If you’re like me, you’ve been put off from digging deeper into DeFi by the terrible signal-to-noise ratio of anything crypto-related on the interwebs. That’s why I found this DeFi primer (using Maker DAO as a specific example) by ET contributor and banking analyst Marc Rubinstein to be so fantastic.
Do you know Bryan Moore? Host of the Active Advisor podcast at Harbor Capital, former trading floor veteran who’s built ETF desks from scratch at major firms like Morgan Stanley, RBC, and WisdomTree, and one of the most thoughtful voices on how active ETFs are reshaping the investment landscape.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Bryan has spent over two decades in the trenches of financial markets – from trading futures in the Chicago pits to building international ETF operations to educating institutional clients about the evolution from passive indexing to smart beta to active management. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the ability to synthesize complex market knowledge with genuine curiosity about human behavior and psychology.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Epsilon Theory YouTube Channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear how a colorblind kid from Virginia who joined the military became one of the most connected voices in ETF education, why he drives in silence to cultivate quiet thinking time, and his legendary Vatican trade story.’
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Jared Dillian came on Just Press Record to discuss his excellent new book, Rule 62: Meditations on Success and Spirituality – and he surprised me with this statement:
“You can teach pretty much anything in writing, except for two things: voice and imagination. You either have it or you don’t.”
But what if you don’t realize if you have it or not yet?
I’m only asking because I’ve felt this way before. More than once. In more than one domain too (I remember feeling this with writing music and writing words, very distinctly!).
So what is voice?
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Somebody was talking about the power of thinking big the other day. It was all about impact.
Then I saw somebody else talking about the power of thinking small. It was all about little efforts compounding today into bigger results later.
They’re both right and they’re both missing the real point.
It’s not about the size in the first step (although the size is obvious in end result).
It’s all about the action, today.
It could be brilliant business idea nobody has thought of before.
Everybody might say its weird or dumb or whatever, but it could change the world.
It could also be a boring act that everybody has thought of before but executed in a way nobody will ever attempt.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
My dog wanted to smell (re: eat) a baggie with a few stray gummy somethings left in it that clearly fell out of some kids hands and onto the street up the block from my house.
It’s been hot, so the gummy whatevers melted in the bag.
It’s a disgusting mix of too bright colors and sugar.
And, it’s art.
If you want it to be.
It’s also trash, and a dog snack, and a snack that should have been eaten.
The point is, it’s a choice, and today I’m choosing to say it was art.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
There’s a thin line between chaotic nonsense and chaotic substance. There’s a not so thin line between creative exploration and creative activism. Sometimes art, as protest, is too on the nose and it ends up being – temporally trite, and other times it’s personally reflective enough to be timelessly emotive.
Think protest songs for a minute. There’s a big difference between the Op Ed/opinion column singalongs and, say, Hendrix interpreting “The Star Spangled Banner.” Is it just the lyrics? I’m kind of stuck on it, because when the words are left out, the feelings that wash over you – it’s different, right?
I want to tell you about how I arrived at this thought first, but we’re going to land on Uri Caine’s musical protest song, “BushWack” and how in 2004 he gave a number of classics the Hendrix at Woodstock treatment.
Kevin Alexander shares a note every year on the 4th titled, “John Phillip Sousa- ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’: ‘A Republic, if you can keep it.” He adds some new ideas to the margins, but it’s such a great story of the song that I hope you’ll read it.
There are two parts I always appreciate the most though.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Do you know Bryan Moore? Host of the Active Advisor podcast at Harbor Capital, former trading floor veteran who’s built ETF desks from scratch at major firms like Morgan Stanley, RBC, and WisdomTree, and one of the most thoughtful voices on how active ETFs are reshaping the investment landscape.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Bryan has spent over two decades in the trenches of financial markets – from trading futures in the Chicago pits to building international ETF operations to educating institutional clients about the evolution from passive indexing to smart beta to active management. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the ability to synthesize complex market knowledge with genuine curiosity about human behavior and psychology.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Epsilon Theory YouTube Channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear how a colorblind kid from Virginia who joined the military became one of the most connected voices in ETF education, why he drives in silence to cultivate quiet thinking time, and his legendary Vatican trade story.’
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Jared Dillian came on Just Press Record to discuss his excellent new book, Rule 62: Meditations on Success and Spirituality – and he surprised me with this statement:
“You can teach pretty much anything in writing, except for two things: voice and imagination. You either have it or you don’t.”
But what if you don’t realize if you have it or not yet?
I’m only asking because I’ve felt this way before. More than once. In more than one domain too (I remember feeling this with writing music and writing words, very distinctly!).
So what is voice?
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Modeling Common Knowledge by analyzing Missionary statements and their reverberations works. Except when it doesn’t.
