There is one question we keep hearing. From clients, from readers, from anyone paying attention right now.

When does this end?

It is the wrong question.

The right question is: who has an incentive to end it? Run that analysis. Go actor by actor. And something uncomfortable becomes very clear.

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Russia

Russia is fighting Ukraine. But Ukraine isn’t really the opponent.

Ukraine is the battlefield. The opponent is the collective West...specifically the American military-industrial complex that has funded, armed, and sustained this war from the beginning.

Given that framing, what does Russia want? Its real opponent weakened, distracted, and fighting on as many fronts as possible. Every dollar flowing into Middle East operations is a dollar not flowing to Kyiv. Every political fracture in Washington over Israel-Iran is political capital Russia doesn’t have to spend.

Russia benefits from the war continuing. It is that simple.

China

China has watched the Western strategic playbook carefully. The sequence is not subtle: weaken Russia, control their resources, surround China with compliant client states, and then dictate terms to Beijing.

Energy is China’s structural vulnerability. Russia and Iran represent the two feedstocks of energy that sit outside Western orbit. A Western victory in the Middle East doesn’t just hurt Iran. It tightens a noose around Chinese energy security that Beijing cannot afford to ignore.

So China watches. It waits. And it has every incentive to see the West bleed resources, credibility, and political will in a theatre that isn’t Beijing’s problem to solve.

Iran

For Iran, this is existential. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Even if the bombs stopped tomorrow, Iran’s leadership understands something the Western commentariat won’t say aloud: they’ll be back. Maybe in five years. Maybe ten. Because the strategic objective...control of the region, control of the energy flows...hasn’t changed. It never changes.

Iran has studied Vietnam. The lesson is not complicated: you cannot win a conventional war against a militarily superior force. But you can bleed them. Slowly. Over years. Until the domestic political will to continue collapses under its own weight.

That is Iran’s strategy. A sustained war of attrition. And they are prepared to prosecute it indefinitely.

The Political Class

And what of the political and managerial class in the West? The ones whose influence expands in proportion to the scale of the crisis?

For them, a prolonged conflict is an opportunity. Emergency powers, accelerated procurement, tightened surveillance infrastructure, expanded mandates. As Randolph Bourne wrote in 1918, War is the health of the State. These are not people with a strong personal interest in resolution.

The Gulf States

Here is the actor I find most interesting. And most trapped.

The Gulf states tied their destiny to the Western military-industrial complex decades ago. The arrangement seemed sensible enough at the time: recycle petrodollars into US Treasuries and US equity markets, and receive American military protection in return. The petrodollar recycling arrangement that has anchored demand for US Treasuries for fifty years traces directly to a 1974 deal between Kissinger and the Saudis. Mutually beneficial. Durable. Or so it seemed.

Now they are discovering the problem with that deal.

The protection is conditional. The alliances are transactional. Step away from the arrangement and you invite colour revolutions, economic pressure, or worse. Step toward it and you bankroll a military project that is increasingly visibly failing.

There is no clean exit. The Gulf states are not a winner here. They are a hostage to a bargain they can’t renegotiate and can’t walk away from.

But here is what matters for us: they know it. Gulf Arab leaders are reconsidering their military alliances. The petrodollar recycling arrangement is now under structural pressure that the current conflict has accelerated into something that can no longer be ignored. Turkey, for its part, has already refused to let Israel and the US use its bases to launch attacks on Iran. That is not a small signal.

These are not reversible decisions. Once you've publicly refused a request from Washington, the relationship has changed permanently.

What the Market Hasn’t Priced

Markets are treating this conflict as a spike. A disruption. A line on a chart that eventually reverts to baseline.

The incentive structure says otherwise.

Consider what the world has now learned. US stealth aircraft can be targeted. US defence equipment, purchased by allies at enormous expense, has performed below expectations in a real shooting war. The invincibility myth that underpinned decades of American deterrence has taken damage that cannot be repaired with a press conference.

Africa is gone to the West. India cannot be relied upon. European nations are discovering their military capacity is considerably thinner than the briefing papers suggested. Alliance quality matters enormously for projecting power, and the quality of the Western alliance has just been publicly tested.

And then there is this...the conclusion that matters most for anyone who manages capital:

Natural resource ownership is now equivalent to superpower status.

The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day. The Strait of Malacca another 23 million. These are not lines on a map. They are the circulatory system of global industrial civilisation. Every nation that depends on these flows is reassessing its exposure. Every nation that controls or sits adjacent to these flows has discovered it holds leverage it never fully understood it had.

We are entering a period when all of these chokepoints get contested...not necessarily by military force alone, but commercially, diplomatically, and geopolitically. The old assumption that military supremacy decouples from resource control died somewhere in the fog of this war.

This Is Our Shtick

We have been positioned for this for years. Hard assets. Energy. Emerging markets in resource-rich geographies. These are not trades. They are structural allocations for a world where the foundational assumptions of the last thirty years are being dismantled in real time.

The investors who are already positioned in the assets that win in that environment will do well. Those waiting for clarity will eventually get it. But clarity, in our experience, arrives late and expensive.

If you want to know exactly how we’re positioned...which specific names we hold across energy, hard assets, and EM...that is all inside the Insider Service at capitalistexploits.at. The analysis above is the why. The what is behind the paywall.

Do your own research, as always.

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Issue #328 of the Insider Newsletter is live today. But before you scroll down to it, I want to give you some context...because what’s inside this issue doesn’t make full sense without understanding what led up to it.

So. A brief history.

The Thesis Has Been Building for a While

Back in March, we published a piece called ”The Glut Was a Lie”...a detailed takedown of the consensus view that global oil markets were oversupplied. The IEA’s own field-level data told a completely different story. Shale decline rates of 35% per year. Conventional field decline at 5.6% annually across 15,000 fields studied. The “glut” was a narrative. The supply deficit was structural.

A week later, we followed up with a piece arguing that the Middle East escalation was not a black swan...it was a consequence. The portfolio was already positioned. We said the real risk wasn’t the bombs. The real risk was sitting in cash while governments debased their currencies to pay for the war.

We also flagged something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough: the global supply chain has been running on just-in-time inventory management for decades. Optimised to the bone. Great for margins. Catastrophic when the flow gets disrupted. We said the shift from just-in-time to just-in-case was coming...and that it would permanently alter demand for commodities across the board.

Then in April we published ”The Toll Booth”...a deep look at the Strait of Hormuz closure, the petrodollar crack mechanics underneath it, and why stagflation wasn’t a risk at that point...it was a certainty.

Each of these pieces was building toward something. Issue #328 is where it starts to show up in the numbers.

The Portfolios Are Diverging

Over the past twelve months, both our Asymmetric Strategy and our Dividend Strategy have significantly outperformed the S&P 500. The gap is widening, not narrowing. And we believe this is not a short-term blip driven by oil price moves. It’s the early stage of a structural rotation that will play out over years...possibly a decade.

The S&P 500 energy sector, as a percentage of the index, sits at the same relative lows it reached at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000. Using Exxon as a long-run proxy, the energy sector relative to the broader market is as unloved as it has been at any point in the last fifty years. Financial journalists barely mention it. The average investor has concluded it’s “uninvestable.”

Whowouldathunkit.

The Part the Market Hasn’t Priced Yet

There’s a detail in Issue #328 that most people will read right past, and they really shouldn’t.

Everyone’s talking about “clearing the Strait of Hormuz.” As if the strait is the only problem. It isn’t. The Persian Gulf itself is largely un-navigable for Very Large Crude Carriers. Most of it is too shallow for VLCCs to operate in. And the navigable deep-water channel...runs right along the Iranian coastline.

In other words, even if the Strait were cleared tomorrow, the Gulf does not simply reopen. Shipping lanes that trace the Iranian coast cannot be used freely under active conflict conditions. This is a detail that changes the recovery timeline considerably. Qatar has already declared force majeure on LNG contracts for up to five years. Roughly 12.8 million tons per year of LNG capacity is offline. Some $20 billion in annual revenue, gone. Production restarts require not just a ceasefire...but physical infrastructure repair, well assessment, and resumed tanker routes. We’re talking 12 months minimum, and that’s the optimistic scenario.

The market is not pricing this.

Stock, Flow, and Hope

Inside Issue #328, we revisit a framework that cuts to the heart of where capital should be positioned right now. Think of any business: it runs on stock (what you have), flow (what keeps coming in), and hope (what you imagine might arrive one day). For forty years, global markets have been repricing hope upward and stock downward. The Nasdaq is filled with companies valued almost entirely on hope. OpenAI has never turned a profit. The Bloomberg World Commodity Producer Index relative to the Nasdaq tells you everything you need to know about where the mispricing is.

You can replicate that trade with GUNR relative to QQQ. We’ve discussed this before. But what’s different now is that the hope-to-stock repricing is no longer just a valuation story. It’s being forced by physical reality.

What Else Is in This Issue

Issue #328 also covers the eerie structural parallels between the Covid response and a newly announced fuel rationing plan...the geopolitical incentives keeping this war going longer than most care to admit...a thoughtful look at the energy security pivot happening in real time across Australia and Southeast Asia...and five deep-value ideas in the Big Five that we believe have the potential for 300% or more. These are not for the faint of heart, and they’re gated behind the Insider Newsletter Service for a reason. If you want the full research and actual portfolio allocation guidance, that lives at capitalistexploits.at.

