players

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.” As Nippon Steel b

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 questions accurately, comp

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