In 1980, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg and his team in California did something that sounds like it belongs in mythology.

They made gold.

They did not mine it or discover it. They took another metal and bombarded it with high-energy particles inside a particle accelerator until its nucleus rearranged. What came out was not an imitation. It was gold. Atomic number 79. Density of 19.3 grams per cubic centimetre. Melting point of 1,064°C. Chemically identical to the bars sitting in bank vaults and jewellery stores. It passed every test that gold is supposed to pass.

For a brief moment there, it sounded like the ultimate breakthrough. If gold can be created, doesn’t that change everything about how we think about it?

It didn’t. And not because the science failed.

The process required a particle accelerator, cost orders of magnitude more than the gold it produced, and could not be scaled to anything resembling commercial relevance. There was never a moment where this threatened the gold market, a trading desk, or a single vault.

So, it stayed what it was: an experiment. A proof of concept for chemistry, not finance.

But the experiment asks a useful question. If you can make perfect gold and it is worth nothing as an investment, what exactly have people been buying all along?

Once you move from gold as an element to gold as something you can actually own, the metal itself is only one part of the story. What really matters is everything built around it: custody, liquidity, legal ownership, taxation, and trust. That infrastructure is what makes gold an asset rather than a metal. And it is precisely what the lab never built.

That is why, in practice, there aren’t endless ways to own gold.

There are only four viable formats. Each one a little bit more interesting than the last.

380 Retailers, Ten Tonnes a Day, Zero Capital Gains

The Gold Souk in Deira has been running since the 1940s. It covers roughly 380 retailers across a covered lane in central Dubai and moves more than ten tonnes of physical metal every single day. The price on the screens changes multiple times before lunch as London, Zurich, and New York open in sequence. In 2025, the UAE surpassed the United Kingdom to become the world’s second-largest gold trading hub, behind only Switzerland. Total gold flowing through Dubai that year: AED 440 billion, up 36% from the year before. The UAE handles somewhere between 20% and 25% of all global physical gold trade.

The tax environment is where Dubai becomes genuinely unusual.

Investment-grade gold in the UAE - 99% purity and above carries 0% VAT, 0% capital gains tax, and 0% import duty on bars and coins.

Let’s compare that to other markets:

Gold is trading at approximately AED 16,730 per ounce in May 2026 - or roughly AED 538 per gram. That is 19% below the all-time high of AED 20,511 reached on January 28, 2026, at the end of a year in which gold gained 65% and set 53 new records.

Say you decided in January 2025 to put AED 20,000 into gold - around 65 grams at then-prevailing prices of approximately AED 310 per gram.

By January 2026, with gold up 65%:

AED 20,000 × 1.65 = AED 33,000

Gain: AED 13,000

That AED 13,000 is the starting point. What you actually kept depended entirely on which of the four formats you used to hold it.

Gold Comes in Four Flavours

On paper, buying gold is one decision. In practice, four formats exist.

#1: Physical Gold - The Oldest Answer to the Oldest Question

Physical gold is the format everything else is measured against. You buy the metal, you own the metal. No fund structure, no custodian bank, no platform between you and it.

At current prices of AED 538 per gram, a 10-gram bar - a realistic, holdable starting point costs roughly AED 5,380. The premium a Dubai dealer charges on top of spot price depends on the size you buy.

The pattern is consistent: the smaller the denomination, the more you pay above spot.

A 10-gram bar bought at 4% above spot costs AED 5,595 for something worth AED 5,380. That gap only closes once the price rises enough to cover it.

Then there is the question of where it goes after you buy it.

For a holding of this size, the storage calculus matters. A bank safe deposit locker at Emirates NBD, ADCB, or FAB starts at AED 500 per year - proportionate once your holding grows, but a significant annual drag on a smaller position. Home storage is more practical at this scale: insurance for gold stored at home runs at 0.1% to 0.3% of value per year, which on AED 20,000 worth of gold comes to AED 20 to AED 60 annually. For larger physical positions, DMCC-accredited vaulting facilities: Brink’s Dubai, Malca-Amit, and IDS offer professional custody at AED 1,000 to AED 3,000 per year with full insurance included.

Selling is straightforward. Most DMCC-accredited dealers offer same-day buyback at near-spot prices, with spreads of 0.5% to 2%.

Back to our AED 20,000.

• In January 2025, that bought approximately 65 grams at a 2% dealer premium.

• Stored in a bank locker for the year at AED 800. By January 2026, the position was worth AED 33,000.

• Subtract the entry premium and the storage cost, and the net gain was AED 11,800, not the headline AED 13,000.

This is the only format where you own the metal directly, which means the only risk is your own: custody, insurance, and finding a buyer.

#2: ETFs - Funds That Track Gold But Do Not Owe You Any

Gold ETFs are designed to solve one problem: access.

Instead of buying gold, you buy a unit in a fund that holds gold on your behalf. The fund holds physical gold in custody - typically with a major institutional bank and issues units that track the spot price almost exactly. The largest examples globally are SPDR Gold Shares, iShares Gold Trust, and SPDR Gold MiniShares, with combined assets under management running into the hundreds of billions.

Here is what the category’s own architects have said about it: owning a gold ETF is not unlike an investor in GM owning shares but not a car. You do not own gold. You own units in a trust that tracks gold prices. Physical redemption exists on paper but requires holdings in the hundreds of millions. Everyone else - which is everyone, gets cash when they sell.

What it costs: annual expense ratios range from 0.09% to 0.40% depending on the fund. No entry premium, no storage fee, no dealer spread.

Back to our AED 20,000.

• Zero premium at entry

• And the expense ratio for the year (0.10%) costs AED 20

• By January 2026, the position was worth AED 33,000.

• Net gain after fees: AED 12,980.

The liquidity that makes ETFs attractive is also what makes them fragile under pressure.

In March 2026, when gold pulled back from its January peak, ETF holders sold. AED 44 billion in outflows in a single month. It is safe to say that the ease of selling is not always a feature.

#3: Digital Gold - The Digital Format Built for This Market

While much of the world still debates whether app-based digital gold is safe to use, the UAE built a regulated version of the same idea.

Digital gold platforms in the UAE - Comtech Gold, iGold, and a handful of others are DMCC-licensed, VAT-exempt on investment gold, and backed by 999.9 fine physical gold stored in DMCC-regulated, fully insured vaults. Most allow physical redemption into coins and bars on request. Most let you start with AED 50.

That AED 50 buys you allocated gold. Not a claim on pooled gold held by a private company you cannot audit. Not a fund unit. Your name, your grams, your vault record.

So, here’s what it costs. Entry: a buy-sell spread of 0.5% to 1.5%. Annual storage: built into the platform fee at approximately 0.15% to 0.25% per year. VAT: zero on investment-grade gold. Physical delivery: available, with a small delivery charge.

For our AED 20,000:

• Let’s say it was invested into Comtech Gold in January 2025: entry spread of 1% costs AED 200

• Annual storage AED 40

• By January 2026, the position was worth AED 33,000.

• Net gain after costs: AED 12,760.

#4: Tokenised Gold - The One With a Serial Number and a Blockchain

Tokenised gold is the newest format and the most structurally different.

Each token represents ownership of a specific quantity of gold, often one troy ounce, backed by a London Good Delivery bar stored in a professional vault. The token is linked to a specific bar with a verifiable serial number.

The two dominant players in this space are PAXG, issued by Paxos, and Tether Gold (XAUT), issued by Tether. Together they account for the overwhelming majority of the tokenised gold market.

What makes this category distinct: with most tokenised gold platforms, you can enter a wallet address and see the bar number, weight, and assay certificate backing your holding in real time, at any hour, without buying anything first.

This is the only gold format in existence where a retail investor can independently verify the specific physical bar backing their holding, at any moment, from anywhere on earth.

The market has noticed. PAXG and Tether Gold combined have a market cap of AED 17.8 billion and recorded AED 333 billion in spot trading volume in Q1 2026 alone.

What it costs: transfer fees typically run at 0.02% per transaction - the lowest entry cost of any format. Minimum purchases start at approximately AED 500.

For our AED 20,000:

• Into PAXG in January 2025: transfer fee at 0.02% costs AED 4.

• By January 2026, the position was worth AED 33,000.

• Net gain after costs: AED 12,996.

The more interesting version of this example is what becomes possible structurally. Because tokenised gold is verifiable on a blockchain, it can function as collateral on lending platforms - allowing you to borrow liquidity against your position without selling and without triggering a tax event.

HSBC built a bank-issued version of this in Hong Kong, launched March 2024, for investors who want the traceability without managing a crypto wallet. Within 18 months it crossed AED 3.7 billion in trading volume and 100,000 transactions. The limitation: the token cannot leave the HSBC ecosystem. Every convenience that implies, and every constraint.

Comparison: What You Actually Own

Your Tax Bill Called. It’s Calling From India.

Let’s come back to the AED 20,000 invested in January 2025. By January 2026, with gold up 65%, here is where each format left you on costs alone.

This is only part of the picture. The other part is tax, and it works differently depending on where you file.

Investment-grade gold in the UAE carries zero VAT on purchase, zero capital gains tax on sale, and zero import duty on bars and coins. The UAE takes nothing from your gain.

If you file taxes in India, earn income there, or ever move money back, Indian tax rules apply to your foreign assets. The starting point is the India-UAE DTAA.

Under Article 13(5), capital gains on assets sold while you are a UAE tax resident are taxable only in the UAE. Since the UAE charges zero, the effective Indian tax rate is also zero - but only if you hold two documents, both obtained before the sale.

