In my twenties I read everything, my religious ritual. The Economist, cover to cover without fail. Barron’s. Their roundtables. So many newspapers, my Sundays utterly consumed. Wall Street research, countless numbing reports. Week in review. Ahead too. Year after year in preview. If I learned anything at all, it is that there is no single truth, just interpretation. And it’s not that there is anything wrong with bein

Losing money sucks. Lots of other things do too. Most of us hate being wrong. We go to extraordinary lengths to protect our egos. Which is absurd of course, but we are curious little creatures, taught as children to aim for 100% on each test, to win every ball game. At some point in a trading career, we either learn to deal with the humiliation of making mistakes or we fail. And the way karma works, the harder we den

Hope all goes well… “My favorite part about today’s zoom was that I saw you all collectively conjure the entrepreneurial/creative spirit,” I wrote to my team after a late-Friday internal meeting, a break-through brainstorming session. “It is the key ingredient for anything truly innovative, magnificent,” I continued, yet another insane week nearly done, racing to capitalize on a world changing at breathtaking speed.

“A capitalistic economy is definitionally a Ponzi scheme,” explained the CIO, a student of economic and market history, his fortune built by staying a step ahead, timing cycles, anticipating what comes next. “If it stops expanding it collapses. If the economy stops moving it suffocates, like a shark. That is why the Fed behaves as it does, intervening so aggressively, to stop this from happening,” he explained. “Even

Hope all goes well… “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” tweeted Elon. “Do you support this?” asked Musk, Saturday afternoon, providing his 62.5mm Twitter followers a yes/no voting app. “I will abide(n) by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes,” added Elon. “Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have

“Web 1.0 was flat, static,” said the visionary, unseating the slow-moving incumbents. “Web 2.0 arrived and was dynamic, interactive — it is what we mostly experience today,” added the founder/CEO, lifting his phone from the table, looking at the screen, placing it gently down. “Web 3.0 will be immersive. And we will spend an increasing amount of our lives within the new worlds that it will open.” I’d zipped int

Hope all goes well… All great investment opportunities close gaps. In the most basic sense, they narrow the space between where a price is now and where it should be. The biggest ones appear when most of us see one reality, while subterranean forces are creating something quite different. When such gaps exist, markets tend to send subtle signals, behaving in ways that make little sense based on our understanding of c

The market is never wrong. The price it produces reflects the collective wisdom of humanity, weighted toward those with the most capital at risk. And because money generally flows to those with the greatest aptitude, the collective judgement resulting from their aggregate bets – reflected in the market clearing price – does a better job than any other forecasting algorithm ever developed. But just because

Hope all goes well… “You know the best thing about dying in a skydiving accident Dad?” asked my 18yr old daughter in the kitchen. “What’s that Liv?” I asked, smiling. Mara looked on, increasingly unhappy with us both. “If you die of old age, you won’t even move the statistical needle, but if you die tomorrow, you’ll have a material impact on the number of Connecticut skydiving deaths,” explained my morbid mathematici

There are two good things about being young and broke. The best part of course, is that you are not old. But you also have little to lose. And that is liberating for a person with decades to recover from taking risk in ventures that might fail. Having a large group of such youth is an invaluable asset for the older citizens supported by their innovations and output. But powerful forces, if improperly managed, create