Blog Introduction + User Manual (Click me!)

About Me + This Blog:

Hey there! It's Timothy. This is TimmyWrites, a one-of-a-kind blog that is a repository for all MUN + debate related resources, from position papers to background guides and everything in between!

First of all, why should you be even reading this blog? Why should you even trust this random person on the internet?

If you don't know me, I'm Timothy Chummar, a high schooler from Sharjah, UAE. 

Model UN and debates have literally changed my life.

How does 12 conferences as a delegate, 12 prizes, a youth business summit and 4 conferences as a chairperson change your life? 

Well, it's the reason I've received a lot of awards + financial grants for my Model UN work and its tangential work.

All this and more are the result of Model UN and debates in my life. It's made me a better writer, thinker, and speaker which has helped me in multiple ways.

It changed my life tremendously and I know it can change yours. That's why I've created this blog.

Purpose Of This Blog:

This blog is meant to be a repository of resources. Apart from a few tips, I'm giving you the unfiltered sauce: the reason why I stacked all those awards. Of course, I've improved over time which is why each position paper and background guides gets better over time.

I've compiled the resources I wish I had as a high-schooler, starting out with my MUN journey. You can get a ton of MUN advice from the internet, but nobody shows you HOW to do stuff. I'm ungatekeeping all of my documents and making it open-source for you.

This should help you have clarity on what an award-winning position paper, draft resolution, and background guide should look like. To win, you need the right resources and you can find them all right here. Happy reading. :)

How To Use This:

Disclaimer: There's no copyright for any of this, but that doesn't mean that you can just copy my work. It's not meant to be a crutch. It's meant to be a guide for you, so please play fair and don't just steal all of my work in its entirety. You can be inspired, but intellectual theft isn't classy.

Click 'Labels' at the left to navigate through my posts. You'll find the classification of all of my resources there.

That's all from my side. Go for the prize and make me proud! 

Article #3

Is India The Graveyard Of Startups?
And what can India to do fix it

- Timothy Chummar

According to the World Population Review, India is ranked as the third highest country in terms of unicorns (71 in total) with companies like Flipkart, PhonePe, Dream11, & CRED becoming household names and sponsoring the Indian Premier League (the largest professional T20 cricket league in the world). Yet, behind the gloss of the startup world in India, what we don’t realize is the dark reality for the rest that don’t make it to their IPO.

A study by the IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics in 2018 states that 90% of Indian startups fail within the first 5 years of their existence. And even if the startup survives, they face the prospect of slim margins, low profitability, constant nudges from VCs to grow at an unsustainable rate, which eventually leads even more companies to crash out and burn in the long run, taking down the livelihoods of thousands of employees in the process. In fact, only 15% of all startups are profitable in India, which explains why the startup world fires 1600 people a day (on average, according to 2023 figures).

Even more disturbingly, according to most news outlets (including CNBC), India ranks consistently as one of the worst countries in the world to get a business or a startup running. According to the World Bank’s Doing Business archive, India’s rank in ease of doing business is 63rd, lower than Rwanda, Beb a long way to go in terms of making a more conducive environment for our startups.

Why is the entire system like, and how did we even get here?

There are four reasons as to why many Indian startups failed especially during the last half of the previous decade, one of which was a short-term problem and other of which is a structural problem in the mindset of Indian entrepreneurs:

The first issue that caused many startups to crash and burn in India especially during the pandemic and its aftermath is the amount of unsustainable debt in the form of investments and other loans that Indian startups took on during the early 20s.

During the pandemic, the federal funds rate was cut tremendously to prop up the economy (this is one of the major pillars of expansionary monetary policy – it was reduced all the way down to 0.25% from March 2020 to February 2022). During this time, it was easy to take loans as the interest rate was virtually 0% for all practical purposes, which meant that investors could start investing in newer, more riskier markets.

