weekend notes

Anecdote (December 2015): “Cliff jumping,” answered Jackson, without hesitation, taking charge. Olivia, Teddy and Charlie cheered. Filling the air with the magic of mischief. I’d asked for ideas. We needed out. Thanksgiving had overwhelmed us. So we piled into the Suburban, in search of sanctuary, solitude. The Greenwich cliffs are hidden deep in back-country. And like so much in today’s wild, the

Hope all goes well… “I need to decide,” whispered Biden to himself, struggling, unsure. “Lael is just terrific, no doubt, and her Fed wouldn’t dare cut off my funding,” thought the President, old enough to remember bond vigilantes. “But you can’t help but like Jay, a fine gentleman, a decent human being, and face it, he’s still buying over $100bln of bonds a month with CPI humming hotter than 6%,”

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 anyt

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 work

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

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 an

“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,”

“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 o

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 ou