Document 1: UAE Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) from the UAE Ministry of Finance. Takes two to three weeks to obtain. Costs nothing.

Document 2: Form 10F filed on the Indian income tax portal before the transaction.

Here is what AED 20,000 invested in January 2025 actually returned in January 2026, after costs and after tax, across every scenario.

The metal was identical across all four. The structure around it - and two documents determined the difference between keeping AED 12,996 and keeping AED 9,097.

Every foreign gold asset - physical bar, ETF, digital platform balance, or token must be disclosed annually in Schedule FA of your Indian ITR under the Black Money Act, 2015. The ₹20 lakh threshold introduced in October 2024 applies only to the penalty calculation, not to the disclosure requirement itself.

The penalty for a missing Schedule FA: ₹10 lakh per year, per asset. On a position worth AED 20,000, it comes to roughly ₹4.6 lakh - the penalty for non-disclosure is more than double the value of the holding itself.

The Element Was Never the Point

If you want direct ownership with no platform risk - physical gold from a DMCC-accredited dealer, stored securely. Highest entry cost, lowest counterparty risk. The right choice if your primary concern is holding something no institution can fail on your behalf.

If you want pure price exposure and maximum liquidity - a gold ETF via an international brokerage. Cheapest annual holding cost, easiest to exit, nothing to verify underneath. The right choice if flexibility and low fees matter more than direct ownership.

If you want allocated gold with low minimums, easy access in the UAE, and physical redemption on request - a DMCC-licensed digital gold platform. Regulated, VAT-exempt, straightforward. The right choice for most people who want something between physical and digital.

If you want the lowest entry cost, verifiable ownership at the bar level, and the structural flexibility to use your gold as collateral without selling - tokenised gold. Most flexible, most structurally novel, and carrying the one tax question nobody has yet answered cleanly in Indian law.

The physical metal in a vault, in a gold ETF share, tokenised gold, and in a 10-gram bar in Dubai Souk is chemically identical. What you are choosing between is the structure wrapped around it: who holds it, what you can prove about it, what it costs on the way in, and what two governments think about it on the way out.

Whichever format you choose: get the TRC before you sell, file the Schedule FA before someone asks why you didn’t, and read what the platform says you actually own.

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Miscellaneous 101: Further Reading

• Eighty feet below Manhattan, the Federal Reserve stores 6,331 metric tonnes of gold. You can book a free tour and get close enough to touch the bars. You just can’t buy any.

• The Golden Constant by Roy W. Jastram tracks gold’s purchasing power across four centuries. The conclusion: gold doesn’t beat inflation in the short run. It just outlasts everything else.

• The Dubai Gold Souk has no price tags. Every transaction across 380 stores is negotiated against the live London fix. Ten tonnes a day, no central regulator, running the same way since the 1940s.

• Visual Capitalist mapped 200 years of global gold production by country from South Africa’s 1970 peak of 1,000 tonnes to China’s current dominance. A five-minute read that reframes where gold comes from and why that’s changing.

• The best person to follow if this piece opened something up: Jan Nieuwenhuijs on X. Years of work tracking physical gold flows, central bank movements, and the gap between where gold is officially reported to be and where it actually is.

There is a restaurant in Wembley, London with no website, no Instagram account, and no reservation system. It seats maybe forty people. On a cold Tuesday night, every table is full.

The dal makhani costs ~$12. Back in Amritsar, the same dish, made the same way, costs roughly ₹250. That’s about $2.75. But nobody in the room is doing that math.

They’re not here for value.

They’re here because this specific dal - thick, slow-cooked, slightly smoky - tastes like something they can’t quite name and can’t find anywhere else. It tastes like a kitchen in another country. It tastes like home.

That feeling has a name in consumer economics: price inelasticity. You don’t comparison-shop your comfort food. You don’t substitute it. You just pay.

The Indian diaspora of 35 million has been doing that for decades. Quietly, loyally, and in numbers large enough to build one of the most resilient food industries in the world.

That is not a niche. That is a market. And this is the story of how that market started, and where it stands now.

What the Brain (And Heart) Remembers

Before we follow the money, let’s understand the appetite.

Comfort food isn’t really a cuisine category you’ll find on a menu. It is a psychological function.

Familiar food carries memory. The National Library of Medicine cites that under stress, distance, or displacement, the brain looks for signals of safety. Immigration, however chosen and however successful, still means separation from the familiar. You left everything that felt normal to build something better. Your brain therefore remembers what home felt like, tasted like.

That is why the Indian restaurant in Wembley is full on a Tuesday night. Not because the food is the best in the city. Because for the people in that room, no other food does what this food does.

Now scale that feeling to 35 million people.

The global ethnic food market is projected to reach $239 billion by 2030 - driven, in large part, by people who left home and kept eating like they hadn’t. Indian food is one of the largest single segments within it. Within diaspora communities, food spending as a share of household expenditure runs measurably above the host-country average. People who left India to earn better money are, proportionally, spending more of that money on the food they grew up eating.

The UK alone has an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Indian restaurants - more, per capita, than any country outside India - generating annual turnover in the $4.7–$5.7 billion range. The UAE’s Karama district has several thousand Indian food operations in a few square kilometres. Tiffin services, thali houses, Kerala fish curry spots, biryani specialists. Many in spaces barely larger than a corridor.

At a glance, it might not even look like a billion-dollar industry, because it was never designed to look like one. It was designed to feed people who were far from home. That was enough.

Until it wasn’t.

The First Indian Kitchens Abroad

The oldest Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom opened in 1810.

Dean Mahomet, a former British East India Company soldier, opened the Hindoostane Coffee House on George Street. He served Indian food to the very British officers whose empire had spent two centuries in India developing a taste for it. It lasted two years before he went bankrupt.

[IMAGE: Hindoostane Coffee House at George Street, London - A City of Westminster plaque now marks the site.]

The second wave arrived a century and a half later and was considerably more durable. It is still here.

The 1960s and 1970s brought South Asian migrants to post-war Britain - and restaurants worked. The skills were portable, the capital requirements were manageable, and the British, having spent two centuries in India, already had an appetite for curry. By the 1980s, there was an Indian restaurant in almost every major British city.

You know this restaurant. It sits on a high street in Wembley, Southall, Leicester or Birmingham. The sign is faded. The menu laminated. The kitchen is the owner. The front of house is family, or someone new to the country finding a start. In the UAE, the geography shifts but the template doesn’t. Karama and Bur Dubai run on the same logic: owner-led, community-fed, open long hours, sustained by regulars who know exactly what they want.

It all feels small, local, almost invisible. And then you start adding it up.

These businesses are not glamorous. They are also very hard to kill.

Most restaurants in the UK don’t survive their third year. Indian restaurants in diaspora neighbourhoods do - because the customers don’t leave. They’re not loyal to a brand. They’re loyal to what the food does to them.

For decades, that was the whole story. Thousands of small restaurants. Quietly profitable. Invisible to the market. Funded by family.

And then, slowly, some of them opened a second location.

When the Second One Opens

Sometime in the 1990s, a family running a restaurant in Southall opened another one. They didn’t call it a chain. They called it “the new one.”

It worked.

Then came a third. Then a relative in another city did the same. Then someone in Dubai, who had eaten there years ago, wanted it closer to home. This is how the middle tier of diaspora dining formed - not through pitch decks or private equity, but through proof. And the regulars became the brand.

Today, we see a growing layer of mid-sized Indian restaurant groups: typically two to eight outlets, built within one community and expanding outward. Punjabi, South Indian, Gujarati, Hyderabadi - each with its own loyal base, each slowly testing whether that loyalty travels.

The second location is where everything changes. The business now needs capital, consistency and throughput. It needs to standardise without losing the thing that made it work in the first place. That tension never fully goes away.

And almost none of this is financed by a bank. The capital comes from community - family, silent partners, sometimes the regulars themselves. There is no index tracking these businesses. No public-market valuation.

And once you move beyond one location, you’re no longer just running “a”restaurant - you’re building a format.

When The Chains Cross the Water

If you’ve ever stepped into a Saravana Bhavan outside India, you already know what to expect. The same idli, dosa, sambar, filter coffee. Familiar before you’ve even ordered.

It started in Chennai in 1981. By the 1990s, it was an institution. By the 2000s, it had 100+ outlets across 20 countries. But it didn’t expand to find new customers. It followed the ones who had already moved. The UAE was the natural first stop. A large Indian population, high dining frequency, and strong brand familiarity make Dubai an easy market to enter: a diaspora that has the money, the appetite, and a specific idea of what good food feels like.

That is the logic of the home-country chain. It doesn’t start from zero. The customer already knows the name. Trust travels before the first plate is served.

The same pattern runs across Bikanervala, MTR, Haldiram’s-linked formats, regional biryani chains and vegetarian thali concepts. The structure is simple: the brand and process travel, the local partner runs the business.

Here’s how that spectrum looks when you put numbers to it:

But scale doesn’t always look like more outlets, more volume or just the likelihood of a second visit. Sometimes, it shows up in a completely different way.

When Indian Food Became Everyone's Food

In 2010, two cousins from Mumbai opened a restaurant on Upper St Martin’s Lane in London. And they called it Dishoom, inspired by the Irani cafés of Bombay - places built around chai, conversation and familiarity.

Every detail was deliberate: bent cane chairs, ceiling fans, old photographs, aged menus. A kind of constructed nostalgia - specific enough to feel real, but open enough for anyone to step into. And they charged more than most Indian restaurants nearby.