During this time, many Indian startups raised a lot of money and started to expand tremendously (which was considered by many at the time as the golden age of the tech industry, because companies hired aggressively to meet demand & they could afford it as well due to a flood of investor money).

For example, Byju’s (one of India’s largest ed-tech companies) raised billions of dollars from investors like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Blackstone, T. Rowe Price and Blackrock. With all this money at hand, Byju’s started to rapidly expand into other countries outside of India, aggressively bought up smaller startups and companies like Aakash, White Hat Jr., GeoGebra, & Tynker which costed the company billions of dollars in the process, increased spending on marketing, and hired a lot of employees to fill in gaps in their sales and customer service teams. 

But when the pandemic ended and the interest rates went up again, many of these Indian startups were forced to pay back debts or loans they took up during the pandemic at staggering interest rates. Add to the fact that their revenue was way lower than their value, and you’ll see why many companies resorted to their last option: freezing hiring or laying off workers or in the worst case, defaulting on their loans and filing for bankruptcy like Byju’s did. In short, their fundamentals were bad.

Secondly, the situation in the Indian startup system was eerily similar to the dot-com crash of the early 2000s in the USA and therein laid the second problem. Similar to how many dot-com companies had bloated valuations and limited profitability, startups started rushing into sectors like quick commerce after the success of companies like Zomato, with investors getting really excited in the process and throwing millions of dollars into the process.

The issue was that there were a handful of companies who truly dominated the space with their distribution and speed and there was not much of a product differentiator because in the case of delivery apps, the same items that could have been delivered at a way cheaper cost by local grocery shops without a requirement to market their services. Add in the fact that the target base that newer startups were trying to reach out to (Tier 2 cities in India) primarily buy from these local store as it’s way cheaper for them and they don’t have to pay extra money for online deliveries when they can get the same groceries with no extra charges at local shops.

So, these small startups couldn’t defeat the giants with their distribution and pan-India reach and simultaneously couldn’t defeat local industries who could severely undercut their prices because they have zero/extremely low variable costs in terms of delivery and no requirement to charge more for delivery services, which is why many of them went out of business. 

Thirdly, many companies over-estimate the Indian market, specifically the consumer base of India. For example, despite Zomato raising $1.3B from its IPO, the CFO of Zomato announced that they would be terminating operations in 225 cities. And even with the other 800, Zomato isn’t profitable with 60% of their revenue coming from just 8 cities.

The problem is that 80% of small stores (referenced in the previous argument) exist in Tier 2 cities in India, which makes the competition at these cities intense because these small stores can undercut delivery apps in the regions which makes profitability a distant dream for many apps.

On the flip side, people in metro cities like Bangalore or Chennai (Tier 1) generally are willing to pay for more expensive higher-quality goods because they have more disposable income than people in Tier 2 cities and are much more likely to purchase online rather than going to local stores. Moreover, out of the 300M households in India, only 10M of these contribute to 50% of India’s consumption and they’re located in just 30 cities across India.

Anybody outside of this bracket is extremely price-sensitive, which means that they’re very picky about what they purchase, which is the kind of demographic apps like Zomato cannot sell to. For instance, why buy a burger on Zomato and pay extra money for delivery charges (because delivering items in 10-30 minutes will cost more) when you can purchase the burger at a local restaurant with no extra cost? For people in these cities, their value is attached to money, and they’ll do anything they can to save it up. For people in metro cities, their value is attached to convenience and the time saved in deliveries, even if it means paying a bit extra.

Many VCs initially invested in startups with the promise to ‘capture the Indian market of more than a billion people,’ but over time VCs realized that they were being sold empty dreams because most of India couldn’t even afford the products and services that these startups were providing.

That’s what led to situations like TeachMint where the company was valued at $45.4M but only made $91K one year. TeachMint was able to recover the losses later, but not many companies are that fortunate. Even foreign companies (like Shopee from Singapore) realized how despicable the situation was and left India.

