My off-to-Camp Kotok morning plane reads:
• World’s Biggest Hedge Fund Teaches the Wealthy How to Slash Taxes to Zero: Cliff Asness’s AQR supercharged tax-loss harvesting into a business that erases IRS bills for the wealthiest — and built the firm along the way. (Bloomberg)
• For Iran, Trump’s Reversal on Escalation Shows Who Has the Upper Hand: By expanding the arena of fighting in the region, experts say, Tehran sent a warning about the dangers of a widening war. Erika Solomon on how Tehran, by expanding the arena of fighting across the region, sent a deliberate warning about the dangers of a widening war. By expanding the arena of fighting in the region, experts say, Tehran sent a warning about the dangers of a widening war. (New York Times) see also Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons? Allies that depend on U.S. military equipment need a Plan B. Phillips Payson O’Brien on an armaments crisis after only a few months of fighting a regional power. Since hostilities with Tehran began February 28, the U.S. has reportedly burned through two-thirds of its Patriot interceptors and more than a third of its THAAD stock. (The Atlantic)
• America Is Great at Creating Stock Market Bubbles—and Shrugging Them Off: Boom-bust cycles now happen in the blink of an eye; the memory-chip bubble inflated and popped almost unnoticed. One day the bust will be the big one, but so far the pullback in AI names has been nearly offset by gains elsewhere. One day the bust will be the big one, but for now the pullback in AI-related stocks has been almost completely offset by gains elsewhere (Wall Street Journal)
• Why Everything Feels Like Gambling: Joe Pompliano on one line in Robinhood’s Q2: the platform built on “democratizing finance for all” now earns more transaction revenue from prediction markets than from equity trading. (Huddle Up)
• Chinese VC firms rush to raise funds after three-year drought: Managers capitalise on investors’ desire to ‘hedge’ against US market bets. Eleanor Olcott reports that firms are seeking an estimated $35 billion across at least 60 new dollar-denominated funds, including about 40 VC funds, after three years of record-low fundraising. (Financial Times)
• How China Won the Iran War: Trump has shattered American power, and Beijing is picking up the pieces. The disintegration of U.S. power was well underway before Trump started his war on Iran, but the pace of decline has accelerated sharply since the magnitude of our defeat started becoming apparent. (Paul Krugman)
• New York Fires Warning Shot With List of Potential Pied-à-Terre Tax Targets: City releases list of celebrities, business executives who could be subject to Zohran Mamdani’s new tax. Mayor defended rollout, saying his administration was providing transparency to New Yorkers (Wall Street Journal)
• obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition): I’m going to boldly go on the record here and say that I think the majority of this content has become so grossly exaggerated and emotionally overwrought that it may even actively deter people from logging off. (This does not mean I’m going to say that being on your phone is good, actually. Being on your phone is, in fact, bad for your brain and for society.) (the late review)
• No, You Don’t Want to Time Travel: Douglas Giles on why it may be for the best that it’s impossible. If time travel worked the way fiction imagines, we would be inundated by visitors from every other era. (Douglas Giles)
• The Anti-IMAX Populist Backlash: Read Max on The Odyssey‘s marketing campaign and the strange consumer revolt it touched off. (Read Max)
Video of the day: Why were The Beatles rejected by most record companies?
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Som Seif, founder/CEO of Purpose Unlimited, a Toronto-based asset manager launched in 2012. He grew his first firm, Claymore Investments to $8B in assets by creating 34 ETFs in Canada over 6 years, including the creation of the first bitcoin ETF, establishing it as Canada’s leader in low-cost exchange-traded funds. Claymore was sold to BlackRock in 2012. He co-founded Wealthsimple that year, which became the default investing app for a generation of Canadians. His current wealth management firm, Purpose, was founded at the end of 2012, and manages $31 billion in ETFs, mutual funds, alternatives, private assets, and digital assets. Som was named to Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2011.
The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.
Source: New York Times
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