Within a year, Dishoom had a queue. And it still does.

Why?

The food is good. But that is not the answer. The answer is that Dishoom understood something the independent tier never had to solve: the market for Indian dining in the West is not only the diaspora. It is everyone. Each Dishoom location is built around a fictional Bombay backstory - one that shapes the menu, the music, the design and the tone. The story is the product. The food is the proof.

[IMAGE: Dishoom, London - 2025]

Dishoom reported $185 million in group revenue in 2024, with an EBITDA of $25 million, valued at $405 million by LVMH-backed L Catterton. JKS Restaurants - the group behind Gymkhana, Trishna and a portfolio of some of the most acclaimed Indian dining in London - reported $100 million in revenue across 25 restaurants.

It was proof that capital noticed their growth.

And Dishoom is not alone. In London, Gymkhana, Trishna, Jamavar, Benares, Quilon and Veeraswamy have all received Michelin recognition. In Dubai, Trèsind Studio earned three Michelin stars in 2025 - the first Indian restaurant in the Middle East to do so.

Indian food abroad is no longer just comfort. In some rooms, it has become craft, theatre and a destination in its own right. That is not a small shift.

It is a signal.

The Tier That Is Still Unexplored

Some of those signals start in a living room.

Twelve strangers. A home kitchen. A set menu, one sitting, everyone at the same table. You came not knowing anyone. You leave having eaten something that tasted like someone’s childhood.

That is a supper club. And it is one of the quietest, fastest-growing corners of the diaspora dining story.

Not everyone who fell in love with the taste of home thought about a lease. Some thought about a table first. A borrowed pot maybe. Asma Khan started exactly this way in 2012 - and in 2025, King Charles came to her restaurant - Darjeeling Express and asked if he could take biryani home.

Most supper clubs won’t end there. And most aren’t trying to. Across the world, Indian home chefs are running supper clubs alongside full-time jobs - Gujarati thalis, Awadhi biryani, Konkani coastal food that has no commercial restaurant equivalent anywhere. Eight seats. One night a month. Word of mouth, a WhatsApp group, an Instagram DM. The economics work precisely because there is no overhead, no lease, no staff. Clean ingredients, pure margin, tiny scale.

It is not yet an industry. It may never be one. Some of these chefs are doing it for the love of the food, not the money. But love has a way of turning into something else when enough strangers keep asking for the recipe.

Which brings us to the three tiers of diaspora dining that are already on the map today.

The Economics of Eating Like You’re Home

[IN TABLE: Revenue and margin figures are estimates based on industry benchmarks and publicly available operator disclosures]

Each tier sells something different.

The independent sells specificity - the exact taste, the familiar face, the owner who probably knows your order. Think of the decades-old dosa spot in Karama that has had the same lunch crowd since 2010. No marketing. No loyalty program. Just a dosa that tastes exactly right. Running on margins of 5–10% and average revenue between $338K and $675K per site, these businesses are not built to scale - and that is precisely why they survive. The capital is family money. The moat is memory.

The home-country chain sells trust. The name is the guarantee. You go because you already know what to expect. Saravana Bhavan with 100+ outlets across 20 countries didn’t build its international estate by finding new customers. It followed the ones who had already moved. Bikanervala, MTR, and a wave of regional biryani specialists have done the same. The economics reflect the brand premium: $1.1M to $2.7M+ per site, margins of 10–18%, built on a recipe that was proven at home before it ever crossed the water.

The premium host-country brand sells a story. And stories, unlike recipes, scale almost infinitely - across locations, cities, and customers who have never set foot in India. JKS Restaurants - the group behind Gymkhana, Trishna and a portfolio of some of the most acclaimed Indian dining in London - reported $100 million in revenue across 25 restaurants. At the premium tier, margins run 13–20% and the capital comes not from family pools but from PE firms and institutional investors who recognise a format when they see one.

That last point is where the capital markets come in.

CAVA took Mediterranean food, built a format around it, listed on the NYSE in 2023, and by FY2024 had 367 restaurants and nearly $1 billion in revenue. Chipotle did it at a larger scale - 3,700+ restaurants, $11.3 billion in revenue in 2024. Both started as diaspora-adjacent cuisine. Both found a format that worked beyond the original community.

Indian diaspora dining has everything the first and second chapter requires: loyal customers, repeat orders, premium pricing in some markets, and brands people recognise before they walk in. What it hasn’t had yet is that one public-market moment.

The demand is not the question. The question is whether someone can build a format that keeps working at the fifth restaurant, the fifteenth and the fiftieth.

The Appetite Isn’t Going Anywhere

It is still Tuesday evening. The dal makhani hasn’t changed. The laminated menu hasn’t changed. The owner, who has been in that kitchen for nineteen years, hasn’t changed.

Somewhere in the same city, a restaurant group is planning its next four locations. Somewhere in Dubai, a Chennai-born chain is signing another lease. And somewhere in London, a chef is designing a menu not just to feed people, but to win a star and tell a story.

For decades, these places did more than run businesses. They became how a culture showed up in another country. For many people, this is where “Indian” is first experienced - not through history or language, but through a menu.

That is not a small thing to have built.

The most beloved Indian restaurant brands in the world are still mostly private. Built on family capital. Sustained by community loyalty. Valued by their regulars in a currency no auditor has ever counted.

Dishoom hasn’t listed. Saravana Bhavan hasn’t listed. The premium tier of Indian diaspora dining, for all its momentum, remains almost entirely outside the formal capital markets.

But that may not always be true.

Dishoom opens in New York this year. JKS, Darjeeling Express and Kricket are following. The US market is next. And the US market has a habit of turning beloved restaurant brands into listed companies.

When it changes, an Indian diner abroad might find themselves in an unusual position - not just eating the food that has fed them their whole life, but holding a small piece of the business behind it.

Whether that turns out to be a good investment will depend on what the balance sheet looks like.

Whether it’s a meaningful one - that, they already know.

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Miscellaneous 101 for Further Reading

• The Dishoom cookbook is worth reading not just for the recipes but for the 80 pages of Bombay history before them. The brand’s investment thesis, in book form.

• The New York Times went deep on the science of why comfort food works the way it does. Worth reading alongside this piece.

• Asma Khan ran a 12-person supper club from her London living room in 2012, charging £35 a head. It became a Soho restaurant, then a Chef's Table episode on Netflix nominated for an Emmy.

• If you’re in London, a must visit is the Khao Suppers - a Gujarati supper club. Dishes from the founders’ childhoods, strangers around a shared table, no menu in advance.

• In Dubai, photographer-turned-chef Vikram Gawd runs a secret supper club: coastal Indian food, Middle Eastern twist, eight seats, no fixed address. Lives entirely on Instagram DMs. Maybe this is what the next Dishoom looks like.

• We sat down with two London home chefs - Zarna Thakkar and The Mallu Bar Stud - who are building supper clubs around Indian comfort food. Two very different stories, yet one very familiar feeling.

The most stolen object on screen is something most people don’t own beyond a handful of cherished pieces.

It’s not a painting, not a stack of cash. It’s a diamond.

James Bond has spent six decades chasing them. So have warlords, insurance fraudsters, and Hollywood heist crews across a hundred films. And yet the person watching from the cinema seat has probably only ever encountered one across a jewellery counter.

Rare by nature, priceless by reputation, and portable enough to cross any border in a coat pocket, diamonds have been the world’s most coveted object for over a century.

So who decided a diamond was worth all of this, and is any of it actually true?

And what happens when a rival emerges that is, by every scientific measure, identical?

Small Enough to Disappear With

Hollywood keeps returning to diamonds because of plain physics and logistics.

In Snatch (2000), an entire criminal underworld tears itself apart over a single 86-carat rough. In Blood Diamond (2006), a civil war is being funded, stone by stone, out of Sierra Leone’s rivers. In Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Bond isn’t defusing a bomb, he is following a diamond smuggling pipeline across three continents.

To move $100 million in gold at today's prices, you need over half a tonne of metal, a reinforced vehicle, and a crew who knows what they are doing. To move $100 million in high-grade diamonds, you need a coat pocket and a passport. No other asset compresses value that densely. Not cash. Not equities. Not property. Only diamonds, and only at the very top of the quality curve.

Over time, it became a collective belief: that diamonds are a universal currency, one that bypasses borders, banks, and governments without leaving a trace.

But Hollywood didn’t invent this idea. It borrowed it.

How an Empire Built a ‘Forever’

Before the movies, there was De Beers.

When massive diamond deposits were discovered across South Africa from the late 1860s, the sudden abundance threatened to destroy the very thing that made diamonds valuable: their rarity.

In 1888, Cecil Rhodes consolidated South Africa’s newly discovered Kimberley diamond pipes into a single company: De Beers. The pipes had been producing so much rough, so quickly, that diamonds risked becoming ordinary. Rhodes and his successors built the company that turned a geological surge into a carefully managed market: matching supply to demand across decades, and carrying the industry through two world wars, a Great Depression, and the arrival of new producers in three continents.

Then, in 1947, a copywriter named Frances Gerety wrote four words on a pad the night before an ad deadline for De Beers.

“A diamond is forever.”

This campaign redefined what a diamond was. A diamond was no longer a luxury. It was a symbol of pure love - love that lasts forever, and therefore, a stone that should never be resold. In 1939, roughly one in ten American engagement rings featured a diamond. By 1990, it was four in five.

The movies made you want to steal one. De Beers made sure you would spend three months’ salary on one instead.

Both were telling the audience the same thing. A diamond is the thing worth wanting.