For everyone else...the newsletter below is a good start. Let’s get started.

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Years ago I took a course in neurolinguistic programming. NLP, for those unfamiliar. At the time I was simply curious about how the brain works...how language shapes perception, how trust is built, how people get led from one state of mind to another without quite knowing it happened.

What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how useful that course would turn out to be. Not for selling products or winning negotiations, which was the stated purpose. But for understanding exactly how power operates against ordinary people.

This isn’t an article about neuroscience. But what’s playing out right now in American politics...and by extension, in your portfolio...runs directly through these mechanisms. So bear with me.

The Trust War Governments Are Losing

Traditional media is collapsing. Not just in viewership numbers, but in something more fundamental: authority. The age when a network anchor could deliver a verdict and the public would update their priors accordingly is over. The pointy shoes running legacy institutions haven’t accepted this yet, but the data is not subtle.

Into that void stepped the influencer. And governments, being governments, noticed.

Here’s what NLP makes explicit that most people understand only intuitively. An influencer doesn’t just have an audience. They have a relationship with an audience. Years of consistent content, personality, perceived vulnerability...all of it adds up to something that in NLP terms is called pacing. The influencer has done the long, slow work of matching the audience’s worldview, their language, their emotional register. That work creates rapport. Deep, genuine, felt rapport.

Governments can’t manufacture that. They’ve tried for decades and failed. The press conference, the newspaper of record, the nightly news...all of it reads as institutional now, which is another word for suspect.

But here’s the insight: you don’t need to build rapport. You can rent it.

The Netanyahu Operation

Benjamin Netanyahu has been, arguably, the most explicit world leader about this strategy.

During the Gaza conflict he actively recruited social media influencers...flying them to Israel, briefing them, feeding them the narrative, and deploying them to counter a ground-level information war that traditional media channels were losing on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. A war being fought by twenty-two year olds with phones, not press offices.

He put it plainly during a meeting with US influencers in New York: “Weapons change over time. We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we’re engaged...and the most important ones are on social media.”

That’s not a metaphor. The Israeli Foreign Ministry allocated a budget of $900,000 through a firm called Bridges Partners, paying 14 to 18 social media influencers up to $7,000 per post under a campaign code-named the Esther Project. Registered under FARA...the Foreign Agents Registration Act...which means it’s all documented. You just have to bother looking.

The NLP mechanics running underneath this are worth naming clearly.

First: borrowed rapport. The Israeli government cannot build a genuine relationship with a nineteen-year-old in Ohio. But an influencer that nineteen-year-old has followed for three years absolutely can. The government doesn’t need to persuade the audience directly. It just needs access to the delivery vehicle.

Second: reframing at scale. A geopolitical conflict is a complex thing with contested facts, a long history, legitimate grievances on multiple sides. None of that complexity survives a sixty-second video delivered by someone the viewer trusts. The influencer simplifies and redelivers the narrative...and crucially, the audience receives it as authentic because the messenger is authentic.

Third: anchoring. The government gets associated with the emotional states the influencer already triggers. Excitement, inspiration, belonging...whatever that influencer has built over years of content. The message arrives pre-loaded with positive emotional charge.

Was it effective? In certain demographics, absolutely. Which is why every government with resources is now running some version of this.

Trump, Jake Paul, and the Textbook

Enter Donald Trump and Jake Paul.

Jake Paul’s audience is young, predominantly male, drawn to dominance, competition, and anti-establishment energy. It is, in other words, a demographic that conventional Republican outreach had essentially zero access to.

The NLP mechanics on display during Trump’s endorsement relationship with Paul are almost academic in their clarity. Rapport transfer...Paul’s audience trusts him, and that trust extends, at least partially, to whoever he endorses. Identity reframing...voting Trump becomes consistent with the Jake Paul identity: masculine, winning, anti-establishment. Anchoring...Trump gets associated with the emotional states Paul already generates in his audience.

Trump’s team understood instinctively what NLP makes explicit: you don’t persuade people by arguing with their identity. You find a messenger who already lives inside it.

There is something genuinely impressive about this, from a purely strategic standpoint. And something that should make you deeply uncomfortable.

Because it doesn’t matter what the content is. The mechanism works regardless. The same playbook that moves protein powder moves a war.

Where This Gets Dangerous

Consider what’s quietly sitting inside the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act...language embedded in Section 535 that automatically and involuntarily registers young men for the Selective Service using federal databases. No opt-in. No consent. The system goes fully operational December 18, 2026.

And consider the context in which this sits. Operation Epic Fury...the US-Israel campaign against Iran, launched February 28, 2026...is already deeply unpopular with younger Americans. A generation that watched twenty years of Middle Eastern military adventure produce nothing except debt, dead soldiers, and regional instability. A generation that is not going to comply quietly with the machinery now being set up around them.

This is not a hypothetical. Mass resistance to involuntary draft registration, combined with a politically fragmented country that is already splitting along ideological lines, is a recipe for the kind of domestic conflict the US hasn’t seen in living memory. Protests at a scale that makes recent years look like a warmup. States taking opposing positions. Federal National Guard deployments. Internal migration accelerating, concentrating populations further into ideological monocultures.

And here’s the thing about resource allocation in a fragmented nation: it doesn’t stay neutral.

The US is already operating in a resource-constrained environment. Energy costs, housing costs, healthcare, food...none of it is getting cheaper. When states fragment along ideological lines, those resources become political weapons. Who gets federal infrastructure funding. Who gets regulatory forbearance. Who gets protected and who gets made an example of.

That path is not certain. But it’s a good deal more probable than the consensus currently prices in.

What This Means for the Portfolio

From a portfolio management perspective, the US equity market was already sitting at valuations near their second-highest level in recorded history before any of this entered the equation. The Shiller CAPE at 39x...approaching the 44x reached at the dot-com peak in December 1999. Passive flows still crowded into the same twelve names. The AI narrative carrying a valuation that requires a future which must be essentially perfect in order to justify current prices.

Throw a domestic political crisis on top of that...genuine, sustained, intergenerational resistance to military conscription, state bifurcation, federal overreach, civil unrest...and there is no scenario under which the S&P holds together at those levels. The 401(k) generation...Americans who have been systematically funnelled into passive equity exposure for three decades...are sitting in a vehicle that has never faced a stress test of this kind.

They don’t know that yet. The influencers they follow aren’t talking about it. The anchors they’ve trusted for thirty years are still running the “soft landing” script.

Which means the gap between what the market is priced for and what is actually unfolding is still fully exploitable.

We’ve been clear about our positioning. Hard assets, real things, assets that don’t require a functioning US equity narrative to hold their value. Gold, energy, farmland, select emerging markets trading at a fraction of what equivalent US assets command. These are not trades. They are a structural repositioning away from the assumption that American political stability is a permanent condition.

It has not been a permanent condition. Not historically. And the machinery now being assembled...the influencer operations, the involuntary registration databases, the narrative manufacturing running at industrial scale...suggests the people in charge understand that better than you might expect.

The rapport merchants are doing their job. The question is whether you’re in the audience or outside it.

Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice. Do your own research. All investments carry risk. This is what we think...it may not be suitable for you.

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Let me tell you something that the financial press has gotten almost entirely wrong about the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran didn’t close it.

The actuaries did.

The moment the conflict broke out, transits through the crucial chokepoint collapsed 81%. Not because anyone mined the channel. Not because the IRGC physically blocked the waterway. Because the International Group of P&I Clubs...the insurance system that covers 90% of the world’s ocean-going tonnage...issued cancellation notices for war risk coverage in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and all Iranian territorial waters. Within 72 hours.

That’s not a military story. That’s an underwriting story. And it tells you something important about who actually holds power here.

When Iran started offering guarantees...when the insurance system started to determine who could and couldn’t get coverage based on what flag the ship was flying, what currency the cargo was priced in, and whether Iran had any political objection to the destination...the power dynamic shifted. Quietly. Without a single press conference.

The Western media missed it entirely. They were busy counting missiles.

The Math the Futures Market Refuses to Do

Now let’s talk about what’s actually offline...because the futures market clearly hasn’t.

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Greetings, friends!

An Australian entrepreneur named Craig Tindale published something last month that I shared with everyone on my team and then read again. It’s called Systemic Risk: A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure. The title is dry. The analysis is not. I encourage you to read the original in full. What I want to do here is walk you through what I think are the most important parts and explain what it means for how we’re thinking about the world.

The central premise is this: we spent the last four decades engineering maximum efficiency into global supply chains. In doing so, we created maximum fragility. Just-in-time logistics. Zero redundancy. Single points of failure nested inside other single points of failure. Tindale maps exactly what that fragility looks like when one of those points fails. Not just oil prices. The whole architecture, unravelling in sequence.

The World’s Narrowest Hinge

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide at its narrowest point. Through that strip of water, roughly 20 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products passed in the first half of 2025...over 20% of global liquid consumption and close to one-quarter of all seaborne oil trade. Running alongside that is LNG. Qatar is the world’s second-largest LNG exporter. Essentially all of its exports transit Hormuz. That’s about 20% of global LNG trade flowing through a single corridor with no practical alternative.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pipelines that can bypass the Strait. Under optimal conditions, those pipelines together might redirect 3.5 to 5.5 million bpd. The structural deficit between that figure and the 20-million-bpd flowing through Hormuz is not a rounding error. It’s the number governments are trying not to say out loud.

