Anecdote: There’s only one way to really learn lessons. The hard way. On Monday, February 7, 1994, I was short a very large number of Short Sterling futures contracts, which would have made me money if the Bank of England (UK central bank) increased interest rates. I was unfortunately not alone; it was a rather obvious trade. Out of nowhere, the price started moving massively against me. Someone knew something. All I

Hope all goes well… Some things are priceless. Had there been an offer, Bill Gates would have surely paid it to bury the Epstein headlines about his island misadventure with Russian women, STDs, and secret antibiotics for Melinda. Some things are incorruptible. The value of all the world’s above-ground gold rose to $39trln on Thursday. But then fell $3.4trln on Friday, roughly the market capitalization of Microsoft.

Anecdote: “Want to know what I think will happen?” asked my father in the mid-1990s. I had lived in London since 1992. At first, I explored solo. I’d call a travel agent on Friday and buy the cheapest last-minute ticket to anywhere. Every European country was different, but each looked down on Americans in much the same way – we were idealistic and unsophisticated. It never really bothered me. Surrounded by the magni

Hope all goes well… “It was a serious strategic mistake to phase out nuclear power. Germany simply does not have enough energy production capacity,” admitted Chancellor Merz. “In order to have normal market prices for energy production again, we will have to constantly support the process with funds from the federal budget. We cannot do this in the long term,” he continued. “We are now making the most expensive energ

Anecdote: One of the first things I learned as a pit trader in Chicago was that your word is your bond. It was in a time of open outcry, when traders agreed to buy and sell with one another verbally, or sometimes by simply making eye contact across a crowded sea of screaming people, frantic, stressed, speculating. Once such a trade was made, each trader would write it on a card; the commodity traded, the number of co

Hope all goes well… Bitcoin and most big crypto assets jumped Tues and Wed when the S&P 500 was under pressure. And then crypto hardly softened when the Clarity Act stalled, even as equity prices for crypto companies took a beating. Then Trump hit America’s NATO partners with a new 10% tariff on Saturday. And despite being the only market that’s tradeable on the weekend, crypto markets barely budged when you’d ha

Anecdote: Xi considered himself in the mirror and stood there for a long time. It had been a difficult month. The extraction of Maduro was extraordinary. If only he had the audacity and capability to have done something like it himself. But such a successful operation would have been impossible for Xi’s military, which lacked meaningful combat experience and was riddled with incompetence, corruption. He had never bee

Hope all goes well… “The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,” said Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, responding to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world,

Hope all goes well… Wishing you and your crew all the very best in 2026, filled with adventure, challenge, change, volatility, introspection too. It’s already off to an explosive start. Back next Sunday with full wknd notes. In the meantime, dusted off an old climbing Anecdote that I reflect on at the dawn of each new year (see below). For Week-in-Review and Weekly & Year-to-Date market data, scroll to the bottom

Hope all goes well… Wishing you and your crew a wonderful holiday. Taking a few weeks off from writing as I do each year, for family, friends, gratitude, altitude. Here’s a video podcast I did last week with Goldman’s Tony Pasquariello [here]. Dusted off an anecdote from 2018 about triumph, struggle (see below). And included links to the Total Portfolio research we published here at One River in 2024/25. The results