weekend notes

Hope all goes well… “We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now,” read the quote below an eerie photograph of young men, huddled tightly on a field, the fog thick, two floodlights high above. “We’ve finally found him.” It was an Instagram post for Navy Lacrosse. “We’re surrounded.” The photograph was from Monday’s practice, wet, cold, dark. “That simplifies things.” They chose a fitting qu

Anecdote: “Did you get your math right,” I asked Patrick. He had just sent me his whitepaper for comments. Like pretty much everyone at our firm, he’s smarter than I am. And by the time something like this gets to me, it has inevitably been heavily vetted. “Yeah, that was my reaction when I first saw the results of the analysis. I ran it a few times. Same results. Then I gave it to the quant team,

Hope all goes well… “If you don’t get hurt, a kid your age should live to 100. And with medical advances, you might live way longer,” I told my oldest, four years ago. He was 18 and had just made a nine-year commitment, it was sinking in. “It’s true that nine years is 50% of your life so far, but it’ll be small fraction of your lifetime,” I said. He nodded, a literal kid, linear. “Decisions early

Anecdote: “The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer – they will die poor,” said Jesse Livermore, the speculator made famous by Edwin Lefevre’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, 1923. It was the first and best book I’ve read on

Hope all goes well… It was New Year’s Eve, red moon rising, sixteen of us around a Kenyan campfire. Family, friends. I had asked everyone to share an important piece of advice they had received, how it impacted their lives. Each told a story, context. What we chose to share was as personally revealing as the advice was profound. Liv is a 5’4’’ woman in a 6’2’’ man’s world, outnumbered 4-1 at West

Hope all goes well… Bitcoin ETFs were finally approved, an extremely important milestone on the path toward the integration of crypto technology/markets into the regulatory mainstream. Just as dotcoms and bricks-and-mortar converged, so too will crypto finance and traditional finance. With this approval, things start to really accelerate. Dusted off an anecdote from 2012 when the dollar was down n

Anecdote: “As you know, I’ve been in the middle of every boom and bust for the past few decades,” said the investor, a unique talent, an opportunist of the highest order. “I have never seen anything like this. Not the dot com boom, not the housing bubble, not the FANGS, not even crypto compares.” We were sharing notes from our recent travels, triangulating, stalking opportunities. He was early to

Hope all goes well… The small bush plane banked hard, our four children gasped at the giraffes along the airfield, a short patch of dirt on the Masai Mara, Kenya. We tracked a pride of lions, solitary leopards too, the apex predators, their prey. Each night brought roars, screams, skirmishes, deadly silence. A new killing, the cycle of life, routine, sublime. Our Masai trackers trained three years

Hope all goes well… Wishing you and your families a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2024. Filled with adventure, challenge, volatility, introspection too. Dusted off an anecdote from 2011 that I reflect on at the dawn of each year, in preparation for what’s to come (see below). All the very best, E Week-in-Review: Mon: Christmas Day, Iran says Israeli airstrike in Syria killed top Rev Guard command