weekend notes

Hope all goes well. “If gold was your hedge, well, you just got bent over,” said Yoda, standing upright, high in the Rockies. “There’s usually one time per year when everything goes wrong at once.” The S&P 500 topped at 1669 on May 21, and is now down 4.6%, while gold is -7.1% and 10yr yields are +57bps. “This is what happens after a Fed Chairman signals that you can buy any asset in the world

Hope all goes well. It’s Summertime. Our four little terrorists are home. Subversive. Restless. Commitin’ thought crime. Jack the Ripper, Olivia Hearst, Teddy Kaczynski and of course, Osama bin Charlie. Naturally we love them. Want to create a utopia for ’em. But what’s utopia without a little dystopia? Anyhow, I’d like to say that I read 1984 this wk in response to the PRISM revelations. But trut

Hope all goes well. “They’re praying, ‘Oh dear god, please get me back to even and I swear I’ll never do this again,’” laughed the PM, one of Greenwich’s biggest. “If you help me just this once, I’ll follow every stop-loss on every position for the rest of my life,” he continued. You see, he took profit on nearly everything a few wks ago, days from the highs, and has listened with great amusement,

Hope all goes well. “NY, Kansas, Chicago, LA – you know what I hear from all our biggest clients?” he asked. And I sipped my VT, three limes, muddled, imagining the infinite possibilities. You see my pal ran mountains of money, hosts TV, and Vice Chairs nearly $2trln. So I gave it a guess: Can you lower my commissions? “They’ve woken up to the fact that their savings are being destroyed.” Wh

Hope all goes well. Swung through NYC. Without a moment to myself. The Big Apple’s booming. Cranes are swinging. Clubs thumping. And of all the stories that swirled, the one that made the biggest impression, was the one I never heard. You see it’s May. And not a single person told me that they sold. And went away. With their prodigious piles of paper profits. To play. Overall: “Wasabi Abe?” asked

Hope all goes well. “Please tell me you’ve stayed long,” I said to the CIO. A brilliant, humble fella, who made a fortune on Wall Street, left the past behind, and moved West. “You can’t talk about something like this as much as I have and not be long,” he replied. You see, we discuss science, technology, robotics, the looming transformation, the coming revolution, winners, losers – and he’s

Hope all goes well. “I really don’t know how a rational person can make this much money,” said one of Greenwich’s biggest managers, hung-over. You see he’s been long Nikkei and short Yen all year, uninterrupted. In monster size. Balancing the fight-or-flight instinct, with a trader’s need-for-greed. “I think the only way to do this is to have enough in the bank that you don’t care anymore —

Hope all goes well. “I don’t want us to delude ourselves,” he answered. “I’m old enough now to know how this is going to ultimately play out,” continued the philosopher. And I laughed, ’cause I’d asked about markets and he’d answered about life. “But in a world of activist central banks, every day’s a new adventure,” said the top performing CIO for many yrs running. “And today, it’s not that impor

Hope all goes well. “Can I tell you my fantasy?” he asked, over his fifth gin and tonic. And with five empty glasses before me, I nodded, preferring simple gestures to sloppy slurs. You see, we’d been exchanging war stories. And he, being one of North America’s biggest investors, has fought for decades. Winning more often than not, but always enduring the kind of stress few fellas can bear. “I wan