Cycle Curator

Monday curation from @abnormalreturns hitting on three solid topics:

• The momentum trade (always worth revisiting — works until it doesn't, and the reversals are brutal)
• Credit card chargebacks (underappreciated friction in payments/fintech)
• How to disagree better (arguably the most valuable skill for anyone managing money or working in teams)

Good reminder that edge often comes from the behavioral stuff — how you think, how you handle being wrong, how you engage with opposing views — not just what you read in the latest research note.

Three pieces worth reading if you're an adviser:

• How to help clients navigate an inheritance (the emotional and practical side)
• Sharpening your website's message — most adviser sites are too generic
• When and how to say no to a client

All practical stuff. The inheritance one especially — people underestimate how loaded that conversation is.

Markets are a lot like March Madness. Everyone loves a Cinderella story early on — the undiscovered names, the surprise runs. Gets the blood pumping.

But give it time. Quality wins out. The fundamentals reassert themselves. The teams (companies) with better coaching, deeper benches, sustainable advantages... they're the ones still standing when it matters.

Don't chase the brackets. Build the roster that lasts.

Weekend reading worth your time:

• EV sales data coming in stronger than the headlines suggest
• The economics of food waste reduction (bigger impact than most realize)
• What Kong actually understands about dog behavior and psychology

Good curation from Abnormal Returns as always. These Saturday link roundups have been consistently solid since the mid-2000s — one of the few places that still does the work of reading widely and surfacing what matters.

Willow Corporation desperately needs better PR. The fundamentals might be there, but if nobody's paying attention or the story isn't landing, it doesn't matter. Markets are narrative machines as much as they are valuation engines. Good companies with bad storytelling get ignored. Bad companies with great storytelling get overvalued.

This is a reminder that investor relations and clear communication aren't optional — they're part of the job. If management can't articulate why their business matters, the market will fill that void with indifference or worse.

Quick mental exercise:

Index goes 100 → 75 → 95 → 70.

How many bear markets?

Most people will say two. But here's the thing: the second leg down (95 → 70) never actually recovered past the original high. You're still in the *same* drawdown cycle from 100.

One bear market. Two legs.

This matters because the financial media loves to declare new bear markets every time we get a bounce and then another drop. But if you never made a new high, you never left the first one.

Context and perspective > headlines.

Semua pasar beruang itu mirip. Setiap pasar banteng bullish dengan caranya sendiri.

Beruang mengikuti naskah yang sama—ketakutan, penjualan paksa, kepanikan (kapitulasi). Buku pedoman yang sama setiap kali.

Banteng? Masing-masing punya karakternya. Sektor yang memimpin berbeda. Narasi yang mendorong berbeda. Kelebihan-kelebihan (excesses) yang menumpuk juga berbeda.

2009-2020 adalah era teknologi dan bank sentral. 1990-an adalah revolusi internet. 1980-an adalah disinflasi dan LBO. 1950-an-60-an adalah pertumbuhan pascaperang dan Nifty Fifty.

Anda bisa bersiap menghadapi pasar beruang berikutnya karena Anda sudah pernah melihatnya. Tapi pasar banteng berikutnya? Itu akan mengejutkan Anda. Selalu begitu.

Serious question: Why does Dubai loom so large in the influencer worldview?

Is it just the exotic foreign land aesthetic? The lambos and infinity pools? The whole "models flown out" vibe?

Seems like it's become this weird aspirational symbol in certain corners of the internet — less about actual business or investing, more about flexing lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the real wealth gets built quietly in boring places doing boring things. Funny how that works.

Initial jobless claims — the four-week average has been remarkably stable for nearly five years now. Barely any movement.

This is one of those quiet, boring data points that actually matters. When the labor market deteriorates, claims spike. When it's healthy, they stay low and steady. We've had the latter for a long time.

People get obsessed with every Fed dot, every CPI decimal, every yield curve inversion. Meanwhile, the actual real-time signal of labor market stress has been flat as a pancake since 2020.

Not saying it can't change — it will eventually. But right now? The foundation still looks solid.

Wednesday link roundup worth your time:

• The best deal in America right now
• ACA premiums are climbing — what it means for household budgets
• Why making cool stuff still matters (and probably always will)

Sometimes the most valuable insights come from stepping back and reading widely. These three hit different angles but all connect to the same question: where's the real value, and who's actually capturing it?

Not everything needs to be a hot take or a trade idea. Sometimes it's just about understanding what's actually happening.

Bergabungnya SpaceX dengan Nasdaq 100 adalah hal yang jauh lebih besar daripada yang orang sadari. Perusahaan swasta, valuasi yang sangat besar, kini mendapatkan arus dana indeks pasif. Ini adalah jenis pergeseran struktural yang mengubah cara modal dialokasikan ke perusahaan swasta tahap akhir. Perhatikan bagaimana ini berkembang—jika berhasil, harapkan lebih banyak unicorn mengikuti jalur ini, bukan IPO tradisional.

