weekend notes

Hope all goes well…. “I got this Dad,” she said, duffel packed, ready. “I know you do Liv – you got this – but what’s going through your head?” I asked, a final father-daughter check in. “It feels like when we went skydiving. I knew it was coming. Then we put on our parachutes, and got in the plane, and went higher and higher. I looked down but it still wasn’t real. Then the door opene

Hope all goes well… Dropping Liv off at West Point tomorrow to start her great adventure. Making the most of our days before Beast (that’s what Cadets call summer boot camp). Then I head to Wyoming in July to climb mountains with Jackson and his brothers from Navy. Time is short. Presents an opportunity to hand wknd notes off to Marcel Kasumovich, our Head of Research, for the month of July. He’s

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote from 2015 about proprietary trading, risk taking (see below). The age of leveraged carry and buy-and-hold investors is behind us. Back to basics. One River Digital’s team published a piece on the distressed opportunities unfolding across the bitcoin mining industry and the parallels with commodity cycle downturns [click here]. Week-in-Review (expressed in

Anecdote: “Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion,” wrote Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. The book explores what separates survivors from the others. Those who die when lost in the wilderness often do so spontaneously, for no clear medical reason. Disorientation is psychologically devastating for those unable to adjust rapidly. Children are often better sui

Hope all goes well… “Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, last of the Five Good Emperors, in 170 AD. I wandered through the Colosseum after dark, Rome’s oppressive heat slowly fading, Goldman’s European Financials Conference approaching. “Matter is in perpetual flux,” wrote Aurelius, an inspired leader, a sto

“Since central bankers are enacting monetary policy by acting like market participants, let’s analyze them like investors,” said Lindsay Politi, PM for One River’s inflation-strategy. “Central banks are the biggest whale in financial market history. And we’ve all seen what happens when a whale needs to exit. The catalyst is always an unaccounted risk, a surprise event, or an incorrect assumption,”

Hope all goes well… “Today the enemy counts on popular demonstrations to strike the Islamic system,” declared Iran’s Supreme Leader, 83-years-old, in power since 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square student slaughter and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unrest tends to cluster. “The enemy hopes to turn the people against the Islamic Republic by psychological means, through the internet, money, and t

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote from 2011 in honor of the brave men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend our nation, history’s greatest safe haven. In this cynical moment of political dysfunction, social division, and carnage in our schools, I reflected on this anecdote on American greatness, in the sincerest hope that we each strive our utmost to secure its future.

Anecdote: Edison shared the following letter that a small US supplier of industrial chemicals sent to all its customers earlier this month: Dear Customer: I hope that you and your business are doing well. New price sheets are enclosed. I have been working at xxxxxxxxxx Industries for over 50 years. I have never seen anything like the current supply problems. Not with COVID-19 in 2020, not during N