When the Strait closed this year following the US-Israel strikes on Iran, P&I war risk insurance was cancelled inside 72 hours. VLCCs sat idle. Brent spiked. And everyone scrambled for bypass routes...that cannot bypass what needs bypassing.

Most of the commentary stayed on that level. Oil prices, inflation risk, central bank response. One or two orders deep. Tindale goes twelve.

Twelve Orders, No Emergency Exits

Order 1 is the part the consensus models. A 17.5 million bpd structural deficit inside two weeks. Oil prices spike. War risk insurance gone. Every energy trader on earth has a view on this. Most of them have a view on nothing else.

Order 2 is where it gets interesting. Sour crude from the Gulf is the primary global source of by-product sulphur. Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility alone produces 10,000 tonnes of liquid sulphur per day. Remove that from the market and you’ve eliminated roughly 8% of global seaborne sulphur supply in one go. Sulphur is not the stuff of investment theses. Most investors couldn’t tell you what it’s used for. Which is exactly why Order 3 matters.

Order 3: Sulphur is the feedstock for sulphuric acid. And sulphuric acid is how you extract copper from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia...through hydrometallurgical SX-EW and HPAL processes. The DRC alone imports over 500,000 tonnes of sulphur annually. When seaborne supply vanishes, force majeures get declared across the Copperbelt. The DRC and Zambia produce roughly one-sixth of global copper and over 70% of global cobalt...both via acid-dependent extraction. Spot acid prices in the Copperbelt breach $700/tonne. Chile’s Codelco faces contagion as global acid merchants divert what little remains.

Read that again. Three orders in, the oil shock is now a copper crisis.

Order 4: The copper deficit collides with something that was already broken before the conflict started. Siemens Energy’s order backlog sits at €146 billion. Large Power Transformer lead times have stretched from 50 weeks to 120-210 weeks under normal conditions. The ultimate constraint is Grain-Oriented Electrical Steel...a US functional monopoly through Cleveland-Cliffs, with multi-year qualification cycles and $500-$700 million in capex required to scale. And transformer insulation curing is a chemical process. No executive order from Washington accelerates the curing of insulation. Not even close. The grid hardware crisis, which was already a problem, is now catastrophic.

Order 5 is the one that should make every AI investor uncomfortable. Taiwan imports between 95% and 97% of its energy. Qatar supplies roughly a third of the island’s LNG. Taiwan’s statutory LNG reserve: eleven days. TSMC alone accounts for close to 10% of Taiwan’s total electricity consumption. When Taipower’s grid goes into rationing mode under energy stress, voltage sags violate the SEMI F47 tolerances that TSMC’s fabs require...historically causing tens of thousands of scrapped wafers per incident. ABF substrate lead times are 28 weeks before you even factor in the power disruption. The entire AI chip supply chain, the one underpinning every data centre build-out narrative currently running on Wall Street, sits eleven days from the edge.

Order 6: Silicon supply constraints collide with transformer unavailability, which freezes gigawatt-scale AI expansion. The US grid interconnection queue holds 2,600 GW of backlogged projects. Northern Virginia...the data centre capital of the world...faces seven-year wait times under current transformer procurement conditions. Without large power transformers and switchgear, hyperscaler commercial operation dates are fiction. Billions locked in sterile real estate and dormant silicon.

The central myth of the last decade is that digital civilisation floats above heavy industry. That the cloud is exempt from the physics of copper, sulphur, transformers, voltage stability, and LNG. Tindale extinguishes that myth across six paragraphs. Compute rests on copper. Copper rests on sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid rests on sour crude. And sour crude transits a 21-mile strait controlled by a country we just attacked.

What Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Order 10 is where this stops being an investment thesis and becomes a political event.

Roughly 40-50% of internationally traded nitrogen fertiliser originates from or transits the Gulf. One full harvest cycle is enough time to translate a supply disruption into structural food insecurity across North Africa and South Asia. Egypt runs on IMF life support and LNG from the region. Turkey’s 10-year yields were already above 31% before this started. CDS spreads breach 600 basis points as FX reserves drain and governments run out of road. The result: rationed power, collapsing food security, mass unrest at scale.

Tindale’s terminal stopping rule is that beyond Order 12, the framework stops functioning as linear analysis. Copper starvation halts transformer production. Transformer shortages suffocate grid expansion. Grid starvation starves the power required for advanced smelting and mining...a self-consuming industrial death spiral. Prices stop being discovered through markets and start being dictated by state decree, export bans, and strategic hoarding.

The system, he concludes, can no longer be modelled as a supply chain shock. It must be understood as the permanent bureaucracy of geopolitical total war.

What This Means for the Portfolio

We’ve been positioned in energy, copper, hard assets, and emerging markets with commodity exposure for some time now. The thesis has never changed: the world spent 20 years underpricing physical production and overpricing digital narrative. The premium for resilience...for real energy infrastructure, real commodity production capacity, real grid-critical materials...was priced at zero. It’s not priced at zero anymore. And the Tindale cascade explains precisely why.

Crude producers, energy services companies, copper miners operating ore bodies that are not acid-dependent, fertiliser feedstock companies...these are no longer just cyclical recovery plays. They are strategic assets in a world that is now, visibly, reorganising around resource security. When the US government starts building a $12 billion strategic cobalt stockpile under “Project Vault,” they’re telling you something. Not subtly.

The cascade also hands us something specific on the short side of the trade. The hyperscalers are committing hundreds of billions in AI data centre capex that requires copper, large power transformers, stable grid connections, and uninterrupted silicon supply...all of which are now compromised supply chains running through the same physical chokepoints. AI capex projections that looked aggressive six months ago now look disconnected from physical reality. Transformer lead times of 120-210 weeks alone make the build-out timelines fictional.

We’ve been saying the AI narrative was priced for perfection. The cascade shows you what imperfect actually looks like.

For the specific names we’re positioned in across energy, copper, and the commodity infrastructure plays most directly exposed to this thesis, those are covered in the Insider Service. You can see the full portfolio and how we’re sizing these positions at capitalistexploits.at.

Read Tindale’s full analysis. Share it with anyone who manages capital or makes decisions about supply chains. It deserves far more traction than it’s getting.

Nothing here is investment advice. This is what we think and what we own. Do your own research.

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I want to show you a chart.

Before I do, a confession. I went looking for the current market positioning of Bag 7 investors and accidentally grabbed the wrong picture.

Right. That one.

My apologies. Here is the correct picture:

That red line sits at 24,000. If the Nasdaq closes below it, our expectation is 20% or more downside. Not gradually. In quick order.

But that is not what I want to talk about today.

The Nasdaq is the sideshow. The main event is happening somewhere else entirely...and almost nobody is watching.

What a Decade of Destruction Looks Like

Cast your mind back to 2014.

Oil was north of $100 a barrel. Exploration budgets were bloated. Companies were drilling everything that moved. Capital flooded into the sector on the assumption that prices would stay elevated and the party would last.

Then it didn’t.

The 2014–2016 collapse wiped out hundreds of billions in market value. Companies went bankrupt. Survivors cut their rigs, slashed their exploration budgets, and for the first time in the industry’s history, started returning capital to shareholders rather than drilling for glory. They had finally learned the lesson that decades of boom-bust cycles had failed to teach: discipline matters.

Then shale arrived and demolished what was left of the economics for another few years. More bankruptcies. More consolidation. More scar tissue.

The result is an industry that has been conditioned by a decade of punishment to invest as little as possible, move as slowly as possible, and keep its powder dry. And now...at precisely the moment when that discipline has starved the supply side of the investment it needs...the demand side is not going anywhere.

The Supply Mathematics Are Unfriendly

Here is the number that does not get nearly enough attention.

Nearly 90% of annual upstream oil and gas investment since 2019 has been dedicated purely to offsetting production declines...not to meeting demand growth, not to adding new barrels, but simply to standing still. The treadmill is accelerating. And the industry’s appetite to invest in keeping pace with it is structurally impaired after a decade of negative returns.

Conventional oil fields decline at an average of around 5.6% per year. Shale...the great supply saviour that was supposed to solve everything...declines at roughly 35% per year. That is not a typo. Shale wells that look spectacular in year one are shadows of themselves by year three. The replacement treadmill never stops.

Meanwhile, the world is consuming around 103 million barrels of oil per day. That number is not going down. Whatever the green transition advocates tell you, global oil demand has grown every single year for the past decade with one exception...the year a pandemic shut down the global economy. That is what genuine demand destruction looks like. Everything else is noise.

This is not a demand story. We are not asking you to believe in a heroic oil price prediction or some geopolitical catalyst. We are saying the supply mathematics are structurally unfriendly, the producing assets sitting on discovered resources carry enormous operating leverage to even a modestly tight market, and the valuations of these businesses are still pricing in the misery of the last cycle rather than the cashflows they will generate in the next one.

The Breakout Is Confirmed

Now. About that chart I actually wanted to show you.