From One Player to Many

De Beers once controlled 90% of the world’s rough diamond supply. Today, De Beers still produces close to a third of the world’s rough diamonds and remains the brand most synonymous with the category.

The industry has since grown up and has far more players than before:

• De Beers (~30%): the original custodian, now being divested.

• Alrosa (~25-27%): world’s largest producer, sidelined by sanctions.

• Rio Tinto (~4-6%): diversified miner, Argyle closure ended 90% of pink diamond supply.

• Lucara: Karowe mine, source of multiple record-breaking 1,000+ carat stones.

• Petra Diamonds: legacy mines, known for rare coloured stones.

The monopoly fragmented. But the market it created didn’t disappear - it matured.

And like any maturing market, it developed cycles, corrections, and a generous price history.

Which brings us to the reactor.

Made, Not Mined

For most of diamond history, the only way to make one was to wait a billion years.

Diamonds are carbon, crystallised under extreme pressure and heat about a hundred miles underground. Volcanic pipes push them to the surface; humans have been extracting them that way for millennia.

Then, in the 1950s, a team at General Electric invented one. In a lab.

The first lab-grown diamonds were industrial - tiny, yellowish, useful for drill bits. For fifty years, that was all they were. By the early 2000s, two methods had matured enough to produce gem-quality stones at scale.

The first, HPHT (High Pressure High Temperature) mimics the conditions deep inside the earth, applying extreme heat and pressure to a carbon seed until a diamond forms around it. It is the older of the two methods, energy-intensive, and primarily used for industrial applications and lower-quality gem stones.

The second, CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) works differently: A carbon-rich gas is pumped into a vacuum chamber containing a diamond seed. The carbon atoms settle and crystallise, layer by layer, over several weeks. The result is a gem-quality stone grown in a facility that looks less like a mine and more like a semiconductor fab.

Chemistry Doesn’t Care Where It Came From

So is a lab-grown diamond actually a diamond?

Chemically, physically, and optically: yes, identical. The same carbon structure, the same hardness, the same brilliance. A trained gemologist cannot tell the difference without specialised equipment. The only difference is origin - one stone took a billion years, the other took a few weeks.

For decades, “diamond” meant one thing. Now it means two. Both are real. Both are beautiful. They are sold in different parts of the same market, bought for different reasons, and increasingly, by the same person.

And the two industries behind them could not be more different.

While the natural diamond industry spent more than a century managing supply and protecting price, the lab-grown industry did the opposite - it scaled.

From a standing start in the early 2000s, Indian and Chinese manufacturers built reactor fleets at industrial speed, flooding the market with stones indistinguishable from the mined ones, and letting prices find their own level.

In fact, Surat in Gujarat is now the centre of gravity. The city that already cuts and polishes around 90% of the world’s mined diamonds is now home to hundreds of CVD reactor facilities.

The world’s largest lab-grown diamond to date is the “Celebration of India”. It’s a 75.33-carat polished CVD stone that spent 270 days inside a reactor in Surat.

That is how fast this industry is moving.

Same Stone, Two Prices

For over a century, the diamond market had one fundamental tension: natural supply vs natural demand. De Beers managed both sides. The question was always about the earth - how much was down there, how much would come out, who controlled the pipe.

That question has been replaced by a harder one.

The diamond market is now a two-category problem.

One category is ancient, finite, and priced at a premium. The other is scalable, cheaper every year, and by every scientific measure, identical to the first.

The price history of the two, side by side, tells the story better than any description could. For 1-carat round, G-colour, VS2 clarity, here is what the price history looks like:

Look at where the lines began, not where they end. In 2005, a one-carat lab-grown diamond retailed for more than a mined one - the technology was new, the reactors were small, and the stones were novelties.

The inversion happened quickly. By 2010, the prices were close. By 2018, the gap had opened into a chasm. In 2025, a one-carat mined stone retailed for around $4,200. Its lab-grown equivalent - same colour, same clarity sold for about $875.

The price gap has changed how people buy. In the United States, lab-grown went from 6% of engagement ring sales in 2021 to over half by 2025. More than half of millennial and Gen Z couples now choose lab-grown engagement rings, according to a research by McKinsey. The decision is not about compromise - it is about value, ethics, and sustainability.

Safe to say that the market is not moving from natural to lab-grown. It is splitting into two products, two price points, and two entirely different conversations about what a diamond is actually for.

The Investor’s Cut

For most of this story, diamonds have been a cultural object. Worn, gifted, stolen, sung about. But there’s a parallel story being told, very quietly, by the people who probably never set foot in a retail store.

Ultra-high-net-worth families - those managing over a billion dollars have held diamonds in their portfolios for decades, rather silently. Industry estimates put the figure at a single-digit percentage of assets at that level. The logic is the one Bond was working with: portable, dense, internationally fungible, immune to currency controls and bank freezes. A coat-pocket-sized hedge against being on the wrong side of a border at the wrong moment.

That logic is real. It is also, almost entirely, not for an average investor.

The people who use diamonds this way are buying at the very top of the market: D-Flawless stones, exceptional sizes, certified rarities through Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and a handful of private dealers. Tens of millions of dollars per stone. A genuinely separate asset class, which the 1-carat ring at a retail counter is not.

For everything below museum-grade, a diamond is a luxury consumable. Resale value typically lands at 20% to 60% of what you paid.

So, if you wanted exposure to the diamond market - the price and value of diamonds, not a diamond itself - there are roughly three ways in.

First, you can buy shares in a listed miner: Rio Tinto and Anglo American both have diamond exposure inside much larger portfolios; Lucara Diamond, listed in Toronto, runs the Karowe mine in Botswana and is closer to a pure-play.

Second, you can buy into the retail side: Signet Jewelers (Kay, Zales, Jared) is the largest diamond jewellery chain in the US, and LVMH owns Tiffany & Co.

Third, if you’re sitting on a million dollars and the right contacts, you can buy at wholesale in Surat, Antwerp, or Tel Aviv, at 50% to 70% of what retailers charge - assuming you can also handle certification, storage, insurance, and an exit strategy.

What you cannot do, the way you can with gold, is open an app, check a spot price, and buy a fraction of a diamond. There is no Robinhood for diamonds. The market, even now, runs on relationships, certificates, and back-room conversations.

So, for the average buyer, that is the honest answer. A diamond is a story, a marker, an heirloom, a love letter in carbon. What it has rarely been is an investment.

Bond’s Next Case

In every heist movie ever made, the diamond is worth stealing because it is the only one. Rare by geology, scarce by design, irreplaceable by definition, and what not.

That is why Bond chases it. That is why the criminal underworld tears itself apart over it. Rarity is the whole point.

But what happens when a reactor in Surat can grow the same stone in three weeks?

If the next Bond villain is stealing a lab-grown diamond, the film is no longer about rarity. Maybe, it is about intellectual property. Not stealing the only one - stealing the recipe instead. The value is no longer in the stone. It is in the process that makes it.

What are we paying for then - the stone or the story? For rarity, or the idea of it?

These are not questions with clean answers.

But they are worth asking the next time a diamond shows up in front of you - maybe on your own finger, in a vault, or in the opening scene of a very familiar kind of movie.

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Miscellaneous 101 for Further Reading

• An acclaimed book on why humans lose their minds over tiny, shiny objects is Aja Raden’s Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World.

• Edward Jay Epstein's 1982 article on how De Beers convinced the world a diamond was forever is still the definitive piece on the subject - written 44 years ago, and somehow more relevant today.

• Nothing Lasts Forever, a Netflix documentary, traces lab-grown from reactor to showroom and asks how much of what’s being sold as “natural” actually is.

• Leave a carbon seed in a microwave-sized reactor for three weeks and you get a 2-carat stone. That’s how lab-grown diamonds are redefining the global diamond and jewellery market - and somewhere in Antwerp, a third-generation diamond dealer is having a very bad century.

• A diamond without paperwork is a problem - it turns out even the world’s most portable asset now needs a passport.

• And finally, no further reading on diamonds is complete without a heist. Stolen: Heist of the Century on Netflix tells the story of the largest diamond robbery ever recorded - $100 million in stones, most of them never found. Ocean’s Eight, except real.

The year is 1497.

A wealthy merchant in Venice, Marco is looking at an interesting proposition.

A young, ambitious trader named Thomas wants to sail to Calicut, on India’s Malabar Coast, to bring back black pepper. The voyage will take two years. The cargo, if it arrives, will be worth a fortune. The ship, if it sinks, will be worth nothing. Marco needs to decide whether he will fund the voyage or not.

Marco has the capital. Thomas has the nerve.

What they agree to in 1497 will become the blueprint for every financial tool we use today. They don’t know that yet. All they’re trying to do is move pepper.

This is the story of how a single trade route - dangerous, lucrative, and largely ungoverned forced a generation of merchants to invent solutions to problems that had no precedent. How to fund a voyage that costs more than any one person can afford. How to survive a catastrophic loss. How to pay across continents without moving gold. How to agree on a price for goods that don’t exist yet. How to let strangers share in a profit.

They solved each problem imperfectly, slowly, and at enormous human cost. But they solved them. And every solution is still running our money today.

Before we follow Thomas’ journey at sea, why Thomas wanted to risk his life for pepper is really interesting to look at.

Why Pepper Ran the World

Pepper wasn’t just a spice. They called it black gold. In 14th-century London, a pound of Malabar pepper could pay a month’s rent - not because Europeans loved heat in their food, but because pepper did things nothing else could. It preserved meat through winter. It masked the smell of food that was turning. It doubled as medicine and most of all, held its value more reliably than most coins in circulation. Whoever controlled its supply controlled the world’s most important trade route, and everything that moved along it.