Many startups in India are not even trying to target Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities/consumers in India, with CRED’s CEO openly admitting that he’s only targeting consumers who own credit cards, and they have no intention of expanding to other cities. He’s not wrong, considering that only 5-6% of Indians even own a credit card. 

That’s the state of India startups: grand visions only to be cratered by the reality of being able to only sell to Tier 1 customers (usually with cutthroat competition). This is the story of every single one of the 9 startups out of 10 created (whilst not usually the only reason, it does affect every single startup in some measure or the other.)

Lastly, startups in today’s economy must compete in a market which was virtually non-existent prior to the 2000s: the attention market. Startups must spend millions of dollars on marketing and sales, with very little upside at the end of the tunnel. For instance, business pundits generally recommend that the lifetime value of a customer should be 3 times the acquisition cost of that customer. In India, the ratio is 5 times the lifetime value of a customer which is being spent in marketing a product.

This was the reason behind the downfall of Byju’s (as earlier mentioned) and also the reason why the hottest ed-tech startup in India (Physics Wallah) is massively expanding. For example, whilst Byju’s ended up spending nearly $283M in marketing alone which accounted for a huge chunk of their costs, Physics Wallah spent around $113K simply due to the brand name of their CEO who was a famous Indian teacher on YouTube. That’s why Physics Wallah’s CAC is way lower than Byju’s, which meant that Physics Wallah became one of the only edtech firms in India to sustain a profit.

Not all is gloomy in the Indian start-up sector though, with multiple titans emerging from the Indian economy. And the good news is that multiple startups are mushrooming organically from tier 2 and tier 3 cities themselves, with the government reporting that nearly 50% of all startups come from these strata of the economy. Indian startups have been some of the most successful in the world and have provided millions of jobs to the economy. It’s just that the disparity between the valuation and the actual revenue is sadly unmissable and a huge turn off for foreign investors.

If startups can focus on developing amazing products and services people genuinely need (instead of developing ‘premium’ products and services no one really needs just to exit with millions of dollars or sell off to a larger company) and if the government can step up its efforts in strengthening the middle class of India who can afford to be part of the startup ecosystem as consumers, then we’ll be doing justice to the thousands of startups all across India. If we can fix these structural problems in the Indian startup ecosystem, that’s when the magic really begins.

Econonomics Articles Introduction

 Hey there! It's Timothy.

I'm a economics guy, to put it simply. 

"Tell me if you can find somebody else who binges on Jacob Clifford, Vox, and a bunch of Indian economics channels in his free time, and I'll tell you what kind of a guy he is."

- Socrates (not the one you're thinking about)

I've done a lot of economics work in high school including two research papers I'm working on right now (for the hawks, it's behavioral and developmental), writing about Indian economic policies & problems for a think tank at the University of Virginia, and a lot more stuff.

This segment of my blog is going to be a lot of economics rants, exploring why the world works the way it does, and the occasional crashout either about the national team (hopefully) or my exams.

Happy reading! =)

Article #2

Did Jane Street Screw Up The Indian Options Market?

How a Wall Street giant rigged India’s markets—and why SEBI finally struck back

- By Timothy Chummar

One fine morning, SEBI (the Securities and Exchange Board of India) delivered a massive blow to Jane Street, one of the largest quantitative trading firms in the world. They accused Jane Street of market manipulation, banned Jane Street from trading in Indian markets temporarily and even demanded that Jane Street pay fines to the tune of $567M. Where did Jane Street go terribly wrong in dealing with the Indian markets?

Here’s a simple run down of the whole issue:

The whole can of worms opened up when Jane Street sued a rival investment management company, Millennium Management Global Investment and two former employees (Douglas Schadewald & Daniel Spottiswood). Why? The employees developed a trading algorithm for Jane Street, which was initially viewed with skepticism by other Jane Street employees. But when they tested the algorithm in the market, it went wildly beyond expectations. This algorithm earned so much money that Jane Street knew that had to keep it under wraps, which is why they signed a confidential & IP agreement in December 2023.