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Greetings, friends!

Fellow subscriber and friend Al sent through this sunset from his farm in New Zealand:

To start, wise words from Ray Dalio:

Principle: “A Smart Rabbit Has Three Holes.”

That is an old saying I learned in Hong Kong that is meant to convey that any place can become unsafe and that having the ability to go to other places is invaluable. It is a lesson from history that might have been lost to people who haven’t experienced that need in their lifetimes. The fact is that throughout history...over the last 200 years...about 85% of countries have had such bad circumstances that large numbers of people have had to flee them. More specifically, today there are about 195 countries, and over the last 200 years, approximately 160–175 of those had at least one period in which substantial numbers of people fled because of war, persecution, famine, or state collapse. History has shown that the Big Cycle is at times driven by the five big forces toward periods of disorder, as seems to be happening now. In any case, it would be naive to not consider and prepare for this possibility.

When I think about investing, I think about what your money is for. I think that we would agree that, first and foremost, it is to keep you and your loved ones safe. I have found that one’s perspective about wars and investing in light of them depends on one’s proximity to them. If you are someone who is experiencing some sort of war (civil or international), your perspective is very different than if you’re outside of the war, thinking about the return on your investments. My point is that history has shown that the best investment you can have in times of war is alternative safe places to go that are well stocked, and the best asset you can have is your human capital.

The above is appropriate given the events unfolding right now. At a portfolio level this means diversification.

In This Week’s Issue

• The Nasdaq: Take a Closer Look

• Asymmetry in Motion

• Lessons from History

• Predictive Programming

• Cascade

• Gasoil (aka Diesel)

• AI

• Convergence

• Iran War

• Liquidity In Credit Doesn’t Matter… Until It Does

• Not the Onion

• Halo

• Fertilizer: It’s More Than Ammonia

• Gypsum

• The Big Five Six:

Read more

The International Energy Agency just published a report called Sheltering from Oil Shocks.

Read that title again. Sheltering. From oil shocks. As if the solution to an energy supply problem is to manage your behaviour rather than solve the supply problem.

I read it. All of it. And I want to walk you through what it actually says, because the document is instructive...not for the reasons the IEA intends.

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The Report

The context is real enough. The conflict in the Middle East has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz. According to the IEA’s own figures, around 20% of global daily oil consumption previously transited that waterway. That flow has slowed to a trickle. Gulf producers have cut output by at least 10 million barrels per day. Brent is north of $100. The IEA has already authorised the largest emergency stockpile release in its history...400 million barrels from member country reserves.

So: real disruption, real price spike, real emergency response on the supply side. Fine. This is what the IEA exists to do.

But then comes the second half of the report. The demand side. The “10 options” for governments, businesses, and households to “shelter themselves” from the shock.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Option One. Governments should mandate or encourage working from home. The Philippines and Pakistan have already introduced four-day government workweeks. Sri Lanka has closed public offices on Wednesdays. The IEA estimates three additional remote days per week could cut personal car oil consumption by up to 20%.

Option Two. Reduce highway speed limits by at least 10 km/h. Pakistan has already done it. France did something similar in 1973 and again in 2022. A 10 km/h reduction can cut an individual driver’s fuel use by 5% to 10%.

Option Three. Alternate-day road access based on your licence plate number. Odd plates drive Monday. Even plates drive Tuesday. Korea is currently considering a five-day or ten-day vehicle rotation system. The IEA frames this as reducing congestion and “engine idling.” Which is technically true. It is also a permit system for movement.

Option Four. Avoid air travel “where alternatives exist.” The IEA doesn’t define what qualifies as an alternative. A twelve-hour train journey? A video call? The ambiguity is deliberate...it allows regulators to determine after the fact whether your trip was essential. Governments are encouraged to lead by example by restricting overseas travel for public officials. Thailand has already suspended government agency trips abroad.

Option Five. Switch from gas cooking to electric. The IEA is now recommending what appliance you use in your kitchen.

I want to stop there for a moment. Because taken individually, none of these is outrageous. In a genuine supply shock, people tighten their belts. Businesses adapt. Governments respond. That’s normal.

What’s not normal is the architecture underneath these recommendations.

Where We’ve Seen This Before

In 2020, governments around the world restricted movement, mandated behaviour, and closed businesses. The justification was public health. The template that emerged...the compliance infrastructure, the digital passes, the essential vs. non-essential designations...proved remarkably durable.

In 2022, the energy crisis that followed the Ukraine war produced its own round of behavioural mandates. The EU recommended thermostats capped at 19 degrees. Germany launched public campaigns asking citizens to take shorter showers. France ran information campaigns on eco-driving. The IEA published guidance on all of it.

And now here we are in 2026, and the IEA is publishing a 10-point demand management plan that includes licence plate rotation systems, government-enforced remote work, and restrictions on air travel based on criteria that regulators will define for you.

The excuse changed. The template is identical.

What makes this worth paying attention to is not that governments are doing these things in an emergency. It’s that the IEA’s own longer-term publications make very clear that emergency measures are viewed as a proof of concept for permanent structural change.

The IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 report is explicit on the point. The lesson the IEA drew from Covid-19 was not caution. It was that people will comply at scale when the pressure is sufficient. Mass behaviour change, achieved under emergency conditions, demonstrated what’s possible. The same report calls for ongoing personal behavioural changes as a core part of the Net Zero pathway...lower speed limits, reduced flying, dietary shifts. The emergency creates awareness. The awareness becomes the baseline. The baseline becomes the mandate.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a stated policy framework from the agency that exists to manage global energy security.

The Investment Angle

Now. Here’s where I want to turn this, because this is what we actually do. We look at the world as it is, not as we wish it were, and we try to figure out where the money goes.

The IEA report is useful not as a policy blueprint but as a demand signal. When the world’s foremost energy security body publishes a crisis management document recommending demand rationing across transport, aviation, and industry...that tells you something about the supply situation.

The Strait of Hormuz carrying 20% of global oil consumption is not a new vulnerability. It has been the central structural fact of global oil markets for fifty years. What’s new is that the disruption has actually happened at scale. And the response...strategic reserve releases, demand mandates, national emergency protocols...confirms that the just-in-time global energy system has no margin left.

This is exactly the setup we have been talking about for the better part of two years. Global oil field decline rates are running at 8% annually, meaning the industry needs to replace roughly 8 million barrels per day of production every year just to stay flat. Capex into new production has been structurally inadequate since 2015. Shale growth in the US is decelerating. There is no cavalry coming.

And now a single geopolitical shock has knocked 10 million barrels per day offline and the IEA is telling people to carpool.

The gap between what the world needs and what the supply system can deliver is not closing. It is widening. And gaps like that, in commodity markets, have historically resolved in one direction.

We are positioned for this. We have been positioned for this. Energy, broadly...oil and gas producers, services companies, tankers, the infrastructure that moves molecules around a world that runs entirely on them. Not because we predicted this specific conflict. We didn’t. But because the underlying structure of supply and demand had already made some version of this outcome highly probable.

Geopolitical shocks are the match. The tinder has been building for years.

The governments implementing driving rotation systems and work-from-home mandates are not addressing the underlying problem. They are managing the symptoms. The underlying problem is that the world systematically underinvested in energy production for a decade while simultaneously pursuing a green transition that has not delivered reliable baseload power at scale. The IEA’s own demand management report is a tacit admission of that failure. You don’t publish a rationing playbook if the supply side is healthy.

None of this is advice. We own what we own and you should do your own research before touching anything. But the direction of travel here seems reasonably clear. Scarcity commands a premium. The producers and handlers of scarce physical commodities are not going away. And the political response to scarcity...whether it’s rationing, price caps, or licence plate rotation systems...has historically transferred wealth from paper assets to real ones.

That process is underway.

The Longer Game

In other words: the solution to being exposed to oil shocks is to reduce your dependence on oil. Which sounds reasonable until you spend thirty seconds thinking about it.

You cannot manufacture a solar panel, a wind turbine, an EV battery, or a heat pump without oil in the supply chain. The resins, the lubricants, the transport, the mining equipment that pulls the copper and lithium and cobalt out of the ground...it all runs on oil. The green energy supply chain is not separate from the fossil fuel supply chain. It is downstream of it. So when oil gets constrained, green energy device production gets constrained too. The IEA is essentially recommending you cure a headache by hitting yourself somewhere else.

Then there’s the reliability problem. When the power goes out...and in a genuine energy crisis, it will...you cannot cook. You cannot heat your home. You cannot take a hot shower. The family that transitioned off gas to a fully electric kitchen and an electric heat pump has no fallback. Gas gives you something to cook on when the grid goes dark. Electricity gives you a very expensive paperweight.

And even when the grid is running, most of the electricity flowing into your all-electric home is generated by fossil fuels. Natural gas. Coal. In many countries, oil. Electrifying your appliances and calling it clean energy is, in most cases, just burning fossil fuels with extra steps...extra infrastructure, extra transmission losses, extra points of failure.

None of this is an argument against managing energy use intelligently. It is an argument against pretending the transition has already happened, or that it can be accelerated by rationing petrol and mandating induction stoves while the Strait of Hormuz is closed.

