* this page is in progress, a lot now is just filler *
some things i'm thinking about at the moment
- if the world gets more volatile, who wins and how?
- geopolitical autarky and trade decoupling: relative winners - southern cone (especially with red sea tensions adding friction to eurasian trade), nearshoring (mx), physical arbitrageurs (shipping brokers/insurance, commodity traders),
- providers of digital infrastructure: compute, kyc (deepfake resistant), undersea cables, systematic volatility traders (e.g. danske commodities - n.b. intraday power volatility compounded by green revolution but curtailed as battery adoption gets better)
- chinese outflows and diverted FDI accrue to other EM? winner takes all?
- volatility in red sea could make brazilian (and other southern cone) exports like sugar and soya relatively attractive vs asian competition
- why the metropolis x sp deal is fascinating "reverse verticalisation", "ai rollups", and creating operating leverage at scale (e.g. with sensors and CV in this case). parking is also a very fertile space for improving consumer experience. you could do very granular price discrimination ($4 extra for us to save you a spot in a Waze plugin. $6 for a spot next to the entrance, etc.)
- what is the right model for investing in idiosyncratic risk environments? opportunistic, flexible mandate, shorter average deal length (curtail duration risk), sector agnostic, ability to engage with complexity premia, mentality of infinite play rather than raiding (the best deals in EM are often pretty illegible), focus on creative downside protection (protecting principal) but with convexity of equity-like upside (structured equity component). creation of platforms but with opportunistic/discounted entry points
- where can you replicate the european model of power traders?
- how do you build an asset intensive business from scratch?
- what does the right portfolio look like? there's a strong argument for just having 6ish things in your portfolio. Some variation of Microsoft/Apple/Google/Meta/etc., Bitcoin, maybe some uncorrelated legal/special sits fund, and then dedicating all your new time (not spent reading decks or talking to lawyers or worrying about altering your portfolio) to building a sizeable business yourself over a decade plus.
- to what extent does media saturation and shorter feedback loops make central banking harder? damodaran noted that FOMC meetings take up so much more mental bandwidth than they used to. could you train a model to quantify "nervousness" and "awkwardness" (stuttering, sweat, figdgeting) of central bankers in announcements and see whether markets are increasingly skittish and atuned to this over time?
- the "will to have nice things" In an interview with Tyler Cowen, Patrick Mckenzie notes that in Japan, the high attention to detail and quality comes from a "will to have nice things", which is lacking relatively-speaking in the US. Intuitively, it's true that some places just have it, but is it measurable? where does it comes from? how do you scale or create it?
- how can you maximise your own agency? There are some evident patterns in successful people: being prodigious in certain fields, those fields being high leverage ones, and having a prolific volume of output. But most important is the "force of nature" element: for a skilled politician it might just be the gravitas and charisma with which they can work a room, for Napoleon it meant a ceaseless energy for creating institutions and building legacy, for Sam Altman it may be some combination of asking the right questions, execution, and being in the rooms with the right people. "How alive are you willing to be" - some people are more *alive* than others. For Rick Rubin this means having more open and calibrated antennae to all the stimulus of the world; to others it can be a restless desire to build and act.
- are there hidden gems in sovereign refi?
Please reach out if you want to discuss any of these!