What do you get when you give a Raccoon billions of dollars AND invisibility from regulators? Collusion and insider trading.
Most of us are under the impression that a protracted conflict within China will increase national unity. Not this time.
Recent Notes
The Summer Reading List (by Jeremy Radcliffe)
In which Jeremy Radcliffe recommends Bob Lefsetz, Scott Galloway, Scott Belsky,Tim Urban and the gang at Hoisington.
Tell My Horse
So yeah, I’m overweight and I need to get more sleep. I’m not happy about the market, and I’m anxious about living up to my obligations to my partners and clients. But I wake up every morning thinking independent thoughts about idiosyncratic risks. I’ve got a Tribe. I’m nobody’s horse. And that’s about as good as it gets here in the Hollow Market.
Chili P is My Signature: Things that Don’t Matter #5
The second moral license from a wise emphasis on passive investing is spending inordinate amounts of time on tilts, trades and tactical ideas that will never influence our portfolio results.
Quantum Supremacy, Correlating Unemployment, and Buddhists with Attitude (by Silly Rabbit)
What web searches correlate to unemployment, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and methodologies with a fragility problem.
Complex Systems, Multiscale Information and Strange Loops (by Silly Rabbit)
Complex systems, machine learning software creating machine learning software, one-shot imitation and the power of the platform.
She Screams, He Kidnaps (by Silly Rabbit)
Proximity of verbs to gender, wiki-memory, fool me once (and twice), and a veritable zoo of machine learning techniques.
And They Did Live by Watchfires: Things that Don’t Matter #4
For the bored (read: profitable) investor, the bias to action is a constant threat. As we become more passive in our strategies, the moral license to ‘do something’ is exaggerated, and must be curtailed.
Mo’ Compute Mo’ Problems (by Silly Rabbit)
On hard problems, lazy XKCD references, the myth of superhuman AI, and valley grammar.
Westworld
If political parties in Western democracies were stocks, we’d be talking today about the structural bear market that has gripped that sector. Show me any country that’s had an election in the past 24 months, and I’ll show you at least one formerly big-time status quo political party that has been crushed.
1999 v2.0
On episode 21 of the Epsilon Theory podcast, Dr. Ben Hunt is joined by Brad McMillan, CFA, CAIA, the chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network®. Brad graciously hosts us at Commonwealth’s headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. Ben and Brad talk about their mutual love for Terry Pratchett, narrative causality, the French elections, and how technology is changing the financial advisory business.
Future Flash Crashes, Digital Darwinism & the Resurgence of Hardware (by Silly Rabbit)
My view is that we are heading into a far more ‘interesting’ era of flash crashes of confused, or deliberately misled, algorithms.
Alibaba’s AI, JP Morgan’s Risky Language & the Nurture of Reality (by Silly Rabbit)
Starcraft mastery from AI, risky language, and the map of physics. Also Zen vs. Tantra, because why not?
Break the Wheel: Things that Don’t Matter #3
Almost as much as we love stock discussions, we love talking about our favorite fund managers. These discussions are unfortunately almost always a complete waste of time.
AI Hedge Funds, Corporate Inequality & Microdosing LSD (by Silly Rabbit)
On DARPA explainer videos, Burning Man invocations, and the impact of bad weather and high taxes on AI talent pools.
Change is in the Air
By the time we got to episode 20 of the Epsilon Theory podcast, change was bound to happen. Coming to you from our New York office, Dr. Ben Hunt and producer Michael Corrao talk about changes to the Epsilon Theory website, Ben’s role, and the entire political system.
The Horse in Motion
Many of the gaps in our knowledge are the result of our insistence on accepting our priors and using technology to answer questions we see as new. But what if we could develop techniques to challenge those priors with new questions?
What a Good-Looking Question: Things that Don’t Matter #2
We meet with our fund managers and financial advisers with a goal in mind. But we always end up talking stocks. If you insist on buying the tank, they’ll sell you a tank, folks.
Information, Please.
On episode 19 of the Epsilon Theory podcast, Dr. Ben Hunt is joined by Rusty Guinn, Salient’s executive vice president of asset management. Picking up from their last conversation on fake news, Ben and Rusty consider the kinds of information that we have at our disposal and if we are asking the right questions in our analysis — or just searching for the answers we want.
Salient and Other Just-So Origin Stories (by Jeremy Radcliffe)
An introduction to Jeremy Radcliffe, the Rabbit Hole and why it seems like the best asset management executives would be far happier as general managers of sports teams.
The Rabbit Hole: The War on Bad Science (by Jeremy Radcliffe)
If questioning everything you ever thought you knew about science sends you into a downward spiral of crippling anxiety, this may not be the Rabbit Hole for you.