weekend notes

Anecdote: “It’s not the mindset of an emerging market. It’s the mindset of an emerging superpower,” said one of the greatest macro investors of all time to me, his eager protege. This time, it was China’s FX revaluation making the headlines – not the investor’s famous predictions of devaluations in the past. “The world mistakes China as ideological. 1979 marked the shift to pragmatism,” he c

Hope all goes well… Spent the past few days at The Nantucket Project, a unique gathering with a worthy mission, started by a buddy from my Brown days, a fellow entrepreneur who came to appreciate the importance of storytelling. Its power to propel us forward. But markets didn’t take a time out. Nor did Xi Jinping, who hit a breaking point and announced an abrupt policy U-turn, not unlike his late-

Anecdote: I could feel the altitude today. Felt good. Just a little more alive, alert, grinding my way up from the valley floor to some minor peak, the Tetons in the distance. Fifteen of us climbed the Grand Teton this past July, family, friends, guides. One of the great pleasures of climbing mountains is to return to the valley and forever remember the moment you stood at that summit; arms stretc

Hope all goes well… Whirlwind tour of Australia, California too. There’s increasing talk about a growing strategy amongst the world’s largest allocators. A total portfolio approach to investing. We presented two illuminating whitepapers related to the topic that Patrick Kazley on my team published: Convexity, Correlation, and Compounding [here], and The Convexity (Re)Balancing Act [here]. Talked c

Anecdote: “We have 4% of the world’s population and the dominant economy – almost twice the size of China and 5x the next largest,” said the Chairman, an American patriot, a public servant, realist, capitalist. “US stock market cap is over $50trln, dwarfing China at $11trln and Japan at $6trln,” he continued. “For over five decades, the US has produced the next generation of great global companies

Hope all goes well… “For complex reasoning tasks this is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” wrote OpenAI, describing its latest model release. “Given this, we are resetting the counter back to 1 and naming this series OpenAI o1.” Such is the pace of advancement (and hype) in AI that we need to rebase our calibrations. o1 answered 78% of PhD-level science questi

Anecdote: “At first we despised the Black Hats with every ounce of our beings,” said Liv, the ceremony over. She had just completed Air Assault School, the toughest ten days of training in the Army [here]. Air Assault teaches our young men and women to push themselves to the physical limit while paying close attention to the minute details necessary to safely lift heavy loads with attack helicopte

Hope all goes well… “You see what Biggie saw Friday,” asked Biggie Too, slipping right into 3rd person, summer behind, autumn ahead. Fall. “The lazy bulls, the re-accelerationists, they caved, Biggie saw it,” continued the Global Chief Strategist for one of Wall Street’s Too-Big-To-Fail affairs. “You got no growth in Europe, Japan, China is just terrifying, Germany too,” barked Biggie. “Jerome gon

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote from 2017 about financial market crises, which in my thirty-five years of doing this, seem to bubble up more often than most care to recall (see below). Enjoy Labor Day break. Back next Sunday with full wknd notes. All the very best, E  Week-in-Review: Mon: Canada to impose up to 100% tariff on Chinese EVs / 25% on steel & aluminum, Trump vows to