The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more

I don’t listen to as many interviews and podcasts as I used to, or indeed as I should (more fool me), but this interview this week with legendary investor, Stanley Druckenmiller, happened across my desk and I highly recommend it, if you can find the time. It’s long, but well worth it. Druckenmiller founded Duquesne Capital in 1981 and closed it 2010 with some $12bn in assets. He is said to have ma...

Like Brexit, Trump, what a woman is, the BBC or vaccines, bitcoin has proved itself one of the battlegrounds in the ongoing culture war.  Some people like it a lot. “Bitcoin fixes this” is the slogan, and bitcoin is thought to be the answer to any number of societal problems – from unaffordable housing, to government overreach, to the financial inclusion of the unbanked, the world’s poorest. There...

Further to last week’s piece on, “ acquiring the right investment psychology” (if you missed it here is the link ) I enjoyed listening to Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast this week with Goldman Sachs metals strategist, Nicholas Snowdon. The recent price action in metals has cast doubts in my mind as to the secular bull market. I needed gee-ing up with some bull food.  I came away from the conversation...

As regular readers of my stuff will know, I’m of the view that a society should be designed around direct democracy and very low levels of land value tax (LVT), what Milton Friedman called “the least bad tax”. I may dream of Ancapistan, a land of no government, but the reality is that taxation of some kind, even if it be voluntary, is inevitable. There has never been a civilisation without taxatio...

I remember having lunch once upon a time with a fun manager of the old-school, refined Englishman variety.  He rather took me aback towards the end of the meal when he started talking about this company his fund had put money into… You need faith – but you need to back that faith with something real  Previously so understated, my fund manager acquaintance became wildly enthusiastic about this comp...

I have an odd professional life.  I double as a financial writer and a comedian. It seems to work. I specialise in unacceptable songs. You’re bound to have stumbled across one of them at some point. Apparently, I’m Nigel Farage’s favourite comic.  I’ve just made what many would consider a comical investment. I have put more money than I care to think about into a theatrical venture on which I am a...

Back in 2016 we learnt a new word. “Lustrum”.  It means a five-year period. Given how long decades are, I can’t believe it doesn’t find more use.  Even if we don’t use the word, we investors often think in terms of lustrums. Many of the investments we make are made with a three-to-five-year time horizon in mind. Which is precisely why I started using the word. We had identified a trade of the lust...

Back in the early 1990s comedienne Mandy Knight did a show at the Edinburgh Fringe called, “Some of my best friends are ginger”. I always thought it was an inspired title, exposing a double standard that still persists today, and it always stayed with me. Then, a few years back I presented a series for Italian TV about beauty, Senso Della Bellezza - Sense of Beauty - and we did a feature on red he...

Not being a Fed-watcher, I have been rather slow to this particular narrative, I’m afraid, and it only really dawned on me last week as I was losing money trying to catch falling knives in the stock market. It was Zoltan Pozsar writing for Credit Suisse who switched on the lightbulb for me. He’s the new rockstar among institutional market strategists. A couple of other analysts have reached the sa...

‘Due to our low tax policy . . . revenue has increased.’John James Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong Financial Secretary, 1961-71 Fourteenth-century Tunisian, Ibn Khaldun, is probably the greatest philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age. In his magnum opus, The Muqaddimah , he wrote: ‘In the early stages of an empire, taxes are light in their incidence, but fetch in large revenue. As time passes and kings su...

You might call it the cable that changed history. In the mid-19th century there were various attempts to lay cables across the Atlantic Ocean between Britain (Ireland) and the US.  It took several failures, numerous bankruptcies and over ten years before they got it right.  But eventually they did and on July 27 1866 Queen Victoria broadcast a message to US President Johnson. Here’s what it said: ...

Thousands of years before the dawn of civilisation, as prehistoric man hunted and gathered his way through the Stone Age, he came across 6 metals - the six native metals, which occur in nature in a relatively pure state: silver, tin, lead, iron, copper and gold. He found gold in river beds - nuggets, mixed in with sediment, relatively easy to collect and shape. Man adorned himself with it - as wel...