Spices were not an ingredient. They were the asset class of the medieval world.

They say, when Vasco da Gama completed his first voyage in 1499, the cargo he brought back was worth 60 times the cost of the entire expedition. Sixty times. On a single voyage.

Which is exactly what made the trade so difficult to enter and so violent once entered. A cargo of that value required a voyage of two years, costs that could break most merchants, and a 30-50% chance the ship never came back at all. No single person could fund it alone, survive the loss alone, or pay for it in gold alone.

In solving that cluster of problems, the merchants of the 15th and 16th centuries built every financial tool you are using right now. This is our account of how it all started with the deal Marco and Thomas struck in Venice in 1497.

The Handshake Before the Voyage

Marco funds the entire voyage - the ship, the crew, the supplies, the purchasing fund. Thomas sails it. If the ship sinks, Marco loses his capital; Thomas loses nothing but years. If it returns with pepper, profits split roughly 75% to Marco, 25% to Thomas. Both parties walk away from a disaster without being destroyed by it. They call this arrangement - a “commenda”.

One party provides capital, one party provides effort, losses are defined, profits are shared. Limited liability. Carried interest. Risk-adjusted return.

Sounds familiar? Today, that commenda has been repackaged as “Venture Capital”. The fund is Marco, the founder is Thomas. If the startup fails, the fund loses its money, the founder loses years of their life. If it succeeds, profits split.

But the commenda shows up somewhere far more familiar too. Every time you put money into a mutual fund, you are Marco. You are the silent capital provider. The fund manager is Thomas, sailing the ship, making the calls, taking the day-to-day risk with your money. If the fund performs, you both benefit. If it doesn’t, you absorb the loss and the manager absorbs the awkwardness on the earnings call.

The Loss Nobody Could Carry Alone

Now that Thomas has his funding, he needs to reckon with the incredibly mighty and risky ocean.

Between Calicut and Venice lie 12,000 kilometres of open ocean. Storms that appear without warning. Pirates who ask no questions. Disease that moves faster than any wind. The probability of the ship completing the round trip safely: somewhere between 50 and 70 percent.

An individual merchant like Thomas could not absorb the full loss of a sunken ship without being permanently destroyed. But Genoese merchants in the 13th century noticed something important: while the loss was large, it was also predictable. Ships sank at known rates on known routes in known seasons. Predictability, it turned out, was the raw material for a solution.

So they built a pool.

Merchants would each contribute a small premium before a voyage. If a ship sank, the pool paid out the loss. If it arrived safely, the pool kept the premiums. Fifty people each absorbing one-fiftieth of a catastrophic loss - that was survivable. One person absorbing the whole thing was not. They called this contract “bottomry”. Today we call it “insurance”.

Every insurance premium you pay, health, term life, travel, is the same bet the Genoese were making in the 13th century. You are paying a small certain loss today to avoid the possibility of a large uncertain loss tomorrow. The underwriter is betting the bad thing won’t happen. You are betting it might. The pool of everyone’s premiums is what makes any individual’s catastrophe survivable.

The Paper That Paid Like Gold

Two years after leaving Venice, Thomas’s ship has survived the risky ocean. He is standing on a dock in Calicut, on India’s Malabar Coast.

Before he can start loading the pepper onto his ship, he needs to make payment for it.

But Thomas hasn’t brought any gold with him for payment. Carrying so much gold would add dangerous weight to a ship already loaded to capacity. And carrying a fortune in gold across 12,000 kilometres of pirate-infested ocean was a fool’s errand regardless.

There was a more elegant solution, and the Medici banking families of Florence had built it.

He picks up a quill and signs a document called “lettera di cambio” - a bill of exchange.

The document is a written promise, issued by the Medici house in Florence: the person holding this paper is owed a specific sum of money, redeemable at any Medici branch - Venice, Cairo, Bruges, London. The broker in Calicut takes the paper. He presents it at the nearest Medici office even months later. Gets paid in gold.

Technically, no gold crossed the table. A fortune in goods changed hands on the strength of ink, paper, and institutional trust spanning two continents.

Today, the bill of exchange is the equivalent of a “letter of credit” - an instrument that still underpins the majority of global merchandise trade. When a business exports goods to a buyer on the other side of the world, neither party trusts the other enough to pay upfront or ship on pure faith. A bank issues a formal promise: payment will be released the moment the correct shipping documents are verified. The goods move. The money follows. No capital frozen at the start.

The Price That Couldn't Wait for the Ship

Thomas’s ship is on its way back to Venice. The hold is full of pepper. The voyage survived the storms, the pirates, the disease.

But Thomas has a new problem as soon as he docks. He has no idea what pepper is worth right now in Venice.

If ten other ships also made it back this season, the market would be flooded. Prices collapse. The pepper Thomas risked his life for sells at a fraction of what he’d projected. If most ships were lost at sea, pepper is scarce. Prices spike. The same cargo is suddenly worth a fortune.

Prices on the spice route swung 300 to 400 percent depending on how many ships made it home in a given season. A merchant who timed it wrong lost everything.

Amsterdam traders found the answer: Agree today on a price for a shipment that hasn’t arrived yet. Lock it in six months in advance. The buyer and seller get certainty. Both give up the possibility of a windfall in exchange for the guarantee of a known outcome. They called it a “futures contract”.

Here is what this has to do with your money and today’s economy at large.

Every commodity ETF, every mutual fund with commodity exposure, every time you watch oil or gold move and feel it in your portfolio - you are inside the “futures market”. But the mechanism runs deeper than commodities. Most spices are grown in emerging market currencies but priced internationally in dollars. This means a currency move on a Monday morning directly affects what buyers pay for physical goods by the end of the week. Today, MCX and NCDEX still trade black pepper, cardamom, and turmeric as futures contracts. The spice trade didn’t just create commodity futures - it made the foreign exchange market necessary.

One Voyage Was Never Going to Be Enough

Thomas’s ship finally docks in Venice. The pepper made it. Marco gets his 75%. Thomas gets his 25%. The bill of exchange settled the payment in Calicut. The futures contract protected the price of pepper on the way home. The system worked.

The Dutch took a curious look at all of this and thought: let’s build this into a bigger system.

Not one voyage. Hundreds. Not one trading post. Dozens, spread across Asia, fortified and permanently staffed. An empire of trade so large that no storm, no pirate raid, no single bad season could bring it down. The commenda couldn’t fund that. No private syndicate, no matter how wealthy, could capitalise an operation of that scale.

So in 1602, the Dutch East India Company, a powerful, state-chartered spice trading company did something no organisation in history had ever done: It asked the public for money. Not as a loan. As ownership.

Anyone in Amsterdam could now buy a piece of this company, its ships, its trading posts, its contracts, its future profits. Thousands did. The shares were freely tradeable.

At its peak, the Dutch East India Company had a market capitalisation equivalent to roughly $8 trillion in today's dollars - larger than Apple and Microsoft combined. It operated 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, employed 50,000 people, and maintained a private army of 10,000 soldiers. It paid shareholders an average annual dividend of 18% for nearly 200 years.

While it collapsed in 1799, the instrument it created did not.

Every stock you own today works exactly the same way as it did in 1600s. You give a company your money. In return, you get a small ownership stake. If the company makes money, you make money. If it doesn’t, your stake is worth less. The mechanism is unchanged.

The Dock We're All Still Standing On

Thomas, standing on that Calicut dock in 1497, was solving five problems simultaneously: how to fund the voyage, how to survive catastrophic loss, how to pay without carrying gold, how to agree on a price before the ship returned, and how to let strangers share in the profit.

He and his contemporaries solved each one imperfectly, slowly, and at enormous human cost. The instruments they reached for did not retire when the Age of Discovery ended. They scaled. They digitised. They became, without anyone formally deciding, the default operating system of modern-day finance.

What’s worth sitting with is not just how old these tools are, but how permanent the problems are. Every generation since 1497 has encountered the same five questions and reached, essentially, for the same five answers. But the underlying logic has remained untouched.

Look closely enough and you can see it everywhere. Crypto is a new instrument for the problem of trust and payment across distance: the bill of exchange problem. DeFi is a new structure for the commenda: capital meets effort, terms enforced by code instead of contract. ETFs are nothing but the Dutch East India Company’s model made frictionless. Parametric insurance is bottomry. Every financial innovation has been, at its core, a faster or cheaper version of something a Venetian merchant worked out in the 15th century.

Which raises the only question worth ending on.

If the problems haven’t changed in five hundred years - if every generation inherits the same five questions and builds slightly shinier versions of the same five answers - what would it actually take to change the problems themselves?

Nobody knows.

Maybe it starts, as it always has, with someone standing on a dock, staring at an ocean full of unknowns.

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Miscellaneous 101 for Further Reading

• Did you know? The Dutch traded Manhattan (yes, the one in NY!) in exchange of nutmeg to the British. While the British got Manhattan the Dutch received a spice monopoly that collapsed within a century. They say it was by most measures, the worst trade deal in recorded history.

• If this article opened something up for you, the best person to follow is: Morgan Housel on the psychology of money and financial history.

• William Bernstein’s A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World covers the full arc from ancient spice routes to modern financial markets and reads nothing like a history textbook.

• Nathaniel's Nutmeg is one of the most readable accounts of how violent the spice trade actually was underneath the financial elegance.

