weekend notes

Hope all goes well… Dusted off a Jan 2018 anecdote about crowds and counterintuition (see below). It’s something I think about during booms, to maintain balance, mental preparedness. Time to start thinking in ways we haven’t. 2020 changed the world. The coming ten years will be profoundly different from the past decade. It’s hard to imagine a more exciting environment for the game we all play R

“A night sky, dancing with stars,” said Charlie in the kitchen, reciting his latest poetic creation. He’s produced a few at this point, online learning assignments. Mara flagged the first one, surprised by what he’d written, and ever since, I tuned in. She and I love words, their endless combinations. If well engineered, the most wonderful ideas and images form, blend, bend, magic. “A river, full

Hope all goes well… “Tens of thousands of sailors and Marines are deployed forward at the tip of the spear and will be celebrating Thanksgiving to the best of their abilities with their shipmates, their fellow Marines,” said Vice Admiral Sean Buck via video feed, announcing a complete US Naval Academy lockdown, no home leave for his young men and women. Mara and I sighed, Jackson’s siblings too. “

It was a decade of great change. Some blamed its start on the pandemic, which of course was a catalyst. But more than that, the virus was a mirror. In another time and place, perhaps we would’ve seen the same image; a common people under siege, setting aside differences, rising to a noble calling. But in 2020, we each saw what we wanted to see, heard what we wanted to hear, believed what we wanted

Hope all goes well… “Cases doubled since this time last week,” texted Doc, Saturday evening. Over recent months, cases slowly tripled from a low base. Then they doubled in a week. This past week they doubled yet again. “It’s crazy. But things remain under control here right now, fewer are on ventilators than last time,” said Doc, one of America’s most prominent respiratory disease experts, fightin

Wore the same ugly tie for every employment report in the 1990s. It gave me an edge, tilting luck in my favor. Dampening the nervous energy, butterflies, fluttering. Certain numbers I liked more than others. In time, I fell for 13. Made it all mine, unloved, lonely, my type. Rented a flat in Fulham, Number 13. But in time, all that faded. I think those lucky charms helped me transition to a life o

Hope all goes well… I bought Biden at a 62% probability, which was oddly cheap to Nate Silver and Elliott Morris’s probabilities. I sold Trump’s odds of winning the popular vote at 20%. That should’ve been nearly 0% given the 2016 election. I bought a Dem House/Senate clean sweep at a 57% probability. And sold a Rep House/Senate sweep at 17% which should’ve been ~0%. On Nov 4th, I was surprised Bi

Ten years from today, what will market historians write about the present time? After decades of white whale hunting, you come to discover that this is amongst the most important questions. In 2012, they wrote that Gordon Brown sold half of the UK government’s gold between 1999-2002 at 20yr lows, around $300/ounce. The world had lost its mind, wildly overvaluing intangibles, shunning hard assets.

Hope all goes well… “You know they have catacombs beneath Paris, filled with six million dead Persians?” asked Charlie between zoom classes, both of us working at the kitchen table, humanity’s latest pandemic resurgent. “You mean Parisians little man – Persians usually die in Persia,” I said. “Hmmm,” he whispered, fact checking me on his laptop. “Well, did you know they celebrate death in Me