All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
ET friend and contributor David Salem is back!
Here with his Constitution Day address at Middlebury College, David makes the rich tradition of academic speeches richer still, with nods to the Founders and Vitalik Buterin alike.
There is an uncontained spark in the financial world today, a spark that emerged from the unlikeliest of places, a federal courthouse in Florida.
It’s a spark with the potential to light a searing bonfire under Robinhood and Citadel.
#BITFD
ET contributor Matthew Edwards pushes back on seven rules that allocators often apply to new managers.
1) We don’t do crypto.
2) We only invest in what we know.
3) We never pay full fees.
4) We prefer fundamental investment strategies.
5) We seek strong alignment of interests.
6) We cannot be greater than x% of a fund’s total assets under management.
7) We require a minimum track record of X years.
ET contributor Brent Donnelly starts up where he left off, with a new launch of AM/FX and a new riff on the classic ET note, “Snip!”.
In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!
In 1937, in the midst of a Great Depression, we started building a mighty bridge, not for a war effort, but for a popular movement based on wonder and progress.
We really did that.
Can we do it again?
The Green Protocol is a set of rules for the tokenization of symbolic betting markets in positive social good.
I think this is how crypto saves the world.
Our first step on this new path? Let’s plant one billion new trees in North America over the next ten years.
The McDonalds Hot Coffee lawsuit is the archetypal example of nonsense litigation. But there’s a lot more to the story than most people know.
ET contributor Brent Donnelly with an end-of-summer compilation of the top–of-mind topics at Camp Kotok!
Sophocles knew it. Dostoevsky knew it.
Disruption to the biological order and disruption to the social order are one and the same.
When the State Department announced on August 12th that it was removing all remaining non-essential personnel from Kabul within 3 days and was considering a relocation of the US embassy to the more defensible airport, the fall of the Afghani government became common knowledge.
And that’s when everything fell apart.
We are in the very early innings of the Narrative formation around responsibility for the outcome in Afghanistan. Steel yourselves for weeks of gaslighting from every angle. Hooray.
It’s the only question that really matters here in the Age of Nudge: why do we want what we want?
A conversation with Luke Burgis, author of “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life”.
The Olympic games are known as a time of triumph and glory. The truth is that a lot more work goes into creating and maintaining that narrative than you’d expect.
It is a fact that migrants here illegally have spread, are spreading, and will spread Covid-19.
It is also a narrative. A dangerous, seductive, rapidly spreading narrative that will cause many of us to shut off our minds to other facts, which is what narratives DO.
How do we parse the two?
Here’s my take on this weekend’s Senate wrangling over the infrastructure bill, and the implications for crypto.
The US Treasury is the Eye of Sauron — a gigantic panopticon tower that sweeps the world with its unblinking gaze, seeking out the owners of power, i.e. money.
And Sauron remains undefeated.
In the world of Nudge, everyone is an ad man, and the government is just the biggest, baddest ad man of them all.
The recording of the July 2021, Epsilon Theory webinar about The Narrative Machine.
The Boston Molassacre was one of the great tragedies of the early 20th century. So why isn’t it treated like one?
The Chinese real estate developer Evergrande is the epitome of Too Big To Fail. It is truly Ever Grande.
So what happens if it does, in fact, fail?
I think there’s a non-zero chance that the delta-variant becomes something that markets really are focused on. Maybe that happens months from now. Maybe days.
But until that happens, the delta-variant narrative explaining markets is a wall of worry, an artificially easy hurdle to climb for a market that only really cares about a dovish Fed sticking to its transitory inflation story.