The forces. Not the headlines.
Analysis and commentary on markets, companies, and the forces that move them.
Credit Spreads: A Quiet Read For Early December
A descriptive look at where investment-grade and high-yield spreads sit today, and what historical spread regimes have tended to coincide with.
The Taylor Rule and Its Modern Limits
The Taylor Rule is the most-cited quantitative benchmark for central bank policy. Understanding what it says, where it works, and where it breaks is essential context for reading any Fed decision.
The Action Bias and the Urge to Do Something
Why investors feel compelled to act during uncertainty, and why that impulse often does more damage than the uncertainty itself.
Sector Heatmap Read: Mid-September 2026
Sector leadership over the past week describes what participants are actually funding. Reading the pattern without attaching a forecast to it is one of the more useful weekly disciplines.
Industrials: Decoding the Machinery Economy
A framework for understanding industrials — the diverse, cyclical sector spanning machinery, transportation, aerospace, and defense.
Capitulation: What Real Bottoms Look Like
Real market bottoms share a recognisable structural pattern. Understanding the pattern doesn't help you buy the bottom — nothing does — but it does help you recognise a bottom as it forms.
AI Ecosystem: From Chips to Applications
The AI stack has four distinct layers with different economics and different competitive dynamics. Understanding where each participant sits determines almost everything about how their business responds to the cycle.
SPY, IVV, and VOO: The S&P 500 Triangle
Three ETFs track the same underlying index at expense ratios ranging from 3 to 9 basis points. The differences that determine which one to use are usually not the expense ratio.
Drawdown Management: The Emotional Half of Returns
The mathematical return of a strategy tells you what happened. The maximum drawdown tells you whether the investor holding it would have stayed in long enough for the mathematics to matter.
The UK Market: FTSE 100's Global Revenue Base
The FTSE 100 is often called 'the UK market,' but roughly three-quarters of its aggregate revenue comes from outside the UK. Reading it as a domestic bet is the most common mistake in analysing it.
The Yield Curve: Signal and Noise
The inverted yield curve has an impressive historical record as a recession predictor. It also has a specific mechanism and a specific set of conditions under which the signal has broken down.
The Bond Side of the Story: Early September 2026
The bond market has been saying something specific about where the economy is going. Reading it separately from equities is one of the more useful analytical disciplines.
Euphoria at the Peak: The Signs You Missed
Market peaks share a structural pattern that is legible in hindsight and almost invisible from the inside. Understanding the pattern doesn't let you time peaks — but it does let you recognise one as it unfolds.
Cloud Infrastructure: The AWS/Azure/GCP Triangle
Three hyperscalers control the overwhelming majority of the global cloud-infrastructure market. Understanding how they differ is the entry point to any serious view of the sector.
QQQ: What You Actually Own
The Invesco QQQ Trust holds the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq. In practice, most of what moves the ETF is a much smaller subset of names.
Position Sizing: The Kelly Formula and Its Cautions
The Kelly formula tells you the mathematically optimal fraction of your capital to allocate to a given bet. The catch is that the assumptions almost never hold in real markets — which is why almost every experienced Kelly user runs a fraction of it.
Europe: The DAX, ECB, and Structural Growth Gap
European equities have lagged US equities for two decades. The reasons run deeper than earnings — they touch demographics, energy policy, and the structure of the ECB itself.
Real Rates vs Nominal Rates: What the Number Says
The 10-year Treasury quotes a nominal yield. Almost every consequential macro question depends on the real yield — the nominal number minus expected inflation.
Where Sentiment Sits: Late August 2026
A structural read of investor sentiment — Fear & Greed, the VIX, put/call ratios, and AAII survey positioning — with no forecasts attached.
The Panic-Sell Cycle: Why the Bottom Feels Rational
The moment of maximum pain is also the moment of maximum apparent justification for selling. Understanding why is the first step to not being the person selling at it.
Semiconductors: The Global Supply Chain Anatomy
The chip industry is not a single sector — it's four distinct layers with different economics, different geographies, and different vulnerabilities. Reading it requires reading them separately.
VTI, VOO, and SCHB: The Total-Market Trio Compared
Three ETFs that look almost identical carry small structural differences worth understanding — expense ratio is only the beginning.
Portfolio Construction: Weights Matter More Than Names
Two investors can hold identical stocks and produce completely different results. Position sizing dominates security selection in almost every real-world portfolio.
Japan: TOPIX Reflation and the End of ZIRP
After two decades of near-zero rates, Japan is normalising monetary policy while corporate reform quietly transforms the equity market. The two shifts explain most of TOPIX's return this decade.