The commodity thesis runs right through the middle of all of it. Oil to run the world as it exists today. Critical minerals to build the world the planners say is coming. And the monetary debasement required to fund the gap between those two realities...the emergency reserves, the consumer subsidies, the $900 billion spent between 2022 and 2023 just cushioning households from the last crisis...is a hard asset story however you cut it.

The playbook keeps pointing in the same direction.

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Greetings, friends!

Everyone is glued to oil prices right now. Lines at the pump. Flights grounded. Dubai in chaos. And the financial media is doing what financial media does...obsessing over the thing everyone can already see.

What they’re missing is the second order.

And the second order is where empires actually fall.

The Strait Is Shut. This Is Not a Diplomatic Problem.

On February 28, the US/Israel project in Iran began. Within days, tanker transits through the Strait of Hormuz...the world’s most critical energy artery...had effectively flatlined to zero.

Let that sink in.

The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 21 million barrels per day. That’s 20% of global crude consumption. 31% of all seaborne crude. Gone.

The pointy shoes in Washington have a solution, of course. Drain the SPR. Blame the Ayatollah. Beg NATO allies. None of that moves one barrel through a closed strait.

And here’s the math everyone is ignoring on the Saudi workaround: the East-West pipeline from Jubail to Yanbu can ramp to a maximum capacity of 7 million barrels per day.

Seven million into twenty-one million doesn’t go. Even if it ramped tomorrow...which it hasn’t...you’re still 14 million barrels per day short. Ships are in the wrong places. Infrastructure is damaged. We’re looking at a minimum of two months just to restore physical flow, assuming the Strait reopened tonight.

It won’t reopen tonight.

The price data tells you everything. Asian crude grades...Oman futures, Arabian Gulf Light, Dubai...have decoupled violently from Western benchmarks. Oman crude hit $153 on March 18. WTI sits at $94. That spread exists because Asian refineries are chemically tuned to specific sour grades. They cannot simply switch. So they bid astronomical premiums for any barrel that makes it through...and Asia has become the world’s shock absorber.

For now.

But That’s Not the Real Problem.

Oil prices getting your attention? Good. Now forget about them for a moment.

The real problem is food. And food runs on exactly two things: diesel and fertilizer.

Diesel you understand. Trucks. Tractors. Supply chains. Every barrel of diesel that doesn’t flow through the Strait is a truck that doesn’t run, a tractor that doesn’t plant.

Fertilizer is the one nobody’s talking about.

Look at those numbers. 44% of global sulphur trade...a primary fertilizer input...flows through the Strait. 31% of global urea. 25-35% of traded ammonia. These aren’t rounding errors. These are the inputs that make crops grow.

One third of global seaborne fertilizer now moves through waters effectively controlled by Iran. Plants are halting. Nearly a million tons is stranded. Urea is already up 30-40%.

India gets 40% of its urea and phosphates from this region. Same for Southeast Asia. Rationing has already started.

And then there’s Qatar.

The Ras Laffan facility...responsible for roughly 20% of the world’s LNG supply...took Iranian missile strikes. Fires. Extensive damage.

Europe spent four years and hundreds of billions of dollars building its post-Russia energy strategy around Qatari LNG. They congratulated themselves endlessly on the pivot. Energy independence. Crisis averted. Grownups in charge.

That entire strategy is now on fire...literally...because Iran decided to punish Qatar for hosting a US air base Qatar.

No Policy Response Fixes a Physical Supply Problem. None.

This is the part Washington doesn’t understand. And it’s the part that matters most to anyone with capital at stake.

Trump can tweet. Doesn’t grow one ton of urea. Doesn’t move one barrel of diesel. Doesn’t buy back a missed planting season.

Print more money? Doesn’t rebuild a blown refinery. Doesn’t replace incinerated LNG infrastructure that will take a decade to repair. Doesn’t feed anyone.

Here’s what makes food different from every other supply shock: you cannot restate the harvest. Miss the planting window and you wait until next year. That’s not a quarter you revise. That’s a season gone. Bangladesh, Pakistan, India...roughly two billion people, a quarter of the planet...are already facing fertilizer shortfalls going into planting season.

Physics and geography eventually trump central bank prayers. We are watching it happen in real time.

Taiwan. Chips. The Thing Under the Thing.

While we’re at it...

Taiwan imports 98% of its energy. It currently has approximately eleven days of LNG supply on hand.

TSMC is Taiwan.

The Bag 7 and the 33% of the S&P 500 that depends on them...is TSMC. The AI superstory...the chips, the fabs, the power requirements, the entire narrative holding up twenty-three times price-to-cashflow...sits on physical infrastructure that just discovered it has an energy supply problem no earnings call can explain away.

We Didn’t Need to Predict the War. The Setup Was Obvious.

Here’s the thing. We didn’t need to see this exact conflict coming to be positioned for it.

We’ve been long energy. Long farmland. Long hard assets. The thesis was never “there will be a US-Israel strike on Iran on February 28.” The thesis was simpler than that: the global system was running on just-in-time assumptions that had never been stress-tested at scale, and the price of that fragility would eventually be paid in real goods...not financial abstractions.

Paper promises are meeting their physical limits in real time.

The Americas bloc is relatively insulated. North and South American feedstock chains are shorter, less exposed to Gulf disruption. That matters enormously for agricultural output. Latin American farmland...already cheap, already unloved...looks considerably more interesting with each passing day.

The trades that follow from here are not complicated. Real assets. Energy. Agricultural commodities. Hard infrastructure in geographies that aren’t downstream of a closed strait.

Think Maslow’s hierarchy: food sits at the bottom. Everything else stacks on top of it. When people start worrying about eating, they stop worrying about their passive index allocations.

The crowd is already furious about petrol prices and cancelled flights.

Wait until it’s food prices.

That’s how empires collapse. Return of capital matters more than return on capital...right now, more than at any point I can remember.

We’re positioned. If you’re not, that’s worth thinking very seriously about. Do your own research. But don’t wait for CNN to tell you it’s a crisis. By then, you’ll be paying for it at the checkout.

Sincerely,

Chris MacIntosh Founder & Editor In Chief, Capitalist Exploits Independent Investment Research

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Greetings, friends!

I was on a call last week with a family office based in Europe. Good people. They’d spent the better part of two decades compounding money at a remarkable rate...acquiring businesses, consolidating within their own sphere of competence, building something genuinely impressive.

Now they had a problem.

They’d run out of things to buy. Acquisition targets had dried up. And so there they were, sitting on more cash than they knew what to do with, trying to figure out what comes next.

They’d been looking at a private deal in Kazakhstan. Decent business. Potentially interesting returns. But they got spooked...jurisdictional risk, legal uncertainty...and passed.

What struck me, getting off that call, was this: the very framework that built their wealth was now working against them. They were accustomed to deploying large chunks of capital into concentrated positions. That’s how you build a family business empire. You go big, or you don’t go. But that framework, applied to a portfolio of financial assets? That’s how you eventually blow yourself up.

We own Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan. Same jurisdiction. Same potential for legal and political unpleasantness. Are we worried? Not particularly. It’s a 1% position size. Paying somewhere around 15% in dividends. Has essentially returned its cost basis in distributions alone.

Could it get wiped out tomorrow? Absolutely. But the probability, going in, was in our favor. The valuation was already pricing in the jurisdictional risk. We were being paid to own it. And at 1% of the portfolio, a total wipeout is a rounding error.

That is the whole game, right there. Not picking the right name. Sizing the bet correctly.

I get asked constantly about the Fed. What are they going to do next? Will they cut? Will they hold? Is QE coming back?

My honest answer: I genuinely don’t care.

Not because it isn’t mildly interesting as trivia. It is. In the very short term, if you’re a trader working tight time horizons, fine...the Bank of Japan raising rates a quarter point can matter to your P&L this week. But as a structural determinant of where your wealth ends up in five or ten years? Completely meaningless. It does not change the trajectory.

And the trajectory is what matters.

When you have the financial constraints we have across the western world...debt loads now topping $251 trillion globally, the social contract eroding between governments and their populations, the geopolitical pressures that historically and reliably follow exactly that kind of breakdown...the destination is already set. You can’t know the precise sequence of events. You can’t know which particular headline moves markets on a given Tuesday. But you can judge the trend. And you can position accordingly.

Trying to trade around Fed meetings is intellectual junk food. It feels productive. It isn’t.

So what is the actual job?

It’s boring. People hate when I say that, but it’s the truth.

The job is portfolio management and position sizing. That’s it. That is the whole thing.

I could come out here and tell you there’s a gold company that’s going to go up 10x and you should put 20% of your wealth into it. That gets clicks. That gets attention. It also gets you wiped out eventually if you keep doing it...because you can have completely correct analysis and still get blindsided by something you couldn’t see. The analysis isn’t the problem. The sizing is.

What you want is multiple bets, all with probability in your favor, knowing full well that not all of them will work out. Then you size each one so that when something goes wrong...and something always goes wrong...it doesn’t matter.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice. Within our Dividend Portfolio, we own north of 80 positions. Most sized at 1 to 1.5% each. On any given day, one of those is probably down 10% or more. Nobody on our team is losing sleep over it. Because it’s 1% of the portfolio. You barely notice it.

