Every note in a minute
Quick digests across all five categories. Read the core argument, then go deeper.
Short, plain-English takeaways from across the research archive, for when you need the signal without the full read. Each overview links to the complete article if you want to go deeper.
Macro & Liquidity
15 insightsThe Treasury General Account Is a Liquidity Valve Hiding in Plain Sight
Movements in the government cash balance change bank reserves dollar for dollar, on a schedule set by fiscal operations rather than monetary policy. Debt ceiling episodes produce the largest swings.
Read the full article → PlumbingThe Reverse Repo Facility, Explained Without the Jargon
Cash parked at the central bank overnight is cash not circulating. The facility became a buffer that absorbed years of quantitative tightening, and the buffer is finite.
Read the full article → StructureThe Cash-Futures Basis Trade and the Leverage Underneath It
Capturing a few basis points requires enormous leverage, and that leverage is why a small pricing relationship became a financial stability concern.
Read the full article → SignalCross-Currency Basis Is the Cleanest Dollar Stress Signal Available
A textbook identity that broke in 2008 and never healed. The size of the deviation separates a growth-driven dollar rally from a funding squeeze.
Read the full article → MechanismReserves Are Not Deposits, and Almost Every Money-Printing Argument Confuses Them
Two different liabilities of two different institutions. The distinction explains why post-2008 reserve creation did not produce the inflation the simple model predicted.
Read the full article → OverviewReading the Global Liquidity Dashboard
The specific liquidity series worth watching and how to read a turn before it shows up in asset prices. A practical guide to the dashboard, not just the theory.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Bond Market Is Telling You Something. Are You Listening?
The bond market is not forecasting a single future. The yield curve encodes a probability distribution, and learning to read it beats listening to any pundit.
Read the full article → OverviewCollateral Is the Plumbing That Nobody Watches Until It Breaks
Modern markets run on collateral that is pledged, re-pledged, and re-used. That chain supplies leverage in calm times and transmits stress when one link breaks.
Read the full article → OverviewCentral Banks Are Not as Powerful as You Think
Central banks are less omnipotent than headlines suggest. They set the price of money at the short end, but fiscal flows and global liquidity increasingly drive the outcome.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Dollar Wrecking Ball and Why It Swings Both Ways
A strong dollar acts as a wrecking ball on the global system, tightening conditions everywhere debt is dollar-denominated. The dollar is the single most important macro variable.
Read the full article → OverviewWhat Does Liquidity Actually Mean?
Liquidity is one of the most used and least defined words in markets. Pinning down what it actually means is the first step to using it as a real analytical tool.
Read the full article → OverviewFiscal, Not Monetary: Why the Old Inflation Playbook Broke
The current regime is driven more by fiscal deficits than by monetary policy. Government spending, not just the central bank, is now the dominant force in liquidity.
Read the full article → OverviewDebt Does Not Get Repaid Anymore. It Gets Refinanced.
Sovereign debt is rarely repaid; it is refinanced. Understanding the mechanics of the rollover explains why debt levels can climb far longer than intuition suggests.
Read the full article → OverviewDebasement Is a Policy, Not an Accident
Currency debasement is not an accident or a failure. It is the predictable, chosen path of governments carrying heavy debt loads, and it should be planned for, not feared.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Global Liquidity Cycle Is the Only Chart That Matters
The single most important chart in markets is the global liquidity cycle. Get its direction right and most other things fall into place; get it wrong and little else helps.
Read the full article →Digital Assets
9 insightsPerpetual Funding Rates Are the Cleanest Positioning Gauge in Digital Assets
A contract with no expiry needs a payment mechanism to stay tethered to spot. That payment is a direct, continuous, public measure of which side is crowded.
Read the full article → MechanismHashprice and the Miner Capitulation Signal
Revenue per unit of hashing power has a floor set by electricity costs. The capitulation sequence that follows is self-correcting, and the signal has degraded as miners professionalised.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Network Nobody Can Turn Off
Bitcoin’s core property is not price but that no single party can stop it. That censorship-resistance is the actual product, and it explains the monetary premium.
Read the full article → OverviewTime Preference, Hard Money, and the Discipline of Saving
Hard money rewards patience. When savings hold value, people lower their time preference and build for the long term. Debasement quietly does the opposite.
Read the full article → OverviewMoney Is a Technology, and Bitcoin Is Its Next Version
Money is a technology with two jobs: hold value across time and move it across space. Gold solved the first, fiat the second, and Bitcoin is the first to attempt both.
Read the full article → OverviewStablecoins Are the Quiet Revolution
Stablecoins are quietly becoming one of the largest holders of US Treasuries and a real rail for dollar demand. The revolution is in the plumbing, not the headlines.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Crypto Market Is Not One Market
Crypto is not a single asset class. Bitcoin, smart-contract platforms, stablecoins, and tokens each answer to different drivers, and lumping them together destroys signal.
Read the full article → OverviewWhy Bitcoin Falls Hardest and Rises Fastest
Bitcoin falls hardest in a liquidity crunch because it trades around the clock and is the most liquid risk asset to sell. That is a feature of its market structure, not a flaw in the thesis.
Read the full article → OverviewBitcoin Is a Macro Asset, Not a Tech Stock
The halving gets the attention, but Bitcoin trades as a liquidity-sensitive macro asset. It rises and falls with global liquidity, placing it alongside gold rather than tech stocks.
Read the full article →Portfolio Strategy
13 insightsRisk Parity and What Actually Broke in 2022
Not a flawed concept. A conditional correlation treated as a constant, with leverage applied on top. The same assumption sits inside every balanced fund.
Read the full article → AustraliaFranking Credits Change Australian Portfolio Maths More Than Investors Realise
Imputation makes fully franked domestic dividends worth materially more after tax, which makes some home bias rational rather than behavioural. The limit is concentration.
