All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
Oil falls, gas bounces, banks are buoyed. It’s apparently a weird gravity metaphor grab-bag on a Monday Zeitgeist.
When an inflation regime shifts, the only question that really matters for your investments and your business model is this: do you have pricing power?
Pt. 1 of a three-fer Brief series … why the worst place to be in any services industry is on the product side.
Billionaire penthouses, vertical integration in cannabis, non-musical music power, and a shifting tone in tech.
Time to resurrect an old Epsilon Theory feature and make it a regular thing. Because the ET pack has a voice that’s worth hearing.
An American mutual fund gatekeeper does PR for China, DNC gunning for Wall Street, multiple missionaries live from the pulpit in Davos.
Talking ourselves into a recession, trusting our employers, and a fine example of government shutdown Fiat News.
Welcome back, folks. Today, it’s all about cloud and blockchain, but no cannabis. Also: tech earnings, Trump can’t make a deal, and corporate debt.
A generation of investors has Paul Volcker to thank for almost 40-years of slowly falling rates. He handed countless baby-boomers a free 100 points of investing IQ, for which most never thanked him. It was as good as it gets.
The gyre widens again, and if we are not careful, it will force us into positions that require us to deny the basic humanity of our fellow citizens. Reject it.
We asset owners and allocators (rightfully) obsess about alignment, but too often that obsession becomes an outward one, motivated by our rights and entitlements instead of our ultimate best interest.
Today it’s Morgan Stanley, the price of rice, Morgan Stanley, the art of AI and a bit more Morgan Stanley.
Modern Monetary Theory is neither modern nor a theory. It’s a post hoc rationalization of politically expedient policy that makes us feel better about all the bad stuff we’ve done with money and debt in service to Team Elite.
And all the bad stuff we’re going to do in the future.
The Zeitgeist for January 17th: China, ‘no inflation’, advice from Bogle, and another day, another cannabis headline.
At the suggestion of one of our friends and subscribers, we wanted to provide what we think are some of the best launch points for exploration of the newly published Discovery Map. The only question: do you want to explore topics in depth or see the connections between them?
In this news cycle, if an issue sticks around for more than a week, you can be sure that it isn’t by accident. It’s because it represents an abstraction, and because those in influence like how that abstraction changes our behavior.
The greatest risk to your portfolio is a change in the zeitgeist. A change from deflation to inflation. A change from cooperative international games to competitive games. A change from capital markets to political utilities.
I think it’s all happening.
Distillation isn’t a process of concentration. It isn’t a natural progression. It is a violent changing of the underlying thing. So, too, is portfolio construction.
It’s easy to convince ourselves that the opposite of being Narrative-driven is being data-driven. This is a lie. The most common way that narrative influences our behavior is through unadorned data, presented with the unstated implication that it is necessary, sufficient and explanatory.
Neville’s favorite links from recent months, including an interview with a collector of mathematical toys and an ode to the hack.