Compare that to lying awake at 3am because you’ve got 20% of your net worth in a single commodity stock that just tanked overnight. That’s when emotion takes hold. That’s when you make the decisions that cost you. Investing should not be an emotional experience. The moment it becomes one, you’ve already made a structural error...and the error wasn’t the stock pick, it was the position size.

There’s a related concept that I think is equally underappreciated: the difference between trimming and selling.

Most investors operate in binary terms. Either I hold, or I sell. Either I’m in, or I’m out.

That’s not portfolio management. That’s gambling with extra steps.

Continuous rebalancing is different. Say a particular theme has run hard and now represents a considerably larger slice of the portfolio than when we entered. That’s a good problem...but it’s still a problem, because the risk profile has shifted. The absolute dollar downside is now larger. And somewhere else in the world, there’s an asset sitting at the same kind of valuation we liked about this one eighteen months ago, with the same asymmetry...and nobody talking about it yet.

So we don’t sell. We trim. Take a position from 12% back to 6%. Redeploy into the next unloved opportunity...maybe Brazilian equities, as we’ve recently done, maybe offshore oil assets, maybe something currently residing in the zero fan club.

This is how wealth compounds over a decade. Not through finding the one great trade and white-knuckling it to zero or the moon. Through systematic, boring, emotionless rebalancing.

The family office in Europe had built something genuinely impressive. But the skill that got them there...concentrated capital, deep domain expertise, big swings within a narrow circle...was precisely the wrong framework for what came next.

The market doesn’t care what built your wealth. It only cares about what you do with it from here.

Stop watching the Fed. Start managing risk. Size your bets so that being wrong doesn’t kill you. Trim when something runs. Redeploy into what hasn’t moved yet.

Boring as a wheelbarrow.

That’s the whole strategy.

Sincerely,

Chris MacIntosh Founder & Editor In Chief, Capitalist Exploits Independent Investment Research

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Greetings, friends!

I was watching some clips from Davos recently. And I have to tell you, the audacity on display was something to behold.

These are the same people...the very same people...who, five years ago, were wagging their fingers at us for showering too often. Chastising the world. Scolding us about renewables and carbon footprints and the moral imperative of dismantling fossil fuels. Remember all that? They were very passionate about it. Very certain.

And now? Now they’re standing at their podiums telling us we obviously need coal. We obviously need natural gas. We obviously need to keep the lights on.

No apology. No acknowledgment. Not even a shrug. They just pivoted...and presented the new position with the same divine confidence they brought to the old one. Problem, action, solution. They created the crisis, administered the scolding, and now they’re riding back in as the only people equipped to fix it.

It’s a good old Hegelian dialectic. And they run it every single time.

What genuinely staggers me isn’t that they do it. Of course they do it. Parasites gonna parasite. What staggers me is that the vast majority of people just...accept it. No outrage. No mockery. Certainly no accountability. The same face on the television says a completely different thing than it said five years ago, and the audience nods along.

This is the Milgram experiment at mass scale.

You’ll remember the original experiment. Ordinary people, when instructed by a figure in a lab coat, were willing to administer what they believed were severe electric shocks to strangers. Not because they were cruel. Because someone with credentials told them it was the right thing to do.

We saw the modern version during Convid. Stand three feet behind the person in front of you. Masks on if you’re standing. Masks off if you’re sitting. You could eat at the restaurant but couldn’t walk through it without a mask. And people...intelligent people...followed these obvious absurdities. Because a man on television with letters after his name said it was the right thing to do.

For those of us who sat back and said this is transparent nonsense...it was deeply frustrating. Personally, I mean. I wanted to pull my hair out.

But here’s the thing. There are consequences to following nonsense. There always are. And the longer a society follows nonsense...the longer it accepts the unacceptable, defers to the indefensible, and applauds the incoherent...the greater the asymmetry that builds.

That asymmetry eventually gets released.

This is how gold runs for two years and becomes the best-performing major asset class on the planet while the financial media barely notices. This is how silver goes up five times. This is how energy stocks quietly compound while the consensus is busy worshipping at the altar of the Bag 7.

The same dynamic is playing out across geopolitics and financial markets simultaneously...and the two are not separate phenomena.

When the social contract between a government and its citizens erodes...when the governing class stops even pretending to serve the people it claims to represent...you don’t need a crystal ball to know what comes next. History is perfectly clear on this. Financial constraints pile up. Political decay accelerates. The currency gets debased. Conflict follows. Domestically and internationally.

None of this is conspiracy theorizing. It’s pattern recognition. Cui bono...who benefits?...is the only question worth asking when a new crisis appears. Follow the capital flows. Follow the policy. Follow who ends up with more power and more money on the other side. These things do not happen by accident.

I’ve been saying for years that the US would experience domestic civil conflict. You’re watching it. I’ve been saying international conflict would escalate. You’re watching that too. Not because I’m clairvoyant. Because this is what happens when the financial constraints reach the point they’ve reached, and when the trust between citizen and state collapses the way it has collapsed.

Now. To markets. Because this is our shtick.

The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ are, at this point, held up by roughly ten companies...all sporting valuations that would make your eyes water. OpenAI hemorrhages cash and has never turned a profit...the company is projecting roughly $74 billion in operating losses in 2028 alone before pivoting to profitability sometime around 2030. The reasoning behind flows into these names isn’t even human at this point. It’s passive capital, algo-driven, chasing the same narrow set of assets in a feedback loop that feels unassailable right up until the moment it isn’t.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth about passive capital flows: they have limits. There are breakers.

I can’t tell you exactly what triggers the unwind. Nobody can. But I can tell you...with considerable confidence...that on a historical basis, this breaks. Gravity isn’t a risk. It’s a schedule.

In the meantime, the conditions that produce the break are the same conditions that have always driven capital into hard assets: unpayable debts, political decay, and an accelerating loss of faith in the institutions that are supposed to manage all of it.

Let’s talk about the debt, because this is the crux of everything.

Western governments are sitting on obligations that simply cannot be repaid...global public debt hit $100 trillion and kept climbing. This isn’t a controversial observation. The numbers are what they are. And when you look back through history, these situations resolve in one of exactly two ways. Not three. Not four. Two.

Outright default. Or default via currency debasement...inflation.

That’s it. There are no other exits. Zero. None. Nada.

And when either of those things happens...when hard assets reprice in the debased currency...it happens every single time. Precious metals. Farmland. Energy assets. Copper. Real things. Things you can hold, things that produce something, things that exist independently of a government’s ability to print its way out of a problem.

I remember traveling through Zimbabwe during their currency collapse. Fridges were being used as currency. Literal household appliances. Better to own a fridge than to hold the local notes. That’s an extreme, obviously. But it’s the same principle operating at a different point on the spectrum.

Which is why...despite the violent corrections we’ve already seen and will see again in precious metals...you do not want to exit this trade. Not until the debt problem is resolved. And it isn’t close to being resolved.

Gold isn’t moving because of inflation, by the way. Let’s be clear about that. It’s moving because of a loss of faith. Faith in institutions. Faith in central banks. Faith in the governing class’s ability...or even desire...to manage the mess they’ve made. That distinction matters enormously, because it tells you where we are in the cycle. And where we are is: early.

Now, a word on how to actually handle all of this. Because knowing what’s coming and positioning correctly for it are two completely different things.

The single biggest mistake I see is concentration. Someone becomes convinced...rightly, in many cases...that gold or energy or emerging markets are going to run. And then they put 30% of their wealth into a single name and wait. This is how you get the call right and still lose your shirt.

Think back to the last uranium cycle. You could have spotted it early, nailed the thesis, bought Cameco...and then watched Cigar Lake flood. Exogenous event. Nobody saw it coming. The odds were not in favor of that outcome. But it still happened. If you had sized appropriately...say 1% into Cameco as part of a broader 5% weighting in uranium...you’d have been fine. You still had the call right. You survived the shock. You got paid on the thesis.

Everything in markets is pure probability. You run probability on the thesis. You run probability on the position. You choose sizing that means you can be right on the big picture and wrong on a specific name and still come out ahead.

This is why we structure portfolios the way we do...roughly ten themes, sized around ten percent each, diversified across names within each theme. It’s boring as a wheelbarrow. Nobody writes clickbait about portfolio construction. But it’s the only way to survive this environment with both your capital and your sanity intact.

The goal is never to predict with certainty. The goal is to have probability in your favor across multiple positions, so that the ones that work cover the ones that don’t...and then some.

Here’s where we are, plainly stated.

Hard assets are in a long-term repricing event driven by debt, debasement, and loss of faith. The consensus is still, by and large, parked in overvalued US tech stocks, watching passive flows do the work of fundamental analysis. The Milgram experiment continues.

But experiments end.

The longer the nonsense persists, the greater the asymmetry. And the greater the asymmetry, the more violent the release.

We’re positioned accordingly. And we’re getting paid to wait.

Do your own research before acting on anything discussed here.

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Greetings, friends!

I mentioned this at our Mavericks event in Cayman last year. That when Argentina’s risk index drops sufficiently to be included in the emerging market status, there would be an immediate auto-execute bid for...by my calculations...at least $40 billion of capital.

Keep in mind that the entire market is still sub $100 billion.

