Published in InsiderFinance Wire·Jul 4The cost of fabricationAn 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…Financial Markets4 min read
Published in InsiderFinance Wire·Jun 3The end of cycles (Part 2)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…Financial Markets6 min read
Published in InsiderFinance Wire·Jun 1The end of cycles (Part 1)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…Financial Markets5 min read
Published in InsiderFinance Wire·Jan 11Markets and the years ahead: The Investment ThesisIn 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…Financial Markets5 min read
Published in InsiderFinance Wire·Dec 30, 2021Fractals and the market voiceMandelbrot’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…Financial Markets6 min read
Published in InsiderFinance Wire·Sep 17, 2021The tipping point and fundamentalsWhat follows is an investment thesis, not advice. As before, the thesis is predicated on network value and its drivers. …Cryptocurrency7 min read
Aug 6, 2021Ten network value lessons from the digitized economyNetworks 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…Economics7 min read
May 25, 2021Clusters of decentralized influenceTwo characteristics of the Bitcoin trade are generally overlooked in the discussion: (1) Distributed networks tend to concentration over time, and (2) the price of Bitcoin can’t, by definition, be a bubble. If a value bubble is definable as a wide and growing gap between the technicals of a traded…Bitcoin5 min read
May 18, 2021Linear perception, exponential change, and the new valueFrom a recent interview around the release of his new book, the following remark by Daniel Kahneman stands out: “The technology is developing very rapidly, possibly exponentially. But people are linear. When linear people are faced with exponential change, they’re not going to be able to adapt to that very…Financial Markets7 min read
Jan 30, 2021Extremes of sentiment in marketsTowards the end of last year, I published a series of short posts on what I saw as a newly emergent but potentially powerful trend in financial markets, in which sentiment seemed to overshadow analysis and fundamentals as a driving force. In light of recent events — that is, the…Investment16 min read
