Weekend Reading #314
This is the three-hundredth-and-fourteenth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 10th May 2025
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What we're thinking.
After a brief and rather insipid couple of days of selling, markets roared back to new post-liberation day highs led by the much maligned Nasdaq. Crypto has gone nuts as Bitcoin approaches all time highs and Ether over the past couple days has make Bitcoin look pedestrian. The key variable to watch is clearly the US treasury yields which continue to rise. What does this mean? We will let the macro prognosticators work that out but it is notable this time round that the markets are not rioting. Yet. We say it time and again include last week and the week before, the market has its own consciousness and it’s far cleverer than anyone who dares impose his/her own views upon it. We said it reminded us of 2020 and 2022 where most participants were dumbfounded at its rise in the middle of a global quagmire. And the analogy continues. We are still running two outcomes side by side. Our base case is bullish and a push to new highs. However, if it is going to turn around it will be right around here so we are still open to our alternative outcome. Maybe it will turn around and we have a plan for that of course but at present our base case is a march to all-time highs in AMERICA. When discussing with people this rally, we have been treated like heretics which makes us even more bullish. Dogmatism in markets is a bad idea! We also would do well to remember that as we sprout our base case to all and sundry.
What we're doing.
I’d first visited Mauritius in 2018, so coming back again 7 years later, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t one of those places that made a good first impression and went on to disappoint. This time, given we had some meetings to do, we unfortunately spent most of our time between the business district in Ebene and the capital of Port Louis, with some forays into slightly more touristy areas like Grand Baie in the north of the island and Le Morne in the south (close to where we’d visited back in 2018). One often mistakes Mauritius as a holiday destination, and of course it is very much the “Bali” equivalent of Africa and India, but it is also a well-established financial jurisdiction with a great ecosystem of banks, service providers and investment managers. All of this is a function of its long history as a trading port, very much the gateway to Africa. It’s a fascinating place – a bit slow in terms of pace, but not necessarily a bad thing sometimes! EL
What we're reading.
This is a really good scenario sketch from a bunch of proper AI guys. AI-2027.com lets you toggle the outcomes but it really is a riveting read. This is not just some imagineering by these guys but their best guess at what superhuman AI will look like over the next decade. I have by now read hundreds of these types of things with outcomes generally either very good or very bad. This is deeply thought out and well-illustrated. It really should make us think properly. Should we be afraid? Probably. DC
What we're watching.
The AI-2027 site above comes at the same time when hedge fund GOAT, Paul Tudor Jones spoke on CNBC this week about AI, stating he believes there is at least a 10% chance that within the next two decades AI kills half of humanity given the conversations at a tech conference he attended recently. This is no glib remark. As he alludes to himself (more humbly than I am writing), he is one of the greatest macro risk managers around and has spent his career managing risk. This is not some prediction from a random coder. This is Paul Tudor Jones so the weighting in your matrix for importance should be high. Check it out yourself.
Eric Prince is an almost mythical figure – the most important military guy not in the military. He is the founder of Blackwater, a “private military contractor” and subject of much controversy. But what is not controversial is this guy’s knowledge of war and strategy. And this talk is absolutely compulsory. His stories about Ukrainian and Israeli innovation using old gear mixed with new tech is great as well as his historical analogies including how innovation changes war going all the way back the Mongols and the invention of stirrups. His outlook on the types of weaponry as well as his views on global hotspots alone are worth the watch.
President Trump gave a commencement speech to the graduating class at Alabama University. I love commencement speeches and think it’s a brilliant tradition. The first bit is just politics but then it gets quite good as he lists a series of points of advice he offers to the class of 2025. Many people believe Trump is unpredictable but I really don’t agree. You simply have to listen properly to what he says. These bits of advice are genuine and give good insight into him. Remember he is not a young man and the experiences he has had in his life are just incredibly valuable. Any advice he has to dish out, should be broken down and treated as gold. There was also a very interesting comment he made, seemingly off the cuff, but I think indicative of a very important trend and attitude this time round in his presidency. He said to the students not to waste their skills to speculate and try make money in the markets, rather use them to build real businesses. If this isn’t a harbinger of a changing time then I don’t know what is. When people tell you what they want to do, listen. DC