And here we are. The JP Morgan EMBI+ Argentina recently hit 548 basis points. An eight-year low. Down from 1,920 when Milei walked through the Casa Rosada door in December 2023.

Let’s talk about what that number actually means. Because most people hear “country risk index” and glaze over. Which is precisely why most people are going to miss this.

The Scoreboard Nobody Taught You to Read

Back in 1992, JP Morgan created the Emerging Markets Bond Index...the EMBI...originally to track Brady bonds. Those were the restructured sovereign debt instruments issued by developing countries after the 1980s Latin American debt crisis. Named after US Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, they were the debt-restructuring mechanism that gave countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico a path back to capital markets.

The original EMBI covered these Brady bonds only. By 1995, JP Morgan expanded it into what we now call the EMBI+, adding dollar-denominated loans and Eurobonds. Today it’s the most widely watched sovereign risk gauge on the planet.

Here’s the elegant simplicity of it. The EMBI measures the spread...the gap in basis points...between what a sovereign government pays on its dollar-denominated bonds versus what the US Treasury pays on bonds of the same maturity. The Treasury rate is considered the risk-free benchmark. Anything above it is the market’s way of saying: “We need compensation for the risk of lending to you.”

One hundred basis points equals one percentage point. So when Argentina’s spread was sitting at 1,920 bps in December 2023, the market was pricing in a premium of roughly 19.2% above US Treasuries to lend Milei’s government money.

Sheesh.

When it falls to 548 bps...as it now has...the market is saying something very different. It’s saying we trust this government enough to lend to it at roughly 5.48% above a US Treasury. That’s not investment grade. But it’s a different galaxy from where it was.

In other words...the market has voted. And it’s voting for Milei.

Why Is Argentina Falling?

Let me count the ways.

When Milei took office, Argentina was running a fiscal deficit of roughly 5% of GDP. Within a year, he’d eliminated it entirely. Primary surplus. The man actually used the chainsaw. That’s not normal for Argentina. That’s barely normal anywhere.

Then came the IMF’s $20 billion Extended Fund Facility in April 2025, with $12 billion disbursed upfront. The Fund backstop gave foreign creditors their security blanket. Monthly inflation, which had been running above 25% when Milei took office, collapsed to roughly 2% by early 2025.

Capital controls were substantially lifted. Residents can buy dollars again. Companies can repatriate dividends earned from January 2025 onwards. The tax amnesty brought over $10 billion back into the formal banking system...dwarfing the previous Macri-era amnesty. Central Bank reserves climbed to a three-year high above $44 billion.

In October 2025, Milei’s party won the midterm elections in a landslide. Gone was the binary bet that Argentina might revert to Peronism. His mandate was ratified. The risk premium compression that followed was immediate and dramatic...from ~1,080 bps in mid-October to the mid-500s by January 2026.

The country risk fell below 500 basis points in late January 2026...the first time since 2018. For context: market analysts have said Argentina can return to international debt markets “optimally” once the spread reaches the 450–550 range. The country already issued its first dollar bond since 2018 in late 2025...a Bonar 2029 at 6.5%, which was 1.4x oversubscribed.

We are not in a speculative scenario. We are watching a structural change in real time.

The Trigger Nobody Is Pricing In

Here’s where it gets interesting. The EMBI is a bond spread. What matters for capital flows...specifically the tidal wave I’m describing...is something slightly different: the MSCI market classification.

Let me connect the dots.

In November 2021, MSCI demoted Argentina from Emerging Markets to Standalone Market status...the bottom of the barrel. The reason was simple: the Fernandez government had imposed capital controls so severe that international institutional investors couldn’t replicate the index. Couldn’t move money in. Couldn’t move money out. So MSCI removed Argentina from the emerging markets universe entirely.

Most mainstream institutional capital has a mandate. They can only invest in markets that sit inside certain classifications. Standalone Market means: you don’t exist for the vast majority of global institutional money.

Roughly $893 billion now sits in emerging markets ETFs globally. That’s passive tracking alone. Add active EM funds, EM bond funds, global macro allocations, and sovereign wealth funds...and the total pool of capital that requires emerging market classification to invest is orders of magnitude larger. The MSCI Emerging Markets index alone has approximately $384 billion passively tracking it.

MSCI typically reviews classifications in June each year. Per analysis from Latam Advisors CEO Sebastián Maril, the earliest Argentina could be added to the watch list is June 2026...with reclassification possible in June 2027. The timeline is not tomorrow. But the trajectory is unmistakable. And the capital market doesn’t wait for MSCI to make it official.

This is important. The opportunity is not in buying Argentina after the MSCI upgrade. It’s in buying Argentina before the announcement.

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When the Gates Open: Historical Precedents

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2014, Qatar and the UAE graduated from MSCI Frontier to Emerging Market status. In the twelve months between the announcement and the effective date, the UAE stock market surged +99%. Qatar rose +54%. Pakistan, upgraded in 2017, rose +28% in the pre-inclusion period.

In other words...the smart money gets in before the date is announced. And the passive money, constrained to buy at the effective date, arrives late to a party already priced. That’s not a criticism of passive investing. It’s just a description of how the mechanics work.

The reason is structural. International asset allocations benchmark to indexes. As those indexes change, hundreds of billions of dollars must rebalance mechanically. Funds that track the MSCI EM index have no discretion. If Argentina is in the index at 0.2% weight, they must own it at 0.2% weight...on the effective date. Period.

The front-runners know this. The active managers who can invest ahead of the date know this. Hedge funds know this. They buy before the announcement. The passive funds show up on settlement day and buy whatever is left, at whatever price it’s trading.

Now here’s the wrinkle with Argentina that makes this specific opportunity different.

Not Enough Assets to Buy

Argentina’s total listed market is still sub-$100 billion. The MSCI Argentina index at Emerging Markets weighting would include only four companies in the standard index: YPF, Grupo Financiero Galicia, Banco Macro, and Pampa Energía. Eleven names in the small-cap index.

Even accounting for active EM mandates and bond market flows, once the capital flood starts...and I estimate at least $40 billion when you include the full spectrum of passive trackers, active mandates, sovereign funds, front-runners, and bond index inclusions...there simply aren’t enough listed assets to absorb it.

You cannot put $40 billion into a $100 billion market at 0.2% weight through only four liquid large-caps. The math doesn’t work.

So what happens? The capital doesn’t disappear. It goes hunting. And where it goes hunting is private equity.

This is where the real asymmetry lies. The wave of capital that will enter private equity will dwarf what we’ll see in listed equity.

Argentina’s private infrastructure is still massively undercapitalized relative to its resource base. Vaca Muerta is the second-largest shale gas reserve and fourth-largest shale oil reserve in the world...barely scratched. Agricultural land. Energy services. Banking infrastructure recovering from decades of suppressed credit. The RIGI investment promotion regime...which expires at end of 2026...offers legally binding 30-year guarantees on tax, FX, and capital repatriation for investments over $200 million. The clock is ticking.

I’ll remind you: we have been positioned in Argentina since 2021. We have three private equity vehicles in the country...Vaca Muerta accommodation infrastructure, farmland, and YPF non-core oil well development. We put those positions on when the EMBI was near 1,700 and the country risk made most institutional investors physically nauseous.

The same people who were nauseous then are the same people who will be buying in 2027...at higher prices, through passive vehicles, with bugger all edge.

The Templeton Reminder

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. Sir John Templeton underperformed the S&P 500 for thirteen consecutive years before generating a 3x return in the 1970s. The biggest risk to a value investor isn’t being wrong. It’s losing patience before being proven right.

Argentina has been good to us despite testing our resolve since 2021. It continued to test resolve through the Fernandez capital controls, the 211% inflation peak, and every “Argentina is uninvestable” headline the financial press could churn out.

Those headlines were the signal, not the noise.

The country risk index now sits at an eight-year low. The fiscal picture is the cleanest it’s been in a generation. A man actually wielded the chainsaw and survived a democratic election. The IMF is providing cover. The US Treasury is buying pesos.

And the MSCI clock is ticking toward a reclassification that will force hundreds of billions of dollars to take notice of a market worth less than $100 billion.

In other words...the spring is coiled. And compression breeds violence.

Do your own research. This is not investment advice. These are our positions and our reasoning...your situation is different from ours.

But I’ll say this plainly: the people who are waiting to see how this plays out are going to be buying from the people who bought when it was obvious only to a handful of us staring at the data.

That’s usually how it goes.

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There’s a country sitting at the bottom of South America that the market has spent the better part of fifteen years actively ignoring. No love. No analyst upgrades. No breathless CNBC segments. Bugger all institutional attention whatsoever.

Which is, of course, precisely why we’re interested in Chile.

The Setup Nobody’s Talking About

Let me give you the picture in numbers first, because the numbers are remarkable.

The iShares MSCI Chile ETF (ECH) recently completed a long-term bottoming process...the kind of base that takes years to build and is painful to watch. Relative to the S&P 500, Chilean equities are trading at half the level they were during the LTCM and Russian default crisis in 1998. Half. That was one of the most chaotic moments in modern financial history, and Chile is cheaper now relative to US equities than it was then.

Fifteen years of underperformance. Forward P/E of 14x. A commodity-rich economy with copper accounting for roughly 50% of its exports.

And a brand-new pro-business government just swept into power in a landslide.