• Modern-day underwriting logic is still very much identical to a 13th-century bottomry contract. Fun fact: Lloyd’s of London, which started as a coffee house, has since insured Bruce Springsteen’s voice, a food critic’s taste buds, and briefly, in the 1980s - offered policies against alien abduction.

October 19, 1987 began like any other Monday on Wall Street.

Except it wasn't. The Dow Jones dropped 22.6% of its entire value - in a single trading session. Over $500 billion wiped out in one day. The world called it the Black Monday.

However, the crash didn't start in New York - it began in Hong Kong that morning, rolled through Asia, swept through Europe, and by the time US markets opened, stocks were already in freefall.

Nobody had seen it coming. The market had been on a five-year bull run. The economy was growing. And then a combination of overvalued markets, rising interest rates, a widening trade deficit, and a new generation of “computerised trading programs” designed to automatically sell stocks - created a feedback loop nobody could stop. The computers sold, which drove prices down, which triggered more computers to sell.

Human traders couldn’t intervene fast enough. Global markets froze. Institutional investors tried to sell and found no buyers. The system seized.

When the SEC went through the wreckage, they found something that had never been noticed before: there was no “single security” that represented the entire market. To sell “the market” in a panic, you had to sell hundreds of individual stocks one by one. In a crisis, that was nearly impossible. The regulators decided something needed to be built. That conversation, starting in 1988, is what eventually led to “SPY”.

A 27-year-old at State Street named Jim Ross - nicknamed “the Plumber” by his colleagues, spent the next several years building a fix. In January 1993, SPY was born: the world’s first US-listed ETF.

Today, SPY moves over $54 billion in a single trading day.

Ross later compared it to the iPhone. The platform was the invention. The revolution was what people did with it.

That revolution now manages over $19.5 trillion globally. This is the story of ETFs and how they work.

What an ETF Actually Is

An ETF - Exchange Traded Fund is a fund created by an Asset Management Company that tracks an underlying index.

Three things in that sentence matter.

First, it’s made by an asset management company. The likes of BlackRock, Vanguard, SBI Mutual Fund, Nippon - these AMCs build the fund, buy the underlying securities, list it on a stock exchange, and issue shares in it. You buy those shares through a broker, exactly like buying a share in any company.

Second, an ETF always tracks an index - a rules-based benchmark like the S&P 500, the Nifty 50, the FTSE 100. The index is the rulebook. It tells the AMC exactly what to buy, in what proportion, and when to rebalance. Because the fund follows rules rather than human judgement, it’s called a passive investment.

The exchange traded part matters too. Unlike a mutual fund, which prices once a day after market close, an ETF has a live price throughout the trading day. You can buy at 10am and sell at 2pm. It trades exactly like a stock.

The Three Numbers That Tell You Everything About an ETF

Before you look at any ETF - before the name, the index, the brand - there are three numbers worth understanding.

Expense Ratio - Every ETF charges an annual management fee. It doesn’t show up on an invoice. It’s deducted from the fund’s NAV every single day, in tiny fractions. This fee is called the expense ratio, expressed as a percentage of your investment.

Most ETFs charge between 0.03% and 0.5% per year. Actively managed mutual funds typically charge 1–2%. That gap, compounded over 20 years, is the difference between building wealth and funding someone else’s.

Tracking Error - An ETF promises to mirror its index. Tracking error measures how honestly it keeps that promise - the gap between what the index returned and what the ETF actually delivered.

A well-run ETF has a tracking error almost close to zero. A tracking error below 0.10% is considered excellent. Above 0.50% and you’re not getting what you paid for. When two ETFs track the same index, tracking error is often the clearest way to tell them apart.

AUM - Assets Under Management - Like most investment products, AUM is the total capital invested in a fund. It’s the most reliable measure of investor trust - the larger the AUM, the more investors have voted with their capital.

The ETF Universe Is Bigger Than You’d Imagine

There are now over 10,000 ETFs globally, managing more than $19.5 trillion - a number that has doubled in under a decade.

What started as a way to track the S&P 500 now covers every asset class, geography, and theme imaginable.

There’s an ETF that tracks water infrastructure.

One that follows carbon credit prices.

One that invests only in companies run by female CEOs.

One that bets against the entire market, yes.

And then there’s NANC (a literal reference to Nancy Pelosi) - the Unusual Whales Subversive Democratic ETF - which does something simpler and stranger than all of them. Under the STOCK Act, US politicians must disclose their trades. NANC just follows them and solely invests in equities held by members of the U.S. Congress. It has outperformed the S&P 500 since 2023.

The ETF wrapper is now a universal container. Any investable idea can be packaged into one, globally.

Top Five Markets Where ETFs Thrive

1. United States

The US market is where ETFs were born, and it’s still where most of the world’s money lives. With over 3,500 ETFs and $13 trillion in assets as of 2025, the US accounts for roughly 70% of the entire global ETF market. It covers everything from individual industries, commodities, bonds, currencies, and themes you’d never imagine existed.

BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street are the three giants that dominate this market who between them manage the majority of all assets. ETFs here fall under SEC oversight and trade on exchanges like NYSE and Nasdaq. It’s the most liquid, most competitive, and most mature ETF market in the world.

Here are some of the top ETFs in the US market:

2. European Union (UCITS)

Europe’s ETF market is the second largest in the world, approaching $2.3 trillion in assets spread across exchanges in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Zurich. The market is still growing, with assets nearly doubling over the last five years.

What makes it distinct is the regulatory wrapper inside which everything sits: UCITS - Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities. It sounds bureaucratic, but it matters. UCITS is a European safety standard that governs how funds are structured, how they can be sold, and what protections investors have.

Here are some of the top ETFs in the EU market:

3. United Kingdom

Post-Brexit, the UK now runs its own regulatory framework - the FCA oversees ETFs here. With over £700 billion in assets under management and more than 1,600 ETFs listed on the London Stock Exchange, this is one of the world’s most developed ETF markets.

Here are some of the top ETFs in the UK market:

4. India

India’s ETF market is young but moving rapidly. Total ETF assets crossed ₹10 lakh crore in 2025 - and much of that growth has happened in just the last five years. SEBI regulates ETFs here, and they trade on NSE and BSE just like regular stocks.

An interesting point to note is that a significant portion of the assets are held by institutional investors in India, particularly the EPFO, India’s pension body, which has been channelling provident fund money into ETFs since 2015.

Here are some of the top ETFs in the Indian market:

5. Singapore

Singapore’s ETF market is small in absolute size - roughly SGD 12 billion in total assets, but it plays a role that outweighs those numbers. As a regional financial hub, Singapore has quickly become a gateway for investors wanting exposure to Asian markets without the complexity of investing directly in those countries.

What’s notable is the access SGX provides - there are ETFs listed here that track Chinese, Indian, and pan-Asian markets, giving investors a Singapore-regulated entry point into markets that would otherwise require local accounts and separate compliance.

Here are some of the top ETFs in the Singapore market:

Every market on this list has its own rules, its own regulators, its own entry requirements. What they share is the same underlying idea: one fund, one price, the entire market.

The ETF Universe Is Big. So Where Does That Leave You?

Jim Ross built SPY to solve a specific problem: making the market accessible as a single thing. One security. One price. No maze.

That problem hasn’t changed. The maze has just moved. For a global citizen managing money across currencies, countries, and tax systems, the question of where to put it and through which structure - is no simpler than it was in 1987.

What we covered today is a fraction of what the ETF universe actually contains. The origin story, the mechanics, and the five biggest markets. ETFs are one of the most efficient financial tools ever built - low cost, fully transparent, available to anyone with a brokerage account.

But knowing the tool exists is not the same as knowing when and how to use it. Before you put money into any ETF: know what index it tracks. Look at the expense ratio and tracking error. Your tax residency, the currency you earn in, how long you plan to stay invested, how much volatility you can stomach - all of this shapes what the right decision looks like for you.

The funds in this article are a starting point for your own research.

The platform is the invention. What you do with it is yours.

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Miscellaneous 101 for Further Reading

• Interestingly, there are now more ETFs listed on US exchanges than individual stocks - 4,300 vs. 4,200. The product invented to hold stocks has quietly outnumbered them.

• We probably found the best person to follow for everything ETF: Eric Balchunas - Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst.

• Someone (Inspire Investing) actually built a fund around biblical values. WWJD - What Would Jesus Do is an ETF that invests only in companies that score positively on a proprietary biblical alignment index - no alcohol, no gambling, no tobacco.

• If you thought ‘NANC’ - the ETF that invests in equities held by members of the U.S. Congress is interesting, wait till you see the live tracker built for it - this shows which politicians are buying which stocks, how much, and when in real-time.

• In one of the most funny-but-serious chapter of the ETF history, Tuttle Capital built an ETF purely to bet against a TV presenter - Jim Cramer of the CNBC. The Inverse Cramer Tracker shorted every stock he recommended.

• There also was an ETF with thirty stocks from South Korea's entertainment industry - KPOP, yes that KPOP! It was meant for investors who wanted their portfolio and their playlist to align. While it liquidated in 2025, the story of why it failed is almost as interesting as why it existed.

All the physical gold ever mined in human history would fit into three and a half Olympic swimming pools. And yet, somehow, it runs the world.

Every bar in every vault. Every ring on every finger. Every reserve held by every central bank on earth. Four thousand years of digging, trading, hoarding, and inheriting - and yet the world has never wanted more of anything.

