54 notes across five lenses
Macro and liquidity, digital assets, portfolio strategy, volatility and flows, long cycles.
All research, in one place. 35 pieces across macro, liquidity, digital assets, portfolio strategy, volatility, and long cycles.
The Variance Risk Premium Is the Most Reliable Anomaly Nobody Talks About
Implied volatility trades persistently above what subsequently materialises. The gap is real, durable, and not free money…
Vanna and Charm: The Second-Order Flows That Move Markets Quietly
Gamma gets the attention. The second-order sensitivities generate larger flows, and they compound around expiries…
Zero-Day Options and the Argument About Intraday Volatility
Same-day expiry options now dominate index volume. Whether they amplify or dampen intraday moves is genuinely contested…
Skew Is a Positioning Signal, Not a Fear Gauge
The shape of the volatility surface across strikes shows what protection costs and who is buying it…
Dispersion: When the Index Is Calmer Than Its Parts
An index can sit still while its constituents move violently. The gap between them is a tradeable measure of correlation…
The Capex Supercycle and Why Underinvestment Shows Up a Decade Late
A mine takes a decade to build. That lag is why underinvestment surfaces long after the decisions that caused it…
Demographics Are Destiny, With a Forty-Year Lag
Birth rates today fix the working-age population four decades out. Almost nothing else in macro is this predictable…
Debt Jubilees Are Older Than Debt Markets
Debt cancellation predates recorded interest rates. Modern economies achieve the same outcome by less explicit means…
The Reserve Currency Clock and the Problem With Counting It
The century-per-currency claim rests on a sample of five. The underlying dynamic survives the weak arithmetic…
The Treasury General Account Is a Liquidity Valve Hiding in Plain Sight
The government treats it as cash management. The banking system experiences it as a liquidity injection or drain…
The Reverse Repo Facility, Explained Without the Jargon
A facility that lets money funds park cash overnight became one of the largest liquidity sinks in the system…
The Cash-Futures Basis Trade and the Leverage Underneath It
A trade capturing a few basis points needs enormous leverage. That leverage is why it became a systemic concern…
Cross-Currency Basis Is the Cleanest Dollar Stress Signal Available
Covered interest parity broke after 2008 and never healed. The size of the break measures how badly the world wants dollars…
Reserves Are Not Deposits, and Almost Every Money-Printing Argument Confuses Them
Two different liabilities of two different institutions. Conflating them produced most of the bad inflation forecasting…
Risk Parity and What Actually Broke in 2022
The concept was not flawed. A single assumption underneath it stopped holding, and leverage made the failure severe…
Franking Credits Change Australian Portfolio Maths More Than Investors Realise
Imputation makes franked dividends worth more after tax than the headline yield suggests. Some home bias is rational…
The Currency Hedging Decision Is Not Symmetric for Australian Investors
The Australian dollar falls in risk-off episodes, which gives unhedged foreign equity exposure a built-in cushion…
Perpetual Funding Rates Are the Cleanest Positioning Gauge in Digital Assets
No expiry means a periodic payment tethers price to spot. The sign and size of that payment reveals crowding directly…
Hashprice and the Miner Capitulation Signal
Mining revenue per unit of hashing power has a hard floor set by electricity. When it breaks, capitulation is observable…
The Household Balance Sheet Is Short Volatility
Income, mortgage, and portfolio all fail in the same state of the world. In derivatives language the household is structurally short vol…
Buckets, Glide Paths, and the Time Horizon Problem
Two families of technique map money to time. Each is a different compromise between behaviour and mathematics, and each fails different…
Best Interests as an Operating System
The s961B safe harbour reads as compliance and functions as a sequence. Most personal portfolio errors map onto a skipped step…
The Six-Step Planning Process, Stripped to Its Mechanism
The planning process is a control loop. Skipping a step breaks the loop in a predictable place, and most failures are open loops…
Risk Profiling Is Three Numbers, Not One
Tolerance, capacity, and required risk frequently disagree. Most portfolio damage happens in the gap a one-word profile averages away…
Goals-Based Investing: Your Real Benchmark Is a Liability, Not an Index
No household spends relative returns. The true benchmark is the liability: the stream of future spending the portfolio exists to meet…
Reading the Global Liquidity Dashboard
The specific indicators to watch to gauge the direction of global liquidity in real time. Central bank balance sheets, cross-currency basis …
The Three-Pillar Blueprint: An All-Weather Portfolio for the Debasement Era
A concrete framework for balancing growth, hard money, and real assets. Why this structure survives regime changes, how to size each pillar,…
The Convexity Playbook: Building a Portfolio That Wants Volatility
Standard diversification fails in a crisis because everything gets sold at once. Convexity is different: it gets stronger when things get wo…
The Network Nobody Can Turn Off
Bitcoin has been running continuously for over fifteen years without a single hour of downtime. No company, no government, no military has a…
Time Preference, Hard Money, and the Discipline of Saving
The money a society uses shapes the time preference of the people who use it. Sound money produces long horizons and patient capital. Debasi…
Money Is a Technology, and Bitcoin Is Its Next Version
Money is not a fixed feature of the world. It is a technology, and like all technologies, it improves. Understanding Bitcoin means understan…
The Pendulum Between Individualism and Institutions
Societies swing between eras that favour the individual and eras that rebuild collective institutions. Understanding where the pendulum sits…
The Bond Market Is Telling You Something. Are You Listening?
