We are pleased to announce the launch of Epsilon Theory Professional, or ET Pro. It is a service designed to leverage our narrative research more directly for investors and asset owners. Learn more about the types of content and research we’re doing here.
Featured Notes
We’re Doing It Wrong
The market is not a clockwork machine, even though we all think it is. No, the market is a bonfire.
Even When I Lie
The way I see it, there are three reasons a person becomes a liar: he believes that he must, he believes that he may, or he believes it serves a Greater Truth.
Things Fall Apart (Part 3) – Politics
Take back your vote.
Take back your distance.
Take back your data.
How to make our way as citizens in a fallen world, with Clear Eyes and Full Hearts to make it better.
From the Archives - Tuesday, December 18th
While Dr. Hunt travels through Italy, we'll have our usual briefs, ET Pro updates and notes from Rusty and other contributors. But we'll also be featuring one of Rusty's favorite notes from the ET archives each day. Today's note is The Play's the Thing, a Ben throwback from nearly 5 years ago, and a reminder that the messaging games many wrongly attribute to Trump's world have been the constant companion of political societies.
There has to be a middle ground between being a Cynic and a Fool, some way of playing the game without losing one’s soul. Recognizing that all of us human animals, including me and including you, are playing multiple multi-level games … well, that seems like a good start to me.
Most Recent Notes
It is a frustrating truth that good – even great – investors rarely know exactly what it is that makes them good. And so the inevitable guilty pleasure of investors – building portfolios from the best ideas of their various managers and advisors – is almost always doomed to fail from the beginning.
There is very little that an investor can do to more easily become a better investor than to better understand his behavior. But the investor who relies on awareness, discipline and self-control remains susceptible to a world that seeks to influence his standard for correct behavior.
Imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, it’s also the engine behind so much of what we do in both professional baseball and professional investing. The trick, of course, is not to get beaned in the process!
Common knowledge effects, credentialing and missionaries are everywhere. You may differ in your view of their importance, but if your framework doesn’t acknowledge their role in price-setting, you’re not seeing the full picture.
ET contributor Pete Cecchini, better known as Cantor Fitzgerald’s Chief Market Strategist, is back with the December installment of his series, In the Trenches. For ET readers who want a less philosophical but no less smart take on markets, Pete’s your guy.
No matter how much you try to make mama tell you what part of the snake you’re eating, and no matter how much the answer might comfort you, it’s important to know that neither you nor she is telling the truth.
Our December 11 edition of Epsilon Theory Live has concluded, but subscribers can still catch the replay here.
Discretionary investment always and in all ways boils down to two things: edge and odds. In the US-China trade war game of Chicken, you have no edge. And you don’t know the odds. Time to sit this dance out.
It’s possible to do good AND to do well. ET’s Neville Crawley interviews Lev Plaves, Senior Investment Manager at Kiva, on banking the unbankable – refugees and internally displaced populations.
Sometimes the dog that doesn’t bark gives as loud a warning as the dog that does. That was true for Sherlock Holmes, and it’s true for investors, too.
Just because something is true doesn’t mean that it can’t also be transformed into a meme. That is, in fact, the usual outcome when an idea encounters resistance. But this isn’t a path to truth.
If you want to learn how you will be nudged in the future, look to the same places: Vegas and Video Games.
Fresh thoughts on the intersection of technology, freedom and decentralization.
ET’s Neville Crawley interviews Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer for the Human Rights Foundation (HRF).
What will it take to Burn The Oligarchy Down? Pics of a certain sort. Which is why “doctored” will be 2019’s Word of the Year.
In our November 2018 update to the Fiat News Index, we review some topics that media outlets are even happier than usual to tell us how to think about.
It’s almost as if there’s a ruling class.
In the Common Knowledge World, we lose the ability to distinguish between what we think and what we think we think. It’s Fiat Thought, and here’s how you beat it.
The emphasis of asset owners on private assets investments is meta-stable – robust to a lot of potential changes in market environment. The reason? The deals! meme.
Every idea has a story, but the story is not the idea. Stories are born, they live, and they die. But if the idea is powerful enough, it can find a new story and be reborn. Crypto must find a new story.
It’s an invitation to explore a joint research program, as described in TFA3. It’s an invitation to share ideas on liberty, resistance and technological advancement. It’s NOT an invitation to share ideas about money.