Hope all goes well… “I suck,” he said with a sigh. “But I think my family still loves me,” he continued, trying to make himself laugh but failing. “I got absolutely killed in January. Then I turned it around after that Trump speech in Feb.” He paused, a long one. I hugged him through the phone. We’ve all been there, it’s brutal. “Then I don’t even know what went wrong. Which admittedly doesn’t make sense. Because I r

Overall: “Some people blindly invested offshore and were in a rush to do so,” explained China’s central bank chief, justifying his recent capital controls. “Some of this outbound investment was not in line with our own policies and had no real gain for China.” No doubt he’s right. The tycoons fleeing Chinese capital markets have done so selfishly. “So to regulate capital flows, I think it is normal,” concluded the ce

“Things come and things go, they rise and fall, it is the same thing all the time,” he said. We looked out across the valley. I’d returned to an old friend, seventh-generation high altitude mountain guide. “Glaciers advance, retreat. You see this yourself, no?” The Glacier d’Argentiere ended in a blue ice tumble, far above where I’d left it in 1998. “Someday they will advance again. Maybe in very many years. Nobody c

Hope all goes well… “My father was born in 1900, and lived through the great depression, hyperinflation, two world wars, a Russian prison camp, and so forth,” said the German in perfect English, over lunch, looking out across the river Limmat, from Zurich’s Hotel Storchen, established 1357. “He would tell me and my brothers, the world does not wait boys, it does not stop turning.” Swans paddled against the current, m

Overall: “Fly me to the moon… OK,” tweeted Elon Musk, an American original, an immigrant. “This should be a really exciting mission that hopefully gets the world really excited about sending people into deep space again,” said Musk, announcing plans to send the world’s first two private citizens on a journey they’ll never forget. Nor will we. Because it’s the breaking of boundaries that propel us forward. Inspi

Hope all goes well… “Un peu,” I answered. That means ‘a little.’ Which is about how much French I’ve retained after all these years. I’ve snuck into the Alps for a couple days with an old friend, 7th generation high-altitude mountain guide. And he’d asked if my legs were tired after five hours, knee-high in the forest, a late-season blizzard upon us. “Mon petit nature,” I continued, breathless, beating him to the pun

“When they laugh at your idea,” said the esteemed investor. “That’s usually a good place to start,” he continued. We were discussing thematic investing. “The first stage of any paradigm shift is a humiliating period for those who see a different future.” There are a wide range of factors that drive investment themes, trends. Of course monetary policy drives many. For reasons we may never fully understand, when centra

“You either have risk on, or you do not,” said Simplicity, walking Occam’s Razor, “There are only these two states, nothing more.” He lifted both hands, palms up, to illustrate the point. “Now, reflect on the levels of anxiety you have experienced in each state throughout your career.” And decades of an agitated existence flashed before my eyes. “There are times when you are carrying an enormous amount of risk and sl

Hope all goes well… “You know the thing about being in the middle?” asked Teddy, over a one-on-one dinner. “I annoy Jackson, Jackson bullies me. I bully Charlie and Charlie annoys me,” explained my middle son. “So out of the three of us, I’m the only one who gets annoyed and bullied.” I laughed, as did he. You see, Teddy finds the humor in things. It’s there for those who look. He falls asleep reading comic books, wa

Overall: “The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first month,” tweeted our president, his latest work of high art. The ability to express concise complexity is a sublime talent. Of course, Hemmingway rises above all others, and wrote a great American novel in 27-characters – “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” But Trump’s