Weekend Reading #313

This is the three-hundredth-and-thirteenth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 3rd May 2025

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What we're thinking.

And the markets roar on. Pick a country and off we go. Dollar or no dollar, rates or no rates. And led by... Yip, that horrid space that no one wants to touch. The Mag7. Another lesson that the truth is no one really knows what going to happen next and our comments last week once again illustrating how price action does show you the way. Higher we go until we don’t. It sounds glib but to be honest we just have to take it one step at a time now. There are two paths as we see it. The price action is telling us that we bottomed for a period – possibly as we did in 2020 and 2022 or possibly for a shorter time, with disbelief from participants evident everywhere one looks. The other path is that we are in an enduring bear market, the first phase of which we saw in March and climaxing earlier this month after Liberation Day. If this is the case, we would soon expect the price action to begin to change. Our process is we don’t impose our view on the market, and we respect the price action as the indicator of the market consciousness’s opinion. So, for now we go with path 1, but we are on the lookout for it to change at any moment to begin hinting path 2 is in play.

What we're listening to.

There is one podcast appearance or book release I have been waiting for more than any other for some time and it is an appearance by a gentleman named Hal Puthoff. Puthoff is the key person behind the CIA’s initial remote viewing program and the investigation of many other parapsychological phenomena at the CIA including UAPs. This podcast appearance on Joe Rogan is beyond immense. There us so much in here that I actually stopped and listened multiple times to the same part. There are multiple admissions in which he speaks openly of alien craft and physics that we simply do not understand although we can observe. I learned of Puthoff when reading Luis Elizondo’s book last year, in which it emerges rather quickly that he is the key person responsible for many breakthroughs in trying to understand many unexplained phenomena. He is also the man who spearheaded the understanding of what is today called zero-point energy. Also, a section on consciousness and quantum entanglement involving microtubules in the brain – something that keeps popping up in my reading. I won’t go into it here but any basic google and anyone can learn. This is my favourite listen of the year so far. Wow. DC

What we're reading.

I flew through Lion, Book 3 of Conn Iggulden’s Ancient Greek series, featuring the great Pericles. It covers the battle of Cypros and the razing of the Persian fleet at the mouth of the Eurymedon River, which led to the demise of King Xerxes, killed by his guards after yet another failure against the Greeks. The stage is now set for the ultimate battle – between Athens and Sparta in Book 4. One particular scene resonated deeply in this book as navarch of the Greek Fleet, Cimon, taught the King of Thrace a lesson, for forgoing his financial contribution to the Delian League, an alliance of city states formed to fight the Persians. After the King refused to pay his share, Cimon had his army destroy everything in sight on the island of Thrace as an example to other alliance members who might be thinking of not paying their share. The analogy to modern times is impossible to miss regarding NATO and President Trump’s contention that in order to be protected, European nations must pay their fare share or face the consequences. History doesn’t repeat but it most certainly rhymes,
 
Liverpool Football Club’s English Premier League title this season was a truly remarkable feat. After being a supporter since I was a kid, I had assumed that some of the joy of success would be diluted with age as other things in life become much more important. I was wrong. The emotion felt at the victory is a weird thing to describe. It’s just a football team right. But it is yet another indication that everything in life cannot be intellectualised and doesn’t always make rational sense. On that note, I stumbled across an incredible piece of emotive writing by Liverpool’s goalkeeper, Alisson Becker. One wouldn’t expect such writing from a footballer, especially one who is arguably the best in the world in his position but my goodness this hit home. He writes of the death of his father, what he meant to him and the experience he has had since with his teammates, his manager and indeed his own children. This is not an article about football. It’s an article about life. DC
 
For anyone that missed it, early this week, Spain and Portugal suffered a power outage that lasted hours, causing chaos and, in the extreme, death from outage related consequences. This feature in the FT raises the ominous warning that “Europe’s first grid crisis may not be its last”. The outage was a quintessential study in system fragility, where a system built for the consistency of coal-powered baseload supply (or in some cases nuclear) saw all of that shut down in favour of a green agenda of solar and wind. The problem of course is that no one can control when the wind blows and when the sun shines, leading to fluctuations in the grid’s power frequency which as it happens was a hair’s breadth away from triggering a continent-wide shutdown – a risk flagged up in this Twitter post. Ultimately, it’s easy to make grandiose promises of sustainability and set ambitious targets to be achieved, but when power generation capacity from “bad” sources (i.e. coal) gets shut down before sustainable replacements can come online AND take over the generation workload from their predecessors, this is exactly what we get. EL