Gold’s story begins around 6000 BC - long before coins, before kingdoms, before written language. But it was in 600 BC that the Kingdom of Lydia, in what is now Turkey, turned it into something the world had never seen before: currency. In doing so, they didn’t just create money. They created the world’s first universally trusted store of value.

And right now, even the most conservative financial institutions on the planet are buying it faster than ever. Central banks added over 1,000 tonnes of gold to their reserves in 2022, 2023, and 2024 - three consecutive record years.

This is the story of where gold comes from, what it costs at every step of its journey, and why the oldest asset in the world is now being owned in entirely new ways.

Forged in the Death of Stars

Gold was not made on this planet.

Billions of years before our solar system existed, two neutron stars spiralled toward each other and collided. In the milliseconds of that collision, the energy released forced protons and neutrons to fuse into heavy elements - gold among them. That gold scattered as stardust, was swept into the forming Earth, and because gold is drawn to iron, sank mostly into the planet’s molten core.

What we mine today is what leaked back to the crust. There will never be more of it than there already is.

Which means every gram ever pulled from the earth still exists somewhere - in a vault, on a wrist, in a circuit board, in a central bank reserve. Unlike oil, which burns. Unlike food, which rots. Unlike currency, which inflates. Gold just persists, being exactly what it was the day it was made.

Which was, roughly, four billion years ago.

Ten Tonnes of Rock for One Troy Ounce

The physical journey begins in places most people will never see.

Mines across West Africa, Nevada, and Western Australia - and dozens of other corners of the world - move and process roughly ten tonnes of rock to produce just 31 grams of gold. Underground shafts drop two kilometres deep. Temperatures cross 50°C. The rock face has to be cooled before anyone can touch it.

Five companies dominate global production: Newmont, Barrick, AngloGold Ashanti, Agnico Eagle, and Gold Fields. Together they control about a third of all the gold mined worldwide. In 2024, global mine production reached 3,300 tonnes. It still wasn’t enough to meet demand.

The industry measures true extraction cost using the All-In Sustaining Cost (AISC) - labour, energy, equipment, royalties, and capital maintenance combined. The 2024 global average was approximately $47 per gram.

The Hallmark Was Earned in Switzerland

What leaves the mine looks nothing like the gold you’d recognise.

It comes out as a doré bar - rough, semi-pure, typically 70-90% gold mixed with silver and copper. To become investment-grade gold, it has to travel to a refinery.

Most of the world’s doré flows to Switzerland. Three refineries - Valcambi, PAMP, and Argor-Heraeus - process a significant share of all gold traded globally. Here, the metal is dissolved in acid, passed through the Wohlwill electrolytic process, and refined until impurities are reduced to parts per million.

What emerges meets the LBMA Good Delivery standard - the global certification that allows gold to move between central banks, exchanges, and dealers anywhere in the world without question. That 999.9 hallmark on a gold coin or bar? It was earned here.

What the World Agrees It’s Worth

This is where the story shifts gear.

Up to this point, gold has been a physical object moving through the world - dug out of rock, refined to purity, shipped across borders. The cost of all of that, end to end, is roughly $51 per gram.

Then the market gets involved.

Gold doesn’t trade at cost. It never has. The spot price - the number quoted on any given day - is set by global exchanges in London, New York, and Shanghai, where supply meets demand in real time. And demand for gold comes from everywhere simultaneously: jewellers, investors, institutions, and central banks.

What Sits Behind That $4,700 Price

From the mine to your hands, the cost of a gram of gold builds at every single step. Mining, refining, moving it across borders in armoured vaults, spot premiums set by global exchanges, import duties - each one adds to the number you eventually see on a price tag. Here is what that looks like:

The largest single jump is the leap from $51 to $152 per gram. That’s the global market premium - the price of everything that makes gold, gold.

From $279 to $4,700: The Last 25 Years of Gold

In January 2000, an ounce of gold cost $279. Equities were booming, dot-com optimism was everywhere, and gold - a metal that pays no dividend and earns no interest - was deeply unfashionable.

Then the bubble burst.

The dot-com collapse erased trillions. September 11 shook confidence in Western stability. The Fed cut rates. Investors started looking for assets that couldn’t be inflated away.

Gold crossed $1,000 for the first time in 2008, the same week Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

By September 2011, it had hit $1,921 - seven times its 2000 price in eleven years.

Then it fell.

Between 2011 and 2015, gold dropped 45% from its peak, settling at $1,077. It stabilised, was ignored, drifted out of headlines.

Then came COVID-19.

In August 2020, gold hit a new record - $2,075 - as governments deployed trillions in stimulus and central banks cut rates to near zero on every continent. When central banks print money on an unprecedented scale, assets with fixed supply revalue.

But the rally didn’t stop there.

Between 2022 and 2024, three forces converged. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation running hotter and longer than governments predicted. And central banks in China, India, Poland, Turkey, and across the Middle East buying gold at a pace not seen in decades.

The World Gold Council reported that central banks purchased a record 1,045 tonnes in 2024 alone.

By early 2026, gold was trading above $4,700 per ounce - a 17-fold increase from its 2000 low.

So How Does the World Hold Gold Today?

For most of human history, owning gold meant owning something physical. That was the point. The weight of it, the colour of it, the fact that it sat in a locker or around a wrist was inseparable from its value.

That is changing.

The world’s oldest asset is being held in the world’s newest ways.

Over the last few decades, the way people own gold has quietly expanded - and for anyone managing assets across borders, the old way of holding it comes with questions that don’t have clean answers.

Where do you store it? Which country do you buy it in? What do you declare at customs? The market has been building an answer. Here is how the world holds gold today:

• Jewellery - gold in its oldest and most personal form. Worn, gifted, passed down. Making charges vary between 8-25% depending on the piece and the maker.

• Coins and bars - 999.9 pure, priced close to spot, accepted by dealers worldwide. Requires storage and insurance.

• Gold ETFs - physical gold held in vaults, traded like a stock on any exchange. Expense ratios of around 0.15-0.5% annually. No storage required.

• Sovereign Gold Bonds - government backed, 2.5% annual interest on top of price appreciation, zero capital gains tax at maturity.

• Digital gold - fractional ownership of physical gold sitting in insured vaults. The same metal, without the logistics.

The Only Question Left

The gold sitting in a digital vault in Singapore and the gold on your ring finger are the same metal, forged in the same stellar collision, pulled from the same earth. What’s changed is everything around it - the borders, the paperwork, the premiums, the platforms.

Central banks don’t buy jewellery. They never have. They buy bars - pure, vaulted, no sentiment attached. They’ve been quietly doing this for decades.

Gold hasn’t evolved. The way we relate to it has.

And the question is simple: are you owning gold, or owning a feeling?

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Miscellaneous 101 for Further Reading

• Idris Elba did the gold journey as a documentary before we wrote it as an article. Watch on Netflix - Gold: A Journey with Idris Elba which takes him from Canadian mine shafts to Ghana to South Africa, tracing exactly this supply chain.

• Peter L. Bernstein’s The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession is the most serious book on gold as a financial force. Moses to the gold standard to modern markets - this one reads like a thriller.

• Genuinely the most entertaining version of the “gold” story we’ve found - by a standup comedian (who is also a financial writer) which goes through 5,000 years of Viking hoards, Egyptian tombs, and why this metal still runs the world.

• The World Gold Council publishes a live quarterly breakdown of how much gold every central bank holds, who bought, and who sold.

• HSBC launched a retail gold token in Hong Kong in 2023, and crossed $1 billion in trading volume within two years. This SCMP’s explainer on tokenised gold is one of the clearest out there.

• And finally - the New York Federal Reserve's gold vault sits 80 feet below Manhattan, holds 6,331 metric tonnes, and you can even book a public tour of the place. The page alone is worth five minutes of your time.

At some point in your life, you will be at a dinner table full of NRIs when someone leans back and says, “My property investment in Pune almost doubled, yaar!” The table is impressed. And rightly so. Then, the room does what it always does – someone raises a glass, someone pulls up listings on their phone, and the conversation doesn’t stop until midnight. And just like that, everyone’s a real estate expert.

But here is the thing nobody said out loud: there are really only two reasons to buy property in India, and they lead to very different destinations.

The first is emotional. Your parents have somewhere to live. Your kids have somewhere to vacation. You have somewhere to retire. There is a bedroom that is yours even when you are 6,000 miles away. If that is your reason – stop reading here. That is a completely legitimate decision and no spreadsheet should talk you out of it.

The second is financial. You want this property to grow your wealth. You are treating it as an investment. And if that is even part of your reason, then the number everyone quoted at that dinner table is not the number you should be making decisions with.

Maybe you’ve been eyeing a property – that ₹1 crore flat in Bangalore. The question sitting at the back of your mind is a simple one: is this actually worth it?

And that’s exactly what we’re attempting to answer today. Not with a yes or a no, but with the actual math.

The Price Tag Is a Polite Lie

Let’s take that ₹1 crore 2BHK in Bangalore. A clean number. Easy to say out loud.

But the moment you decide to buy, four additional costs kick in before you own a single tile. Stamp duty and registration to the Karnataka government: ₹7,50,000. A MoDT charge on your home loan: ₹48,000. Brokerage to the agent: ₹1,50,000. And fit-out to make an unfurnished flat liveable: ₹10,00,000.

Here is a breakdown of what it actually costs to own that house on day one:

Now layer in the financing. You put down 20% – that’s ₹20 lakh from your pocket. The bank lends you the remaining ₹80 lakh at 7.5% per annum over 20 years, which works out to a monthly EMI of ₹64,447.

