All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
The merger between the Treasury and Fed is now complete with Janet Yellen’s apparent appointment as the Secretary of the Treasury. Let the self-fulfilling market narratives begin!
Sometimes complicated is complicated because it has to be. But this nesting doll of a SPAC deal with Dyal (Neuberger Berman) IS weird and worthy of more than usual scrutiny, especially if you are an LP in one of these funds.
These are The Ghosts of Wall Street Commentary Future. And if their chains are not already clanking around in your inbox, they will be very, very soon.
The Wall Street Narrative Machine is in overdrive to create a “Yay, Value!” rally here at year-end.
Like any effective advertising campaign, it will work. I’m not saying this rally isn’t real.
I’m saying that you should reconsider what “real” means.
The American Medical Association is not a charitable organization.
The American Medical Association is not an educational organization.
The American Medical Association is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation, designed from the ground up to enrich its executives and serve its own bureaucratic interests.
Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down.
It’s the November 17th Office Hours, where Ben and Rusty discuss all things narrative in an interactive format.
COVID-19 is endemic, and its mutations will likely be part of our lives going forward.
But there is another disease this virus has caused, and it is a disease of the mind. It is the endemic mindset. And we can eradicate it.
Today.
Polls create the plays. Election models create the score. Fivey Fox and “Nate Silver” announce the game. All to create engagement with a diversified media corporation.
No one understands how to create and sell a spectator sport better than Disney.
There’s a moment when the real world peeks through the narratives that surround us, and we convince ourselves that this will be the truth that frees our fellow citizens/investors/neighbors from their delusions.
But truth is only one of the necessary conditions for this kind of change. The other?
Mercy.
Three weeks ago, I didn’t see a narrative path for Trump to win a turnout-based election hinging on four or five swing states.
Today I do.
It’s the same funny feeling I got in 2016, but with a twist.
Jonathan Plotkin is a longtime ET reader and brilliant cartoonist. For years he’s been sending Ben illustrations inspired by our notes and we’ve been dying…
Stimulus is dominating market news, and even with an election coming up is playing an outsized role in political news. So what is the current fiscal stimulus really about?
Maybe more importantly, what is it absolutely, definitely NOT about?
Once Daryl Morey’s new idea became the Common Knowledge of the NBA – once everyone knows that everyone knows that the way to win NBA games is to maximize 3-point shots and lay-ups – then it became a permanent feature of the way professional basketball is played. It became an equilibrium.
It’s exactly the same with politics.
The corruption of media by missionaries means that we now live in a world of two sets of facts. It is a world which gives us two choices: to champion our truth, or to work toward eliminating the world-of-two facts structure.
To hell with OR. Let’s choose both.
Aguilar, Chengan and Custovic dig into the concept of “tracking error” and find that current measures do a poor job of handling skewness and kurtosis. They propose a new approach to calculating tracking error – Quantile Tracking Errors (QuTE) – to address this weakness in traditional measures.
Sometimes a grift isn’t in what you say, but in the difference in what you say to different audiences.
It’s not the information. It’s the meta information.
It’s the October 13th Office Hours, where Ben and Rusty discuss all things narrative in an interactive format.
The frustrated money manager is almost always a smart, accomplished professional in his own field who believes VERY much in the existence of The Smart Money ™.
The frustrated money manager is almost always a liiiittttle bit on the make.
Like a Vatican cardinal.
2020 has awakened us to the Black Days constructed while we slept.
Now we act, and not just to avoid the worst excesses of the Trumpist clownshow or the Socialist lunacies.
Now we change the entire freakin’ world.
For ourselves, yes. For our children, even more.