Despite the agreement, both left and joined Millennium Management and once they joined, Millennium Management started to make lots of profits whilst Jane Street’s profits started to tank, which is why they went to court. But Jane Street was extremely secretive about its ‘insider strategy’ (if you will) and to which country it was being applied to the point where one lawyer stated in a hearing that the algorithm was so profitable that even stating the country could lead others to virtually reverse engineer the investment strategy. But it was too late, because Millennium Management’s lawyers already accidentally revealed the country’s name in previous proceedings: India. The scale at which this operation was happening was enormous. To give context, Jane Street earned $1B from the Indian options market in 2023 alone.

Eventually, both parties settled the case, but it aroused the curiosity of SEBI and they started investigating Jane Street’s operations in India by checking every single trade Jane Street performed in Indian markets.

They started by looking at Jane Street’s trades from January 2023 to March 2025 and came up with two potential strategies that Jane Street used: intraday index manipulation and extended marking the close.

The strategy of primal concern for us is intraday index manipulation. First, which index did they target? The chose ‘BANKNIFTY’, an index that tracks the 12 largest & most liquid banks in the country. It was set up in 2003 as a sort of monitor to track the health of our banking sector. How did they rig the game in their favor? This is where the concept of intraday index manipulation comes into play.

Jane Street’s Indian companies would aggressively buy BANKNIFTY index stocks in the morning, but specifically the top 5 banks. Why? Because the top 5 banks in the index contribute nearly 80% of the volume, if Jane Street trades these stocks at a high volume (with Jane Street’s computational power and sheer volume of money), the entire index can rise or fall. And also, keep in mind that BANKNIFTY is one of the most popular indexes amongst retail traders with nearly 1.6M unique entities being traded in BANKNIFTY index options.

At the same time, the international offices of Jane Street (specifically the Jane Street Asia Trading office in Hong Kong) would bet on the index falling. Specifically, Jane Street’s Indian entities would bet on the cash market that the index would rise whilst the Hong Kong office would bet in the derivatives market that the index would fall. Overall, Jane Street’s employees reasoned that even if they lost in the cash market, they would recoup the money with huge profits in the derivates market.

Here's an example to show how it worked: on January 17th, market sentiment about a top 5 bank in the index (HDFC) was negative as HDFC posted its worst day in nearly 4 years over margin concerns because of which the BANKNIFTY tanked that morning. But between 9 and 12, Jane Street India bought stocks and futures in HDFC’s major rivals worth upwards of $515M which suddenly increased the index’s value. Smaller retail traders assumed that they would ride the wave and put call options on BANKNIFTY stocks, but they didn’t realize that behind the scenes, Jane Street’s Hong Kong office already bet in the options market that the index will fall which is what eventually happened. As soon as the call options started to increase, Jane Street immediately sold the stocks, which tanked the index (remember the volatility factor of the index). Jane Street ran away with millions in profit but left retail traders with heavy losses. In this example, they lost about $22.9M in the cash market but gained nearly $554.7M in the options market.

Why is this critical to India? From what I’ve seen of traders in India, here’s a few reasons as to why Jane Street’s actions severely affect Indian traders:

1) The options market in India is extremely huge. To give you context: in 2019, only 700,000 people traded in options. Today, it’s 10 million. In the US, the share of options trading is 70 percent. In India, it’s 99.6 percent. In most countries, the trading volume of the derivates market is generally 5-15 times the size of the cash market trading volume. In India, it’s 400 times the size of the cash market trading volume with a $1.1 trillion turnover in March 2024.

So, if manipulation were to happen at this scale, it could heavily discourage options traders which would become very detrimental to a major segment of economic activity in India.

2) Most investors in this realm are young investors (aged between 20-30, the figures are 43 percent in 2024 as opposed to 11 percent in 2019). Jane Street’s actions could potentially disincentivize new investors from entering the market if they feel it’s not worth the investment and has a high risk of failure (add in the fact that they know that the scales are tipped in favor of volume traders who have immense computational power and can raise and crash markets at will).