Equity investors obsess over stock prices. The bond market, which is larger, older, and arguably smarter, often sees the turn before stocks …
Stablecoins Are the Quiet Revolution
While Bitcoin gets the headlines and altcoins get the hype, stablecoins are quietly becoming one of the most important innovations in global…
The VIX Does Not Measure Fear. It Measures Insurance Prices.
The VIX is called the fear index, but that label is misleading. What the VIX actually measures is the price of options protection, and that …
Position Sizing Is the Decision That Matters Most
Most investors spend their energy deciding what to buy. The far more important question is how much to buy. Position sizing determines wheth…
Collateral Is the Plumbing That Nobody Watches Until It Breaks
The global financial system runs on collateral: high-quality assets that are pledged, re-pledged, and multiplied to support trillions of dol…
The Crypto Market Is Not One Market
Lumping all digital assets together is like lumping all equities together. Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and long-tail tokens behave diffe…
Central Banks Are Not as Powerful as You Think
The popular narrative gives central banks near-total control over the economy. The reality is that their tools are blunter, their constraint…
Every Generation Thinks It Is Different. None of Them Are.
The feeling that the current era is unprecedented is itself a recurring phenomenon. History shows that societies move through predictable se…
Gamma and the Hidden Hand That Moves Markets
Dealer gamma is one of the most powerful short-term forces in markets, yet most investors have never heard of it. Understanding gamma exposu…
Why Most Diversification Fails When You Need It Most
Diversification works beautifully in normal markets and collapses in crises. The assets you thought were uncorrelated converge at exactly th…
The Dollar Wrecking Ball and Why It Swings Both Ways
A strong dollar tightens financial conditions for the entire world. A weak dollar loosens them. Understanding this mechanism is essential fo…
Why Bitcoin Falls Hardest and Rises Fastest
Bitcoin’s wild swings are not random. They are the predictable behaviour of the most liquidity-sensitive asset in the world.
What Does Liquidity Actually Mean?
The word liquidity gets used constantly and defined rarely. Here is a plain explanation of what it means and why it moves markets.
One Framework: How Liquidity, Convexity, Cycles, and Flows Fit Together
These lenses are not competing theories. They are layers of the same picture. Put them together and you get a coherent way to see markets in…
Fiscal, Not Monetary: Why the Old Inflation Playbook Broke
For decades, inflation was treated as a monetary phenomenon controlled by central banks. In a world of large deficits, that model is incompl…
The Market Is a Flow Machine, and the Flows Have Changed
Prices are not just opinions about value. They are the residue of flows: options hedging, passive buying, and structural demand that must ha…
Why This Feels Like a Turning Point, Because It Is
History does not repeat, but it rhymes on a roughly eighty-year cycle. Neil Howe’s generational framework explains why the current era of in…
Cheap Insurance Is the Most Expensive Thing to Skip
Most portfolios are optimised for the world staying normal. That optimisation quietly sells disaster insurance to fund a slightly better ret…
Debt Does Not Get Repaid Anymore. It Gets Refinanced.
The modern financial system is not built to pay debt down. It is built to roll it over. Once you see markets as a giant refinancing machine,…
Debasement Is a Policy, Not an Accident
Currency debasement is not a failure of the system. It is how heavily indebted governments manage obligations they cannot otherwise repay. U…
Bitcoin Is a Macro Asset, Not a Tech Stock
The halving narrative gets the attention, but it is not what drives Bitcoin over full cycles. Bitcoin trades on liquidity, monetary policy, …
The Global Liquidity Cycle Is the Only Chart That Matters
Most investors watch prices. Fewer watch the tide that moves them. Global liquidity is the single most important driver of risk assets, and …