last week, I went on a roadtrip across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Every hour or so, I’d come to a stop at a toll plaza; and a few seconds later get a little text saying ₹x was debited from my FASTag account. By the time I reached my destination, I’d spent over ₹1,000 on tolls alone. Sidenote: Put all the FASTtags in India together and the annual collection is a whopping ₹82,000 crores ! But somewhere along the way, I started thinking about this “fee” that I’m forced to pay. Haven’t I already paid for this road? I pay road tax when I buy a car. I pay tax on every litre of fuel. And my…
- Post Office vs FD vs Arbitrage Fund
Whether it is the EMI on your home loan or the interest on your fixed deposit, most interest rates in the country trace back to one number: the repo rate. It is one of the biggest forces influencing interest rates across the country, and the RBI sets this rate based on the state of the economy. When it moves, everything else follows. When the RBI raises it, loans get expensive and you earn more on your fixed deposits. When the repo rate is cut, both loan rates and fixed deposit rates fall. In the last year and a half, the repo rate has been falling. It was at 6.5% at the start of 2025. By…
- Why the market’s best-performing index keeps changing
Markets are down. Screens are red, and foreign investors are selling. For someone who began investing recently, it can feel as though this is what the market always does. An investor who started at the beginning of 2020 has seen a very different journey. The Nifty 50 fell about 39% during the COVID crash, then climbed to a level roughly 115% above where it began 2020 by September 2024. That investor has seen both a frightening fall and a long rise. But someone who started near the end of 2024 arrived after that long rise. Nearly two years later, waiting for the market to make clear progress…
- What happens to your investments after you're gone?
In 2019, Stephen Colbert asked Keanu Reeves a question you don’t usually hear on a late-night comedy show: “What do you think happens when we die?” Keanu paused for a moment and said, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” For a few seconds, the studio went silent. The pain of losing someone can’t be replaced, and no amount of planning changes that. What good planning can do is spare the family a second kind of pain: going from pillar to post, between the bank, the broker, a lawyer, and sometimes a court, just to claim the money legally theirs. Two documents decide whether the…
- The River Below the Market
Liquidity is about flow. It tells us how easily something we own can be converted into the form we need, without losing too much value in the process. Cash in a bank account is already ready to use. A house may be valuable, but selling it can take months. If the owner needs money immediately, they may have to accept a much lower price. The same idea applies at a much larger scale. A company may own factories and machinery but still struggle to pay salaries if it does not have enough cash. A country may own land, gold and natural resources, but it still needs widely accepted currencies such as…
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