Weekend Reading #346

This is the three-hundredth-and-forty-sixth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 10th January 2026.

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What we're thinking.

We are back after a nice long break and ready to go for the new year. The year has gone off with a major bang already. From Venezuela to Iran never mind the rest it has been back-to-back! There has been much written about all these things, and we don't really have anything much to add other than one overriding comment which is that if you think it's all a coincidence, you are wrong. Our long-time thesis of the Eagle (USA) and the Dragon (China) is very much in play and in the perennial battle for the upper hand, President Trump is ratcheting up the pressure to see how the Chinese.
 
Markets wise we are off to a mixed start. Commodities and associated names are off to a flyer with the rotating bottle top bubble game shifting to the nickel markets this week. Anything AI related has followed on from late last year and continued to sell off. The only exception being the memory names which have surged spectacularly (for how much longer we don't know). Our focus is on low hanging fruit early in the year as we rebuild our book for the new year with a fresh mind and a fresh start. Chasing short term tops is probably not smart as we will be patient and wait for the best risk v reward setups to present themselves anew. One market which is looking perky to us after a year of weakness is Turkey, where a number of names are starting to show positive price action. Our usual comments on crypto are reserved for the end and after a fast and furious rally to start the year, we are licking our lips at the opportunity on the short side of these so-called Digital Asset Treasury names.


What we're doing.

After just under 2 weeks doing not a whole lot in Cancun, we returned to Florida and this time to Miami. My previous recollection was as a 13 year old kid and all I could remember was humidity and grime.

Well this time was different. What a city! South Beach and its Art Deco look lovelier than ever. We spent time in the suburbs where beautiful houses are abundant. We went to the night garden at Fairchild and (inadvertently) hung out in the most expensive zip code in America - Coral Cables. We went on a boat trip in the Everglades searching for alligators and despite our 6am wake up we only saw 2 of them! But they are really odd creatures indeed. We went to the original OG outlet mall at Sawgrass Mills and stocked up on cheap(er) clothes.

And we took a drive up the coast to check out Boca Raton to see what all the fuss is about. Boca has one of the largest communities of ex South Africans in America. It is very lovely - beautiful beaches, streets and homes with close proximity to the buzz of Miami. Little not to like.

Miami itself has seen a resurgence as lower taxes and better governance have seen a massive influx of wealthy people from California and soon from New York. It is setting up to be a major American hub in the decade to come, and I was genuinely surprised at how excellent the overall condition of the city was. Once again however I must make mention of prices. Like LA, it is obscenely expensive to do anything. I guess like I mentioned before you get what you pay for!

And so after all our travels, we've arrived finally to a Cape Town in all its summer glory. Beautiful beaches, glistening people and searing sunshine are not even the reason for its recent showing as the 3rd happiest city in the world. In the survey, 18,000 locals were asked to rate how much their city makes them happy, whether they feel happier there than anywhere else, and if they find joy in the everyday moments it offers. Top was Medellin in Colombia and 2nd was Abu Dhabi. Only one American city (Chicago in 8th) and one European city (Sevilla in 9th) in the top 10. Country with the most top 10s? China with Beijing and Shanghai at 6th and 7th place. Make of that what you will.  DC

What we're reading.
 
In a development that epitomizes what has been happening over the past couple of years, The UAE has removed UK universities from its list of scholarship funding destinations for international students. One quote sums it up.
 
"They don't want their kids to be radicalized on campus"
 
The UK of course expressed the importance of academic freedom. You cannot make this up.
 
My best new spy-thriller author, David McCloskey is out with another banger. The Persian is another page-turner. Israelis are famous for their elite assassination squads but in this book, McCloskey creates a battle between the Mossad's killing unit and that of a new, fictional (I think) death squad courtesy of the Iranians. It delves deep into the psyche of the IRGC and also the population and is far more a study of Iran than Israel. It is excellent. I read it in 2 days. DC
 
“Mind over matter” is often the mantra used to push people into (generally) senseless work schedules, packed with copious doses of sleep deprivation, with the argument going that “you can rest when you’re dead”. It turns out that the need for sleep, very much a good thing, came about way before brains were even evolved. This study of Jellyfish and Sea Anemones found that despite lacking a central nervous system (and hence a brain), they have sleep patterns that are pretty similar to ours. Mind over matter doesn’t work as a mantra when there’s no mind – and the rest that was hardcoded into their systems in fact helps with neuron and DNA repair. Sleep is a good thing, and it doesn’t even take a brain to know that.
 
On a more galactic scale, this release from NASA describes how the Hubble Space Telescope was used to locate a fascinating example of a could-have-been galaxy which didn’t form. A starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud nicknamed “Cloud-9” was located, composed of neutral hydrogen and estimating it to be a million times the mass of the sun, accompanied by potentially five billion solar masses worth of dark matter. It’s a fascinating counterfactual for what things would’ve been if everything we know of our existence didn’t happen – and the fact that it’s not unique, just really hard to locate, suggests maybe we’re very, very lucky to even exist. On a side note, NASA were quick to point out that this just happened to be named Cloud-9 because it was the 9th gas cloud identified on the outskirts of the nearby Messier 94 galaxy. Then again, is anything really a coincidence? EL

What we're reading.
On the extremely long flight from Atlanta to Cape Town I watched an inordinate number of episodes of Yellowstone. I watched the first season already and stopped but on a flight with little to do (and not being captured by my most recent book) I dug back in. It really is glorious to watch. This Taylor Sheridan fellow is onto something. A multigenerational family drama/thriller where something happens every episode alongside sweeping natural scenery is hard to resist. I don’t know if I'll get to 7 seasons but it really is good fun. DC