Year of Black Swan Spotting — Heading into 2023, the setup is as follows: Recession hasn't officially started yet. It is awaiting the 2-10 yield spread (currently the most negative in 40 years) to turn positive again. Recession increasingly looks like a second-half event. But once it takes hold, it will likely be longer and deeper…

Transitioning to the Next 1st Turning: Web 3.0, AI, Cryptos, and Metaverses — I cite The 4th Turning often, because for me, it is an effective compass to gauge where we are and how we got here. 4th Turnings are all about chaos. Arguably the current 4th Turning started in 2000, and neared end-stage in 2022, — with chaos approaching a crescendo: Distrust…

A year of phase-shift and asset-revaluation — This last update (published early because of upcoming holidays) concludes my 2022 monthly series which started with my January roadmap. In essence, 2022 had been a movie of transition from Quad 3 (Inflationary Bust) to Quad 4 (Disinflationary Bust), — with central bank rate hikes (read: decelerated credit impulse) as…

The name is Bond. Treasury Bond. — A bond is a tradeable loan and it is that tradeable attribute that creates all the bond math that needs to be understood by a bond investor. The current yield of is a bond’s annual coupon payment divided by the bond’s current market value. It should be compared to…

The year to dump (wild) Tina for (wholesome) Tara? — TINA stands for “There Is No Alternative” (to equities). Tara stands for “There Are Reasonable Alternatives” (to equities). Recession is all but guaranteed for 2023 (because historically, every rate hike leads to a recession, — see chart below). The brightest minds place this in the second-half.

But FTX is worse than Enron — If you were told that the second largest crypto exchange (clearly of enormous systemic importance to the entire crypto movement) was founded and run by these two 20-something cartoony characters straight out of Hogwarts who amassed $26 billion dollars of personal net worth before misappropriating and losing $1 billion of…

Tempering Scientific Thinking with Business and Artistic Thinking — I view myself as being born right-brained (artistic and musical genes run in the family), but trained left-brained (in electrical engineering and business). In my day, these three disciplines — art, science, and business — were separate and distinct, each self-sufficient. In fact, they were arguably orthogonal by way of…

(Can Frankenstein’s monster ever be undone?) — It amazes and saddens me that so many people out there still believe we have a normal stock market, — in which individual stock prices are determined by buyers and sellers with different convictions about a specific company's prospects, and the stock market is the consolidated result of free market…

Global financial markets were remarkably volatile the first half of October, driven by news-flow (and speculations thereof), be it about CPI data or the fluid UK pension fund situation. The Gilts got into a doom-loop (pension funds selling their devalued Gilts trying to meet margin calls, in turn driving Gilts…