Weekend Reading #310
This is the three-hundredth-and-tenth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 12th April 2025
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What we're thinking.
We seem to be saying this every week but WOW what an incredible week. This was Lenin’s week - where everything happened. We are still trying to get our heads around everything that has unfolded to be honest with many colourful exchanges with everyone we trust and respect providing much food for thought. Suffice to say that the price action never lies, and the winner of the week is the EURO. Being the no 2 currency in the world and winning so much is kind of like Labour winning the UK election last year simply because everyone wanted the Conservatives out! With great power comes great responsibility and soon we will find out one way or the other if the Europeans, who up until this point have showed absolutely zero gumption whatsoever, will surprise to the upside.
Either way the flow of money post the Trump PAUSE is very much instructive of the resumption, after a brief interruption, of the GREAT ROTATION. European defence stocks after a day or two of selloff amid the panic have settled near the 52 weeks highs. Same is true of European financials. The way we see it, in the absence of any fresh shocks (this is a MAJOR caveat), this is where the money will flow to. Poland is an interesting play on this theme - the lower liquify relatively means the impulse from the flow of money in will possibly be more pronounced.
And we simply have to say it - with the collapse of the dollar and the surge in the gold price, Bitcoin has up till now been treated like a U.S. tech stock as indeed it was on the way up. But from a risk/reward standpoint it stands out. If ever there was a time for it to decouple from tech and reprice towards something similar (but the not the same) to gold it is now. The infrastructure is all there now - institutional pipes and ETFs all in place. It simply needs a spark, and we know there is nothing that makes Bitcoin (and everything else under the sun that’s public and liquid) go up so much as the price going up. The narrative always follows.
We are also sharing our investor letter we penned to investors before the Trump Pause.
We hope it highlights our approach to money management and provides some insight into how we think about the world of investing as well as obviously the world right now.
What we're watching.
On a flight this week, in need of some properly low-synapse-demand entertainment, I decided to click on a film that showed up called “Cocaine Bear”. The summary is as the name suggests: drug dealers on a plane going down decide to dump bags of cocaine into a designated drop zone to be recovered later. As it happens, a bear eats up the dumped cocaine and turns into a deranged cocaine-addicted bear, going on a rampage in search of the rest of the consignment. Funny thing is as much as it sounds ludicrous, and I’m sure most of the scenes in the film were made up with copious amounts of artistic license (no intelligence required to process any part of it), the general storyline is based on true events, with the bear in question being known as… Pablo Escobear. EL
What we're reading.
The second book in Conn Iggulden’s Athenian series, Protector, follows the next phase in the Peloponnese War between the Greeks and the Persians as Themistocles, Xanthippus, Aristides and Cimon face off against the not so mighty Persian King, Xerxes and his far braver general Mardonius. This book is an absolute treat with Iggulden back to his best. It brought out real emotion for me as I felt part of it all the way through. Nobody does epic historical fiction like this guy.
This announcement by Colossal Biosciences of the resurrection(?) of the Dire Wolf is brilliant. Some will moan about the ethics of playing God but come on this is super cool. Cant wait for those Wooly Mammoths and neither can my 4-year-old son!
I have done lots of reading of market commentary this week as always and all of it contributes but to be honest it’s all just a blur as nothing really stood out. The reality is that for all the intellectual venting nobody can give the right answer because there isn’t one.
No listening or watching this week as I have been sunning myself off the Southern coast of Africa while watching Rome burn (this is not literal). DC