With the entire crypto sector crashing – I thought I should give you some thoughts on bitcoin this morning. Needless to say, it’s not pretty. At all. Faith in crypto has been battered, in most cases, quite rightly This time last year, bitcoin went on one its monster runs above $60,000. It then had one of its monster crashes.  I can’t remember if it was in Moneyweek or on Twitter, but somewhere I s...

Did you buy a Peloton in the lockdown?  I know a couple of people that did.  I nearly did. I certainly looked at them online and lusted after one. But then I didn’t get round to buying one.  Can’t remember why not. It might have been the waiting list. It might be because I don’t have anywhere to put it… The tech bubble has well and truly burst A Peloton, by the way, is an indoor exercise bike that...

There are about  65 million people  in the UK and  60 million acres of land  – almost enough, in theory, for an acre each. (It’s not quite that simple, of course, and not all acres are equal.) Yet about two-thirds of the land – 40 million acres – is owned by fewer than 6,000 people. Land is the most basic form of wealth there is, so if there is a more telling statistic about the unequal distributi...

Stock markets have taken quite a tumble this past week or so, and there has been a great deal of noise about the end of the tech bubble.  Even with some 70%-plus corrections, many tech companies’ valuations remain extraordinarily high.  What seems to have gone rather less reported is the extraordinary battering that metals have taken too.  Whether base or precious, ferrous or platinum group, Russi...

I was lucky enough to attend the Students for Liberty conference, LibertyCon 2022, in Prague last weekend. Oh, my goodness. What a beautiful city is Prague! I’d never been before, but I shall be returning ASAFP. While there, I heard a talk by Li Schoolland, a Chinese-American business woman, who is the Director of External Relations Asia Pacific for the Acton Institute. She fled China in 1984, hav...

When I look at the things fossil fuels have made possible for mankind, I sometimes shake my head and wonder why we loathe them so much. The energy created by fossil fuels have opened up so many possibilities for so many people. We can go just about anywhere, quickly and safely. It really is possible to experience the whole world. The trading opportunities that have opened us mean the whole world c...

It’s a touchy subject, to put it mildly, but today we consider UK demographics. What will the UK population look like in 2035? Very different from today is the answer. I happened upon these Department of Education statistics , as you do, from the January 2021 school census. They are telling. White British now make up 64.9% of UK primary school kids, while what the DoE calls “minority ethnic” makes...

It’s a national religion for some, heresy for others.  Today we look at house prices. But we do not consider property through the window of the estate agent’s, but rather through the prism of an 18-year cycle, one that was brought to public attention by economist Fred Harrison is his cult classic Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010 .  He published it in 2005 so, if you’re i...

An independent Scotland could become the richest country on earth. I’m not joking. It has all the necessary ingredients. Let me explain. Each year the World Bank, the IMF and the CIA each independently publish a list of the richest countries in the world - as measured by GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. The UK sits at a rather disappointing 26th but topping those rankings, year after yea...

Today we return to one of my favourite subjects, and one that we periodically visit: UK house prices measured in gold. As regular readers will know, I am firmly of the mind that unaffordable housing in the UK (and indeed across most of the developed world) is as much a consequence of our system of money and credit as it is of dumb, prohibitive planning laws. If interest rates reflected actual infl...

Here’s something to contemplate this Sunday morning: where are rates going? In many ways it’s the most important question in finance - the biggest question in investing: what is the future price of money going to be? Policy makers are caught between a very big rock and a very hard place.  Official UK inflation stands at 8.5%. It’s higher if you use the traditional RPI as a measure. But real inflat...

If you want to listen to this article, you can via the button above. “Look at what they do, not at what they say.” If you are seeking truth of any kind, this is a great maxim to live by - particularly when it comes to politicians. And lovers. And indeed mining CEOs. My advice today is to apply the maxim to your author, because there is a marked divergence between what I say on the subject of gold...

Commodity prices have started to cool – with the exception of one industrial metal that is in short supply but is an essential ingredient in almost everything. Dominic Frisby looks at copper. The Substack picks are here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www...