players

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 helicopters, rappel from the

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 gonna cut rates quick e

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 make Bitcoin ‘made

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote from 2017 about the sound of silence (see below). Back in a couple weeks with full wknd notes. All the very best, E  Week-in-Review: Mon: Fed’s Daly voices support for gradual easing – rejects idea of 50bp cut in Sept / Kashkari says open to Sept cut, Blinken says Netanyahu accepts latest Gaza ceasefire proposal / next step is for Hamas to agree, Ukraine seeks ‘bu

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote written in the early weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, about managing extreme uncertainty, processing rapid change, searching for opportunity (see below). Back again in September with full wknd notes. All the very best, E  Week-in-Review: Mon: Fed’s Bowman signals she may not support a Sept cut, Ukrainian forces invade Russian territory – forcing mass evacuations f

Hope all goes well… Historic round-trip in markets, with an explosive move up in implied volatility followed by a move down at a speed and scale quite unlike anything we’ve seen. Not exactly the kind of activity one would expect to see so close to all-time highs in equity markets. It’s the kind of odd market behavior I suspect we look back on in the quarters to come, as having been the start of something very importa

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote published shortly before the Feb 2018 collapse of ETFs that allowed investors to sell volatility in an explicit way (see below). Whether they want to admit it, or fully appreciate it, all investors who own equity, private equity, credit, leveraged loans, real estate, etc., are implicitly short volatility (and long stability). As bull markets extend, the ravenous sell volatil

Hope all goes well… Dusted off a David Bowie anecdote from 2023 about great artists (see below). How they help us imagine our many possible futures, and we then collectively conjure one from the nothingness. So many possible new worlds are taking shape; AI, crypto, domestic politics, geopolitics. A thrilling time to be alive, invest. I take July/Aug off from writing, to do more reading, recharge. Hoping the same for

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote from 2016 about the importance of combining loosely related things, triangulating, blending ideas, philosophies, techniques. I wrote it when Jackson, my oldest son, was playing football and lacrosse as a high school freshman. And now it’s Charlie’s turn, my youngest, who just finished a Navy lacrosse camp and is on to freshman football pre-season. I take July/Aug off from wr