weekend notes

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

“Look at any technology industry and you’ll observe compounding market power,” said Big Foot. “Lots of people don’t believe this phenomenon applies to asset management, but I don’t understand why it would not,” continued the CEO of one of the industry’s largest investment firms. “Your first job is to invest in research to develop your alphas. Those produce profit and don’t just go away, even if ov

Hope all goes well… Nine days until the election. Nate Silver gives Trump a 13% chance of winning. The Economist’s Elliott Morris gives him closer to 10%. They both note that polling improvements since 2016 make a surprise less likely. And while there were 13% undecided voters then, there are 6% now. But there could be 154mm voters (144mm-165mm estimated range) today versus 137mm then. And there a

“China is now fully engaged in a financial war with the United States,” said the CIO from Asia. “And this view rises all the way to the top of the power structure in Beijing,” continued one of the region’s leading investors. “Whatever can attract foreign capital to China is seen by Beijing as being in the national interest,” he said. “So if it is in the national interest for a leading Chinese tech

Hope all goes well… “We’d like to thank every one of you for being here on this happy day in a rather strange time and a beautiful place,” I said, newly ordained by some online ministry, officiating my first marriage, not the most lucrative Plan B but better than nothing. One of my four sisters stood with her fiancé at the altar, another fifty family and friends zoomed in for the occasion. “Marria

“MMT has already led us to a better place,” said Warren Mosler, pioneer of Modern Monetary Theory. “If Washington had done just $1trln in fiscal stimulus like Obama did in 2009 rather than the $3trln they’ve already approved, we’d be overwhelmed by civil unrest,” he added, expecting another $2trln this year, followed by another $2trln in 2021 infrastructure. In recent years, central bankers called

Hope all goes well… “Will he live or will he die?” barked Biggie Too in baritone. “We going to get a stimulus or won’t we?” bellowed the Chief Global Strategist from one of Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail affairs. “Will he win or will he lose? Is he going quiet or they gonna drag him out?” And Biggie was just warming up, closing his eyes, head swaying in a slow Zoom groove. “We don’t get something p