The “fear of missing out” — a fear characteristic of the moment in financial markets — seems a prevalent enough sentiment that some consideration may not be out of place. Generally speaking, the sentiment combines a special optimism (as the “missing out” is associated with great potential profit) with a…

In his latest memo (Sea Change, December 2022), Howard Marks argues that, after a multi-decade period of low and falling interest rates and frequent quantitative easing, “a significant portion of the money investors made resulted from the tailwind” that had been created. In this environment, according to Marks, fear of…

An irony that may be lost among the list of failed cryptocurrency premises — the inflation hedge that isn’t, the store of value that isn’t, the institutional disintermediation that was but for a short while only — is that its recent crash has followed a similar blueprint to that of…

This is in continuation of a previous article (Part 1) in which a case was argued that, if historical, economic or business cycles ever truly existed as such, the cycle patterns were disrupted by the complexity and speed characteristic of the modern world. As cyclical environments come with a measure…

The temptation to explain history as a repeating pattern is a long and rich tradition, dating as far back as Ecclesiastes (“only that shall happen which has happened… there is nothing new beneath the sun”) and perhaps longer. In the late Renaissance, Giambattista Vico’s New Science sought to present the…

In times of turbulence, as in the first weeks of this year and possibly for a while to come, it may be a constructive and calming exercise for some to step back and reflect on the longer-term investment outlook. As markets rise and fall, sometimes violently, stock markets at least…

Mandelbrot’s network Rereading The (Mis)behavior of Markets after more than a decade had passed since the previous read — a decade in which one noted misbehavior was the firm establishment of five network upstarts to market value dominance — I was this time struck by the prevalence of network terminology I had…

What follows is an investment thesis, not advice. As before, the thesis is predicated on network value and its drivers. …

Networks are having a moment, or rather, they’ve been having it for quite some time, long before the big contagion and the flattening of curves, but the moment is expanding. Stephen Wolfram is working on a new physics model that would explain the universe in terms of network evolution and…