Read the full article → AustraliaThe Currency Hedging Decision Is Not Symmetric for Australian Investors
A procyclical currency gives unhedged foreign equity a built-in cushion during drawdowns. The answer reverses entirely for foreign bonds.
Read the full article →Goals-Based Investing: Your Real Benchmark Is a Liability, Not an Index
A portfolio exists to fund dated spending. Measure funding probability, not index-relative returns.
Full note →Risk Profiling Is Three Numbers, Not One
Tolerance, capacity, and required risk disagree constantly. The plan lives where all three overlap.
Full note →The Six-Step Planning Process, Stripped to Its Mechanism
The planning process is a control loop. Most failures are open loops, not bad strategies.
Full note →Best Interests as an Operating System
The s961B safe harbour is a sequence any investor can run on themselves. Errors are skipped steps.
Full note →Buckets, Glide Paths, and the Time Horizon Problem
Buckets quarantine volatility by date. Glide paths automate de-risking. Each fails differently.
Full note → OverviewThe Three-Pillar Blueprint: An All-Weather Portfolio for the Debasement Era
An all-weather portfolio balances three engines: growth, hard money, and real assets. Because each wins in a different world, no single environment can wreck the whole.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Convexity Playbook: Building a Portfolio That Wants Volatility
Most portfolios merely survive volatility. A convex portfolio is deliberately built so that disorder pays it, using cheap optionality that costs little in calm and pays off in chaos.
Read the full article → OverviewPosition Sizing Is the Decision That Matters Most
A good thesis sized too large becomes a permanent loss. Because drawdowns compound against you, sizing for survival matters more than sizing for conviction.
Read the full article → OverviewWhy Most Diversification Fails When You Need It Most
Diversification fails precisely when you need it most, because correlations rush to one in a crisis. True diversification means owning things that win in different regimes, not just many things.
Read the full article → OverviewCheap Insurance Is the Most Expensive Thing to Skip
When volatility is cheap, protection is on sale. Buying convexity when nobody wants it is how you own the insurance that pays off precisely when everything else is falling.
Read the full article →Volatility & Flows
9 insightsThe Variance Risk Premium Is the Most Reliable Anomaly Nobody Talks About
Implied volatility persistently exceeds what materialises. The premium is compensation for a specific risk that arrives in concentrated form, which is why it is not free money.
Read the full article → MechanismVanna and Charm: The Second-Order Flows That Move Markets Quietly
Gamma gets the attention. The second-order sensitivities generate larger and more predictable flows, and they compound in the same direction around large expiries.
Read the full article → ContestedZero-Day Options and the Argument About Intraday Volatility
Both the amplification and dampening arguments have evidence behind them. The honest position is that the net effect depends on customer flow that is not directly observable.
Read the full article → SignalSkew Is a Positioning Signal, Not a Fear Gauge
The shape of the surface across strikes reveals what protection costs and who is buying it. Reading it as sentiment discards most of the information.
Read the full article → StructureDispersion: When the Index Is Calmer Than Its Parts
The gap between index and single-stock volatility is a measure of implied correlation, which answers whether diversification is currently doing anything at all.
Read the full article →The Household Balance Sheet Is Short Volatility
Income, mortgage, and portfolio fail together. Insurance and hedging cover a structural short.
Full note → OverviewThe VIX Does Not Measure Fear. It Measures Insurance Prices.
The VIX measures the cost of portfolio insurance, not how frightened investors are. A spike reflects demand for hedges, which is a very different signal from panic.
Read the full article → OverviewGamma and the Hidden Hand That Moves Markets
Dealer gamma positioning quietly decides whether a market pins in place, drifts, or breaks. It is one of the most underappreciated forces in short-term price action.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Market Is a Flow Machine, and the Flows Have Changed
Price is not just a verdict on fundamentals. It is the output of mechanical flows, some of which respond to price itself, creating feedback loops that can overwhelm the story.
Read the full article →Long Cycles
8 insightsThe Capex Supercycle and Why Underinvestment Shows Up a Decade Late
Physical capacity takes a decade to build, which means markets discount the constraint to near zero until it binds. Australia sits on the supply side of the current wave.
Read the full article → Slow VariableDemographics Are Destiny, With a Forty-Year Lag
The most predictable variable in macroeconomics and the least priced, because its horizon exceeds every professional evaluation period that exists.
Read the full article → HistoryDebt Jubilees Are Older Than Debt Markets
Periodic cancellation of unpayable debt is among the oldest recorded economic policies. The modern equivalents are less explicit and achieve the same distribution of losses.
Read the full article → ScepticismThe Reserve Currency Clock and the Problem With Counting It
A widely circulated chart resting on a sample of five. The underlying structural tension is real even where the arithmetic derived from it is not.
Read the full article → OverviewThe Pendulum Between Individualism and Institutions
History swings between eras that trust institutions and eras that trust the individual. Knowing which half of the cycle you are in explains a great deal about markets and politics.
Read the full article → OverviewEvery Generation Thinks It Is Different. None of Them Are.
Each generation believes the world began when they woke up. The generational turning underneath markets shapes risk appetite, politics, and the mood of a whole era.
Read the full article → OverviewOne Framework: How Liquidity, Convexity, Cycles, and Flows Fit Together
Policy, fiscal flows, market flows, and volatility are not separate stories. They all run through the same global liquidity cycle, which is the one framework that ties them together.
Read the full article → OverviewWhy This Feels Like a Turning Point, Because It Is
Every era feels like a turning point to those living through it. Separating genuine regime change from ordinary noise is one of the hardest and most valuable skills in macro.
Read the full article →