Decades of watching the tape make the same mistakes in different clothes, and a process for not making them alongside it. This page is about how a view gets built, tested and, when it is wrong, closed.
Morning Musings is a weekday note written before the U.S. open by someone who traded through every regime since the late 1980s and is still putting his own capital to work in this one. It thinks like institutional research without sounding like it. Every morning: what changed, what matters, what the market is missing, and where I think the asymmetry is. Paid readers get the book: positioning, expressions, levels, catalysts, triggers and the conditions that would prove me wrong.
"I've watched markets make the same mistakes in different clothes for decades. Morning Musings is where I write down what I think is happening before the tape forces everyone else to notice."
News, catalyst, narrative first. I look for what the market is telling a story about, then ask whether that story is right, wrong, or already in the price. Most of what passes for analysis skips the third option.
Before a view becomes a position it gets pressure-tested four ways. I talk it through with people in the market, because flow color and desk chatter carry signal that lives in no model. I check positioning and flows, because a right idea that the crowd already owns is a wrong trade. I write the bull case and the bear case in full, and if I cannot state the other side I do not have the trade. Then I watch the tape for confirmation or falsification, and I write the falsifier down before the position goes on, with a number in it.
In this business the only credible sales copy is a track record, and a track record that hides its losers is not one. Every position on the sheet has a written kill condition with a level. Every Saturday the weekly marks every live line against its stop. Once a month the closed record goes out free, losers first, with the median hold against the horizon I said I would hold it for. If the edge is there, you will see it. If it is not, you will see that too.
Most of what I know about markets I learned by being wrong in them, in public, first with a firm's capital behind me and then with my own. I started on institutional equities desks in the late 1980s and stayed on the sell side through every regime that followed. In 2007 and 2008 the Treasury's markets desk and the New York Fed had my number for the equities read, which is where most of what this note says about plumbing was learned. Financials are the home sector because that is where the plumbing shows first. The note trades across macro, rates, FX, equities, credit proxies and commodities, and I run my own capital. No LPs, no CIO, no product to push, and nobody else to blame.
Not consensus repackaged as insight. Not a recap of the wires you already read. Not "the market is pricing in X" with no spread or vol behind it. Not hedged into mush. The note has a view, says it plainly, names what kills it, and moves on.
The free note tells you what I'm seeing. The paid note tells you how I'm positioned around it.