The Coffee House and the Bell Curve How Lloyd’s coffee house turned information into an insurance market, and how a beautiful mathematical idea changed the way finance understood risk. London, 1688. Tower Street runs east from the Monument towards the...
The Sea Does Not Negotiate How the merchants of Venice developed an architecture of survival, and what their response to uncertainty can still teach finance today. Imagine Venice around 1250. A notary’s office occupies the first floor of a building...
The Map That Ate the Territory Every generation develops a new certainty about risk, and each new certainty eventually breaks on the same rock. Stockholm, December 1997. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences...
Out of Equilibrium The Santa Fe Revolution That’s Reshaping Finance Watch the Episode SERIES OVERVIEW Why do trends exist? For a trend follower, this is the fundamental question. For decades, much of mainstream financial theory struggled to explain why persistent...
There is a question that has tormented philosophers for centuries. Leibniz asked it. Heidegger called it the fundamental question of metaphysics. It still appears in late-night conversations, usually when the room has fallen quiet and someone has strayed a little...
The Programme, Complete Seven components. One integrated system. A synthesis of the System Anatomy Series: what each episode argued, how the components depend on one another, and why the intelligence was never in any single rule. Previous: System Anatomy 7:...
Execution and Process The architecture only exists in the real world if we actually execute it. Previous: System Anatomy 6: Rollover Mechanics | Next: Synopsis: The Programme, Complete A circuit breaker does not make the electrical system work. Most of...
Rollover Mechanics The system can only be as honest as the price history it sees. In futures, that history has to be constructed. Previous: System Anatomy 5: The Ensemble Approach | Next: System Anatomy 7: Execution and Process A surveyor...
The Ensemble Approach No single rule sees the whole market. That is not a problem to solve. It is the reason we use more than one. Previous: System Anatomy 4: Portfolio Construction | Next: System Anatomy 6: Rollover Mechanics A...
Portfolio Construction The markets were never independent. They belong to the same system. The purpose of diversification is not to pretend otherwise. It is to make sure no single expression of that system determines our fate. Previous: System Anatomy 3:...
