September Market Insights: Through The Looking-Glass
Wall Street’s Red Queen problem “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” – The Red Queen; Through the Looking-Glass Download this PDF here. Into the mirror Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass imagined a world in which familiar rules ran in reverse. This problem is now increasingly confronting Wall […]
August Market Insights: Beyond The AI Bottleneck
History, sovereignty and the next leg for markets “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” – Alexis de Tocqueville Download this PDF here. Prologue A leadership transition is already underway, but much of the market remains anchored to the last trade. Investors are still crowded into semiconductors, […]
July Market Insights: Trump’s Meta Game, Pax Americana, and the AI Age
A forces‑for‑2027 forecast looking to the end of the decade Download this PDF here. In politics and markets, the decisive contest is often the one being played above the visible struggle. Elections, earnings and summit communiqués are the surface game—the real action lies in the metagame, the contest over rules, incentives and narratives that shape […]
June Market Insights: America at 250
America reaches its 250th anniversary not as a fallen hegemon, but as the dominant centre of global hard power, monetary power, and frontier innovation. It still sits astride the world’s resource base through energy, agriculture, and continental depth; it still issues the reserve currency at the core of global trade and finance; and it still leads the race to build artificial intelligence (AI) as the next digital platform.
May Market Insights: Mastery and the Terror Premium
Winston Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, tied Britain’s fate to Persian oil. United States President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, centred on Operation Epic Fury, could do the same for the West by removing Iran’s nuclear shadow, resetting oil toward US$60, and finally unlocking a modern peace dividend.
April Market Insights: Bretton Woods 2.0, the New Great Game, and Trump
U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term is not just another burst of tariff theatre; it is the opening move in a new great game over energy, artificial intelligence (AI), and money. By neutralizing Iran and Venezuela, squeezing Cuba, binding Canada, and courting Russia, Washington is trying to re-anchor oil in U.S. dollars and push BRICS’ [1] monetary ambitions to the margins.
March Market Insights: There is no Bronze Medal
“There’s only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.” The subtext of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s widely cited speech from late 2025 sounds like tech‑bro theatre until you reflect on it. In artificial intelligence, there is no bronze medal. There will be a hegemon and a runner‑up. Everyone else will be a client.
February Market Insights: Fortress America and the Colony Next Door
Historians are likely to regard Donald Trump’s presidency as a pivot—as significant as any in U.S. history comparable to the Jacksonian turn, the New Deal, or the Reagan Revolution. Yet Wall Street remains strangely somnolent, pricing in neither the durability nor the depth of what is unfolding. The Trump Doctrine should be seen as equal to—not subordinate to—the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 U.S. policy that warned European powers against further colonization or interference in the Western Hemisphere. It represents a new organizing framework for U.S. power that blends hard power, economic nationalism, and pro-growth domestic policy
January Market Insights: The 2026 Market Forecast
History does not move in straight lines. Markets ricochet between excess and restraint in violent cycles, a truth American economist Peter Bernstein hammered home and one investors are again being forced to relearn. The foundation for the 2026 investment thesis is that with interest payments on U.S. debt now exceeding annual defense spending, the fiscal constraint has become too binding to ignore, and structural adjustment is no longer optional. We have no choice but to adjust; the system is in a state of flux.
December Market Insights: 2026 and the King Dollar Revival
Rumors of the U.S. dollar’s decline are as persistent as they are exaggerated. In 2025, one fact stands out: The global U.S. dollar system—“King Dollar”[1]—is not vanishing. The financial, legal, and institutional architecture that makes the dollar the world’s indispensable currency remains at the heart of global finance.