Your own money committed from day one: the ₹20 lakh down payment plus the ₹19.48 lakh in entry costs – a total of ₹39.48 lakh. The bank puts in ₹80 lakh. That is the actual starting position of this investment, not ₹1 crore.

A note on NRI home loan rates: Rates currently range between 7.5–8.5%. As India’s lending market matures, these are expected to trend toward 7–7.5% over time — which might improve the cash flow picture for future buyers.

Since you’re holding for 10 years within a 20-year loan, the loan isn’t paid off when you sell. Here is exactly where your EMI money goes, broken into 5-year periods:

This table is worth sitting with for a moment. Over 10 years, you will pay ₹77.33 lakh in EMIs. Of that, ₹51.6 lakh goes to the bank as interest – money that is gone permanently. Only ₹25.7 lakh actually reduces the loan. At the end of year ten, you still owe ₹54.3 lakh.

This is why counting the full sale price as your receipt is a mistake. If the flat sells for ₹1.97 crore and ₹54.3 lakh is still owed to the bank, your starting point before tax and brokerage is ₹1.43 crore – not ₹1.97 crore.

You now know what it costs to buy. Owning the flat means two more chapters: what it earns while you hold it, and what you actually walk away with when you sell.

What the Rent Actually Pays For

Let’s start with the rent, because what lands in your account looks very different from what the broker quoted.

A ₹1 crore 2BHK in Bangalore rents for ₹22,000-₹28,000 per month. We’ll use ₹25,000 as an example here. That gives a gross rental yield of 3% on the purchase price, which is actually among the better yields in India. Mumbai and Delhi typically come in at 2-2.5%.

But 3% is the ceiling, not the floor. Here is what the income statement actually looks like after costs:

The rent covers 24% of the EMI. Every month, the remaining 76% comes out of your pocket.

This is simply how most financed residential properties in India work. The rent does not make you money. It softens the monthly outflow. The real bet here is entirely on what the property is worth when you sell.

An interesting note on rental tax that every NRI landlord needs to read

Under Section 195 of the Income Tax Act, your tenant is legally required to deduct 30% TDS (tax deducted at source) from your rent and pay it directly to the government. In practice, this means you receive ₹17,500 a month, not ₹25,000.

Your actual tax liability is usually much lower than 30%. After the standard deduction on rental income and a full home loan interest deduction, taxable rental income for most NRI landlords is close to nil. The 30% sits as a tax credit in your Form 26AS, a government tax statement, and you reclaim it as a refund after filing your annual Indian income tax return. The catch: it is locked for months, and filing the return is mandatory every year you own the property.

The Numbers Your Broker Won’t Walk You Through

Before asking whether the whole investment works, it helps to ask a simpler question first: does the rent alone justify what you paid? A few standard metrics answer this and each one tells you something different.

i. Cap rate: Is the rent a fair return on the price?

The capitalisation rate, or cap rate, measures the return a property generates from rent alone, ignoring how it’s financed. Think of it as: if you paid cash for this property, what percentage return would the rent give you each year?

Formula: Annual Net Operating Income ÷ Property Value.

In our case: ₹1,88,000 ÷ ₹1,00,00,000 = 1.88%.

For context, investors who buy property primarily for rental income typically look for a cap rate of 5-6% or higher. Indian residential real estate almost never gets there. What this tells you is simple: buyers are not paying these prices for the rent. They are paying for future appreciation. That is a legitimate reason to buy, but it should be a deliberate choice, not a surprise.

ii. The other side: INR depreciation

Every number above is in rupees. But if you earn, save, and spend in dollars, dirhams, or pounds, the rupee’s steady decline against your home currency is a real and recurring cost that never shows up in any Indian bank statement.

The rupee has depreciated at an average of approximately 3.5% per year against the US dollar over the past 20 years moving from around ₹45 in 2004 to ₹85 by 2024.

What this means for your rental yield: A cap rate of 1.88% in rupee terms, after 3.5% annual currency erosion, translates to a negative real return in dollar terms, roughly −1.5% per year. To be precise: the rental yield alone (stripped of any asset appreciation) does not keep pace with INR depreciation for a dollar-denominated investor. This does not mean the investment is worthless, the asset itself appreciates, but the income stream, in isolation, does not protect your purchasing power abroad.

Now here is the nuance: INR depreciation also works in your favour on the liability side. Your EMI is a fixed rupee obligation. As the rupee weakens against the dollar, the real dollar cost of each EMI payment declines over time. At 7.5% in INR terms today, the effective USD cost of your interest burden reduces by approximately 3.5% per year as the rupee weakens. By year 10, each EMI you pay represents meaningfully fewer dollars than the first one did. This partially offsets the depreciation drag on your returns, but does not eliminate it.

The full FX picture on this investment:

The bottom line: in dollar terms, after FX erosion, the net annualised return on this investment is approximately 0.9-1%. That is the number an NRI investor should anchor to when comparing Indian property against offshore savings, US equities, or dollar-denominated fixed deposits yielding 4-5% today.

iii. Cash-on-cash return: What is this doing to your wallet right now?

This is the most grounded of the metrics. It measures the annual cash return on the money you personally put in, ignoring the bank’s contribution entirely.

Formula: Annual Cash Flow ÷ Total Equity You Deployed.

Taking the annual cash outflow of ₹5,85,600 from the table above, divided by the ₹39,48,000 of your own capital in this deal: -14.8%.

This does not mean the investment is losing money, you own an asset that is appreciating, and that appreciation is captured in the XIRR figure. What cash-on-cash tells you is something more specific: the annual cost of staying invested in that asset.

What Happens When You Sell

Assume you hold for 10 years. Bangalore residential prices appreciated at approximately 7% per year between 2019 and 2024. At 7% annually, your ₹1 crore flat grows to approximately ₹1.97 crore. Let’s work through what that actually means for your pocket.

But that ₹1.27 crore is only what you receive on sale day. To understand whether this was actually a good investment, you need the full picture with every rupee paid out over 10 years, versus every rupee that came back.

This is the number that matters if you are buying for investment. Everything else – the price doubling, the headline appreciation – is noise until you see this:

A property that nearly doubled in price over 10 years delivered roughly 4.5–5% per year in real annualised return after all costs. The ₹51.6 lakh paid in interest is the single largest reason the number looks so different from the headline price growth, that money left your account every month and never came back.

A cash buyer in the same property gets closer to 7-8% XIRR, because that entire interest drag disappears. This is still comparable to a well-run Fixed Deposit, with significantly more paperwork and none of the liquidity.

How Capital Gains Tax Works for NRIs and What Budget 2024 Changed

If you hold property for more than 2 years, the gain qualifies as Long-Term Capital Gain (LTCG). Budget 2024 changed the rules and NRIs were handed the harder end of the change.

Before July 23, 2024, NRI sellers could apply indexation (adjusting the purchase price for inflation to reduce the taxable gain) and pay 20% tax. Post-Budget 2024: the rate dropped to 12.5%, but indexation was removed entirely for NRIs. Resident Indians were given the choice of either method. NRIs were not. It is now 12.5% on the full nominal gain, no inflation adjustment.

Two things to sort before you sign the sale agreement

1. Watch out for TDS over-deduction. The buyer is required to deduct TDS at 14.95% of the full sale value — not just the gain. On a ₹1.97 crore sale, that is approximately ₹29.45 lakh deducted before you receive anything. But your actual tax liability is only ₹11.38 lakh. The extra ₹18.07 lakh is refunded — but only after you file your ITR, which typically means waiting 6–12 months. To avoid this, file Form 13 (Lower Deduction Certificate) with your Assessing Officer at least 30–45 days before the sale. It certifies your actual liability and instructs the buyer to deduct only that amount.

2. Section 54 exemption can eliminate the tax entirely. If you reinvest the capital gains of ₹87.52 lakh into another residential property within two years of the sale, your entire ₹11.38 lakh tax liability is exempt. This requires planning well before the sale — not the week after.

Getting your money out of India

Once the sale proceeds land in your NRO account (a bank account NRIs use for Indian income), you can remit the money abroad. You will need to file Form 15CA online and obtain a CA-certified Form 15CB, a document confirming your tax compliance. Allow 4–8 weeks for the process. The annual repatriation limit is USD 1 million per financial year.

So, is it Really Worth it?

The friend at that dinner table wasn’t wrong. His property did double. That is a real outcome.

But here is where we land. If your reason is emotional – your parents, your retirement, your roots, just do it. Those reasons are real and no spreadsheet should talk you out of them.

But if any part of the reason is investment, you owe yourself a more honest number than the one that got a glass raised at dinner. The full picture – entry costs, interest, taxes, maintenance, and what you actually walk away with at exit.

The people who have gotten Indian real estate right went in with their eyes open.

That is all we are asking you to do.

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Miscellaneous 101 for Further Reading

• For a city-by-city breakdown of how Indian property prices have actually moved, ANAROCK’s Annual Residential Real Estate Report 2024 is the most credible free resource out there.

• CA for NRI here explains the tax rules for NRIs post-Budget 2024 without making your eyes glaze over.

• Pico Iyer’s TED talk “Where is home?” has nothing to do with property and everything to do with why NRIs feel the pull they feel towards India. Fifteen minutes well spent.

• Akshat Shrivastava on X: “Buying a flat in India as an investment is a waste of money.” He then lists three reasons to do it anyway. One of them is: you love the place.

• For a real case study that puts the FX angle in stark terms, Business Today covered the story of an NRI who bought a Pune flat in 2010 for ₹45 lakh and sold it for ₹1 crore in 2024.