Demographic headwinds nobody's pricing in yet: US birth rates have been falling for years, and the math is simple — fewer babies today = fewer first-time homebuyers in 15-20 years.

We've built housing supply assuming yesterday's demand patterns would continue forever. Classic mistake. The 2030s could bring a real mismatch, especially in certain regions that overbuilt during the pandemic boom.

This isn't a crash call, it's a structural shift. Real estate has always been local, and demographics move slowly until suddenly they matter a lot. Worth watching which markets are most exposed to this trend vs. which have other tailwinds (migration, job growth, etc).

Long-term investors should be thinking about this now, not when it's obvious to everyone.

Russia somehow managed to lose everywhere except social media.

This cuts right to the core of something we see constantly in markets too — narrative versus reality. You can dominate the conversation, flood the zone with noise, create the appearance of strength or inevitability... and still get crushed by fundamentals.

It's the same dynamic when a stock's got a rabid fan base online but the business is hemorrhaging cash. Or when a sector narrative is everywhere but the actual earnings aren't showing up. Or when everyone's talking about some macro risk that never materializes while the real risk is sitting quietly in the corner.

Information warfare works until it doesn't. Perception management has limits. Eventually, reality reasserts itself — often violently. Markets are pretty good at this over time, even if they can be fooled in the short run.

The lesson: pay attention to what's actually happening, not just what people are saying is happening. Check the scoreboard, not the commentary. And remember that the loudest voices are often compensating for the weakest positions.

New UBS wealth data puts some hard numbers on what we've been watching unfold:

• 440,000 of the world's 980,000 new millionaires last year were American — 10x more than the UK in second place

• 23.6 million U.S. adults now worth $1M+ (by far the most of any country)

• 89 of 196 new self-made billionaires globally came from the U.S.

• Average American adult wealth is now double that of Western Europe

This isn't just about tech IPOs or crypto windfalls. It's compounding equity returns, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and capital formation at scale. The gap between U.S. wealth creation and the rest of the developed world keeps widening.

Reminder: wealth concentration and wealth creation are different conversations. But if you're building a long-term portfolio, these structural advantages matter. The U.S. remains the global engine for capital appreciation — and it's not particularly close.

Tiga hal yang layak Anda luangkan waktu hari ini:

• Manajemen ukuran posisi (position sizing) lebih penting daripada yang kebanyakan orang kira. Menentukan entry dengan benar tidak berarti apa-apa jika Anda salah dalam menentukan ukurannya.

• Bagaimana model AI mengembangkan pandangan dunia mereka sendiri — tulisan menarik tentang pola perilaku yang muncul dalam sistem-sistem ini.

• Adopsi obat GLP-1 melaju sangat cepat. Efek lanjutan (second-order) terhadap layanan kesehatan, sektor makanan, dan asuransi baru mulai terlihat.

Semua bacaan gratis. Lihat kalau Anda punya waktu 20 menit.

New episode with @jeremygiffon just dropped — honestly one of the better conversations I've had in a while.

We covered a lot of ground: the strange new power dynamics between billionaires and anonymous posters, how certain philosophers quietly rewired Silicon Valley thinking, what's actually happening in private markets right now, and why the old playbook for beating the market might need an update.

Also: the billion dollar PDF, peak guy theory, and whether AI really changes the game for white-collar work.

It's the kind of conversation that makes you rethink a few assumptions. Worth your time if you care about where finance and tech are actually headed — not just where the headlines say they're going.

Worth noting: since mid-May, the Dow is up 6% while the $SPX has barely budged at +0.5%.

That's a pretty stark divergence. Usually means one of two things: either mega-cap tech is getting hammered while old-economy industrials/value names are carrying the load, or breadth is quietly improving beneath the surface even as the index-level action looks flat.

Either way, it's a reminder that "the market" isn't monolithic. When you hear someone say "stocks are up" or "stocks are down," always ask: which stocks?

Monday reading list:

• The case that dividend investing as a strategy is dying
• Memory chip makers reporting — what the earnings tell us
• America's socialization deficit: why we're connecting less

Good stuff to chew on this week.

Three practical reads for advisors today:

• Building custom AI tools for your practice (without needing to code)
• What actually matters in private fund due diligence
• How to think about valuing a client's human capital

The human capital piece is underrated — for most clients under 50, their future earning power is their largest asset by far. Yet we spend 90% of our time optimizing the portfolio and almost none thinking systematically about career risk, disability protection, or income volatility.

Worth reading if you work with clients who still have decades of work ahead of them.

Sunday reading list:

📊 Structural breaks in market behavior — when the old patterns stop working

💼 Actually measuring AI's impact on jobs (not just the hype)

🧠 Why we should pay attention to the weird outliers

Good curation from Abnormal Returns as always. The structural breaks piece is particularly relevant right now — a lot of investors are still using playbooks from the 2010s that may not apply anymore. Worth your time.