Weekend Reading #319
This is the three-hundredth-and-nineteenth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 14th June 2025
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What we're thinking.
Ever since I’ve been in markets there has been one item consistently on the list of top risks of all the beleaguered prognosticators each year. An Israeli strike on Iran. Well, here it is. And risk assets do not give a flying f*ck. Not yet anyway. Once again, Israel has demonstrated its ability to decapitate Iran’s plan. The ultimate sign of success arrives shortly after the attack when the umpteenth new head of Hezbollah quietly announced that they won’t be participating in any retaliatory action. Oil spiked up a whole 5%, giving hope to the energy permabulls.
As we have written before, we are unabashedly bullish on the future of the Middle East. Once again Saudi and Jordanian authorities allowed the use of airspace to shoot down the 100 drones Iran sent in response. Iran is the odd one out and maybe, just maybe, we could be on the cusp of a golden age of peace and prosperity in the region akin to Europe after the fall of the wall. There is a lot to still unfold especially in the wake of this development but it turns out that the October 7 massacre, intended to start a war which Israel was to lose and Iran to rise victorious has resulted in the exact opposite. Funny how the world works.
Equities wise, we march on albeit with a slightly less raucous move this week. Dollar weakness continues, stocks keep going up. As we were.
This week, I have been very busy watching cricket - the World Test Championship Final between South Africa and Australia, and haven’t done much else in terms of reading, watching or listening. As I am off to Lords for the third day in a row, I must just remind everyone that as I said last week, life does happen away from the media - both social and otherwise and I’m on a one man mission embracing real life stuff like this with friends to combat the haze of a social media slanted view on the world. Life is what happens while you are making plans! DC
What we're watching.
I managed to catch on a flight a Christopher Nolan film from a few years back, Tenet, which was a fascinating bundle of timelines and loops. As always, it takes a lot of rewinding and re-watching, which probably would be challenging if watched in a cinema. The idea of reversing entropy and causing objects and people to be “inverted” and therefore travel through time in the opposite direction (including perceiving the world in a very different way e.g. birds flying backwards) is intriguing, not least in terms of the amount of “playing recordings backwards” the film must have required. And given the way interesting things are being revealed about the world as we know it, some harder to believe than others, science fiction may not turn out to be that fictitious in the end. EL
What we're listening to.
Markets wise I haven’t listened to anything interesting for a while now. Usually when this happens it means absolutely nothing. But still very few (who are not already permabulls) are embracing this market. DC
What we're reading.
I have begun a book which likely I won’t finish but I’m giving it a go. It’s called The New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple. It covers a topic which has recently intrigued me - plasma. Not the plasma in our TVs or our blood but rather space plasma. Temple contends that space plasma is a fourth state of matter other than the three we are familiar with - gas, liquid and solid. And what’s interesting is that some scientists contend that plasma is the state out of which all other three emerge. It seems quite sciencey so I’ll probably get bored but I’ll give it a go. In some NASA papers, there has been mention that this space plasma exhibits signs of intelligence. What does that mean? Well read the book, I guess. DC