Capital Flows and Asset Markets

Back in the free market era (circa pre 2016) autocallables (structured products in Europe) were guaranteed time bombs in financial markets. Essentially, they sold volatility to create yield products. In calm markets, they artificially reduced market volatility, but in crisis markets they amplified market volatility. Originally invented in Japan, they cost retail investors so much market, they even...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com At the heart of what I am trying to do is capture a shift away from the current economic and political system, that is a system that favours capital over labour. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the key trade at the heart of this view is a long gold/short treasury trade. Over the long term, we are still ear...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com As I gear up for the fund launch, I am slowly but surely shaking off the apathy of being a personal investor and moving back to fund manager mode, and this is pushing me back to using my own trading rules. Personal investors in my experience are much more tolerant of losing positions. That is holding on to a mistak...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I have been asking my self two related questions. Can DOGE really cut enough spending to keep the US from a debt crisis, and secondly, should I move from a GLD/TLT strategy to a GLD/SPX strategy? If DOGE is a sign of reduced government spending, then this is deflationary, and should be good for bonds, and bad for e...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Nothing lasts forever. Sometimes when your entire investment career has only seen a bull market, then its hard to imagine change is even possible. But it does come. When you look at how far the S&P 500 has outperformed treasuries in recent years - not expecting change would seem to be the wrong attitude.

After a record amount of comments on the last post, and a huge volume of direct emails and even a few WhatsApp messages - I have settled on Brumby Capital. First of all, a brumby is the name of a wild untamed horse in Australia, which gives a rough association to both me and to Horseman capital. Australia’s most famous poem, “ The Man From Snowy River ” refers both to wild horses and horsemen, so...

Naming a fund is a real chore, and I need your help. In my experience, fund management firms have two main different options for fund naming. They can name after themselves, or use some slightly esoteric words that describes their “values”. Examples of the first abound - Soros, Rokos, Balyasny are just a few. Of the second, we have LTCM, Citadel, Two Sigma, Renaissance Technologies, Global Asset M...

Trump has done exactly what he said he was going to do, and negotiated with Russia directly to end the war in Ukraine. The Trump deal with Russia could be very bullish for Europe, as it could see Russian sanctions lifted, and oil and gas prices fall. This would be particularly bullish for Germany, as it has suffered from high energy prices. Although far less than in 2022, European energy prices ar...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I am at heart a thematic investor. I find a theme that I really believe in, and then commit to it. This has pros and cons. I will ignore assets that are doing well that don’t fit this theme so can miss out on substantial upside, but the pro is if I am right, I tend to boss the market. And the simplest, biggest them...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Most hedge fund strategies are b******t. I see reports of how it was a banner year for hedge funds - but most of them made less that the S&P 500. No denying that hedge fund managers are incentivised to pretend that is a good result - and at the end of the day, everyone has to eat. But if you are really just going t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I like risk. Not stupid risks - but calculated risks. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been moving the pieces to get a fund of some sort up and running. And I am getting down to signing pieces of papers, and spending some money end of this process. And, it is at this moment, as with all the big decisions in li...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com The last big successful short trade before I gave back money was shorting Chinese tech. It was a trade made solely on the observation that Chinese regulators had stated exactly what they wanted to do with tech companies - that is break down silos, only allow the use of data for the express purpose it was allowed, a...

The US tech sector - particularly the mega caps - are the only sector in the world you “HAVE” to have a view on. When I look at US tech, I see the following (please feel free to abuse me in the comments). Most of the tech space is exactly as you would imagine it to be - volatile and competitive. However big tech - Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon have managed to carve out profitable areas...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Someone asked me about investing personally the other day. I basically told them if you find a company you really like and use, and the shares look cheap, then buy it and hold it forever. As they had never bought shares before, I directed them to Warren Buffett letters to shareholders to get an education in long te...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com When Deepseek first grabbed the public consciousness - my thoughts were that Nvidia was a short, and it was potentially negative for Microsoft and Google. The market has also seen this as being very good for Meta - as there AI strategy is close to the open source methods of DeepSeek. Market action has followed this...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I know that I and many other “macro” managers have commented that the world no longer trades the way it used to trade. I have spent the last few years trying to find ways to put it together - but to be honest, the models I have needed have always ended up being too complicated to use effectively. I have looked at t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com The core trade of GLD/TLT continues to do well, hitting a new high during the month. When I look at the long term graph of this chart, we can see we are still at the foothills of this move. When I look at previous moves in GLD/TLT in the late 1970s, and 2000s, you wanted to be long oil and gas names. That has not b...

Nvidia has been THE play on the AI revolution. Not only does it have a monopoly on cutting edge GPUs, it has also had a lock on the software needed to develop AI products. This has propelled Nvidia to an over USD3 trillion valuation. As I understood it, the success of Chat GPT suddenly opened an opportunity for Microsoft to access the search market that has been dominated by Google, as well as str...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I was once asked if I felt guilty about short selling. I think they felt that profiting from other people’s loss was morally wrong. To be fair, I could sympathise, but I think I provide a useful service. For big money allocators, it is very hard for them to not be fully invested in the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq - even...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I was born in 1974, and even I have trouble believing that people really wore this stuff. When I first started working in fund management, I used to seek out older fund managers to ask them about previous bear markets were like. Two really stuck out as been brutal. The Asian Financial Crisis was one - where fund ma...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Generally speaking, Americans will always tell you how special America is, even if you don’t ask them. From an investing perspective, US is very special at the moment, with USA making up over 50% of world market capitalisation now. Comparisons of the S&P 500 to other markets confirms American dominance. If you aske...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com The vast majority of people are very easy to analyse. The trick is to pay zero attention to what they say, and pay all the attention to what they do. This is why in-person meetings still remain so valuable, as it is much easier to work out what is motivating them in person, that via zoom. The irony of this approach...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Energy markets have been one of the most disrupted markets of the last 20 years. As the shale revolution has taken off, the US has both grown production and consumption dramatically. Production growth has been so strong, that the US is now a net exporter of natural gas. As recently as 2007, it was thought that the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com So what the plan, Stan? When I first started thinking about a “pro-labour” shift in the world, one of my first working assumptions was that inflation would be higher than expected going forward. I also assumed that central banks, being backward looking, would be late to the party. What this means is they would be l...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com The vast majority of short selling is focused on looking for dodgy balance sheets, and or management doing naughty things. This method has a huge drawbacks in my book. First of all, there is almost no edge in doing this. What tends to happen is that every fund manager and algorithm picks up on the same behaviour, a...