I don’t see that as a strong possibility, but it might gradually erode faith in the stock market and SEBI’s role in regulating large multinational quantitative traders.

3) It might change the power dynamics of the stock market. Before the advent of the internet, stock trading and options trading was only restricted to extremely rich people sitting in offices who had access to stockbrokers. The internet changed all that and every day people could have access to the stock market, and it was perceived in an almost delusional light where you only had to trade stocks to make it big. The stock market became democratized, and it opened the possibilities of making it big in the stock market for everyone.

Now, with Jane Street’s actions, it’s starting to cement the elephant in the room: the true winners of the stock market are people who have access to large sums of money, huge computational power, and access to intelligent math and CS nerds from top colleges.

The stock market is slowly but surely starting to become more oligarchical in nature, with the big IB firms and hedge funds having the last laugh leaving little room to spare for tiny retail investors.

4) What they’re doing is borderline illegal. To back this up, SEBI stated that Jane Street’s actions were manipulative in the fact that Jane Street is moving around pieces in the market to profit from them.

In a truly equal stock market, the price of a share or an option is determined by genuine demand or supply without artificial distortion by external companies. Jane Street fundamentally goes against the grain of stock market ethics by artificially boosting or tanking demand for certain shares or options by trading in both the cash market and the options market.

Trading in both is fine, but trading to manipulate one of the markets (mostly the derivatives market) is manipulative. That’s unethical and that’s what SEBI is trying to crack down on.

5) SEBI is protectionist for a good reason. In this case, SEBI prioritizes institutional investors in India over Jane Street’s profits, and for good reason. If SEBI allows Jane Street to continue, that might encourage other companies to exploit this fundamental weakness in the options market in India.

And also, if we think about this from a practical perspective, why is it that many investors trade in options? It’s because you only have to spend a little money to potentially get huge returns when the market’s value goes up. But if you’re fighting Jane Street in the race to make money, it’s like David trying to fight Goliath. Unless we find the stone and the sling (which was momentarily discovered during the whole GameStop incident), no retail investor can make money in options except if he is lucky because of the unpredictability caused by market-shifting forces like Jane Street’s investment strategies.

This is further proven by the fact that 91 percent of retail traders lose their money in trading derivatives this year, but people are still delusionally trying to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from a few thousand dollars in investments.

Now that we’ve seen how Jane Street affected everyday retail investors in India, how can we fix this? As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been thinking about some solutions which could work if implemented properly:

1) Restrict derivatives intraday index trading to a capped amount: This isn’t the most optimal solution for all stakeholders involved, but it does limit the amount Jane Street can profit from Indian markets without completely ruining retail investors’ chances at making money of options.

2) Early detection: The issue with this particular case is that it took SEBI years to even detect what Jane Street was doing in the Indian markets. Potentially using AI/ML models to detect abnormalities (especially in derivatives intraday index trading) in trading volumes or detecting consistent patterns (like BANKNIFTY being heavily traded by Jane Street and then immediately being sold off later on in the day) could nip manipulative actions in the bud. Regulators should start looking at both markets simultaneously in order to get a clearer picture of what is actually going on behind the shadows.

3) Tighten rules around expiry days: Options fall under a weekly expiry, so the closer you move to the expiry day, the more volatile the option (as you have equally likely chances sometimes of making a profit/loss). That’s why big traders like to manipulate the prices during those times because they can make their options pay off. One way of fixing that would be to cap the amount you can trade on the expiry day in order to discourage huge investors from manipulating the market at the last minute.

In conclusion, India has learned the hard way how it feels to be the target of one of the largest quantitative trading firms in the world but it doesn’t have to happen again. If we can regulate Jane Street’s presence in India, we can inject life again into the options market and help investors responsibly trade without having to worry about the cards that are stacked against them.