In other words, we have deeply unloved equities, a generational valuation low, a commodity tailwind building for years, and a political catalyst. All arriving at the same time.

Call us hopeless romantics, but we love this setup.

What Chile Actually Is

Here’s what most investors miss. Chile isn’t really an equity market story. It’s a commodity story dressed up as an equity market.

Copper is the spine of this economy. It runs through everything...the mining sector, the government’s fiscal capacity, the current account. And copper, like most commodities, spent the last decade getting absolutely smashed. Capital starvation.

No new mines permitted. Existing operations stretched thin. The infrastructure to bring new supply online takes a decade minimum, and the industry has been in capital hibernation mode since the commodity bear market bottomed around 2015-2016.

Now AI is showing up and demanding copper in quantities that strain credulity. Data centres. EV charging infrastructure. Grid upgrades for power systems that the so-called “green transition” was supposed to build but largely hasn’t. Every one of these things is a copper consumption story. Supply is structurally constrained. Demand is structurally rising. You do the arithmetic.

Chile sits on top of the world’s largest proven copper reserves. It isn’t going anywhere.

The Historical Precedent

Now let me show you what happens when a commodity-rich emerging market inflects after a prolonged bear market.

From 2003 to 2011, the large-cap Chilean equity market went up approximately 500% in USD terms. Five hundred percent. That wasn’t some leveraged derivative play or crypto moonshot. That was a country ETF, available on any brokerage account, for anyone paying attention.

Small caps did 700%.

We are not saying history will repeat exactly. It never does. But we are saying the setup rhymes ... and rhymes loudly. The commodity underperformance relative to the S&P 500 is as extreme now as it was at the late-1990s peak of the TMT bubble.

Emerging markets as a whole are trading at relative lows not seen in a generation. The rotation hasn’t happened yet. That’s the whole point.

The opportunity lives in what hasn’t happened yet.

The Political Catalyst

The election of José Antonio Kast changes the operating environment in ways that matter for investors.

Chile spent years under heavily socialist leadership. The previous regime’s approach to mining investment was, shall we say, not conducive to attracting foreign capital.

Legal certainty...the thing miners need more than almost anything else before committing a billion dollars to a project...was, diplomatically speaking, a dog’s breakfast.

The new administration is doing something radical: simplifying the tax system, reducing compliance costs, creating legal certainty in mining, and actively pursuing foreign investment. This is the pro-business playbook, and it works...particularly when commodity prices are already setting up for a multi-year run regardless of what any government does.

The political tailwind doesn’t create the trade. It amplifies it.

Think of it this way. The commodity supercycle would give Chilean equities a tailwind regardless. A socialist government was a headwind. The new government removes the headwind. That’s not additive to the thesis...it’s multiplicative. You’re now running downhill with the wind at your back, and you were already starting from the cheapest valuation in a generation.

The Grand Rotation

Zoom out further and you can see what’s actually happening here.

We have been saying the same thing since Insider launched: emerging markets and commodity-sensitive stocks are going to have their day. That day is not far off. The S&P 500 is priced for perfection at over 23x price-to-cash-flow...richer even than the dot-com bubble peak. The Mag 7...sorry, the Bag 7...have become so correlated via their mutual AI investments that a stumble in one is increasingly a stumble in all. Passive flows have done a remarkable job disguising this until now.

Meanwhile, emerging markets have underperformed the S&P 500 by extraordinary margins for fifteen years. MSCI EM is sitting at relative lows that mirror exactly where it was at the height of the TMT mania in the late 1990s...and we all remember what happened after that.

The 2001-to-2011 period saw a decade of EM outperformance so dramatic that most investors who lived through it still can’t quite believe it. We believe it’s coming again. Chile...with its copper exposure, its political reform story, and its rock-bottom relative valuation...is one of our highest-conviction expressions of that thesis.

The Entry Point

For those who want direct exposure to Chile, the most straightforward entry point is the iShares MSCI Chile ETF (ECH), trading on the NYSE. It’s your one-stop copper-and-Chile vehicle. At 14x forward P/E...with the underlying components also averaging around 14x...this is not a stretched valuation. Far from it.

Do your own research. This is what we own (the ETF) and why we own it. It is not advice for you specifically...your circumstances are different from ours, and all investments carry risk, including the possibility that we are dead wrong and/or just very early (which sometimes looks the same as being wrong, for years).

The Bottom Line

Chile has everything I prefer in an investment. It’s cheap. It’s unloved. It’s been terrible for a decade. The dominant sector is structurally undersupplied relative to demand. The political environment just flipped from headwind to tailwind. And the macro backdrop...a grand rotation out of US equities and into commodities and emerging markets...is the strongest structural setup I’ve seen since the early 2000s.

Fifteen years of underperformance is not a red flag. It’s the prerequisite.

The folks who bought the S&P 500 in 2000 at 30x earnings waited a long time to get back to even. The folks who bought cheap, unloved emerging markets in 2001 and held through 2011 made five to seven times their money.

History has a wry sense of humour. We’re smitten with the idea that it’s about to repeat.

As always, do your own research.

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To start, Wadi Rum in Jordan, thanks to Pavan.

And Andreas in Italy looking at the Sibillini mountains.

Speaking of Italy, we’ve made the case for years now that we’re in the revolution cycle and so before we get into this issue, I think the following from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. He described our world perfectly:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

And Pooh bear explains what happens with the zeitgeist during these times:

In This Week’s Issue

• Epstein Files: Why the drip?

• Gating

• Superbowl Ads

• When Revolutionary Tech Needs a Marketing Budget

• More Signs of a Top From Down Under

• Owl in the Coal Mine

• 17 Years Ago…

• Gold: Signs to Alarm Bulls

• Heating Oil: Lookie Here!

• The Great Rotation (Again)

• The Big Five:

Read more

The answer is nothing.

Not because we’re frozen. Not because we’re paralysed by uncertainty. But because we positioned for this years ago. The bombs flying don’t change the thesis. They confirm it.

Let me explain.

Every time there’s a geopolitical shock, the financial press reaches for the same label. Black swan. Unprecedented. Nobody could have seen this coming.

It’s codswallop.

A black swan is a genuine surprise...an event outside the range of normal expectations with no historical precedent. What we’re watching unfold right now is none of those things. It is the logical, sequential, boringly predictable result of choices that have been made over many years.

When you have Western governments running deficits that would embarrass a banana republic...when you have a decade-long collapse in capital expenditure across every extractive industry that actually matters...when you have de-dollarisation accelerating quietly while the financial press argues about quarterly earnings...when you have geopolitical fracturing that anyone paying attention could trace back years, not weeks... this is where you end up.

Wars. Supply shocks. Instability.

These things weren’t black swans. They were on the schedule. The “black swan” framing is a scapegoat...a convenient way to avoid admitting you weren’t paying attention.

Let’s talk about the actual implications, because there are a few layers here.

The obvious one is energy. The Strait of Hormuz sits at the throat of roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. That’s not a narrow accounting footnote...it’s an artery. And it’s not just crude oil. LNG, ammonia, fertilisers... the ripples go well beyond what shows up in the WTI price on any given day.

Now here’s what the supply bears consistently get wrong. They assume that if the conflict resolves, supply rushes back. It won’t. Iran is already near full capacity. The only countries in OPEC with any meaningful spare capacity at all are Saudi Arabia and the UAE...and it wasn’t much even before any of this. US shale, which for years was the world’s marginal producer and swing supply, is now seeing year-on-year production go negative for the first time in history. The basins are maturing. There is simply no cavalry coming.

In other words, supply was already structurally constrained before a single missile was fired. What’s happening now is an accelerant on top of a fire that was already lit.

But I think the more important shift...the one that doesn’t get discussed enough...is the move from just-in-time to just-in-case.

We’ve been living in a world optimised entirely around efficiency. Why store anything? Why maintain inventory? Someone else could store it. Supply chains were frictionless. You could outsource everything, reduce your cost base, and trust that whatever you needed would arrive on demand.

That world is ending.

Japan has roughly 250 days of oil in storage. Sounds like a lot until you consider how completely dependent their entire industrial base is on that supply. And Japan is not unique. Every country in the world is running some version of this calculation...and most of them are going to come to the same uncomfortable conclusion at roughly the same time.

The shift to “just in case” means strategic stockpiling. It means nations and corporations hoarding energy, food, and critical inputs in ways they haven’t since the Cold War. That is structurally inflationary. Not the demand-pull inflation the central banks keep confidently misdiagnosing. Supply-side inflation. The kind that rate hikes don’t fix and that fiat currency is uniquely terrible at handling.

Which brings me to the denominator.

While everyone was watching the missiles, we were watching the war bill. A few hours in and the costs were already north of $2 billion, burning through roughly $9 million an hour. These things need to be funded. And they will be funded the same way everything gets funded now...deficit spending, bond issuance, and ultimately printing.

Deficits up. Bond supply up. Rates up. And as rates go up under these conditions, you get stagflation...not a soft landing, not a gentle cooldown, but the ugly combination of rising prices and a slowing economy that crushes financialised assets.

Bonds don’t do well in war. Cash doesn’t protect you when the currency is being debased to fund the fighting. Going “risk off” into cash in this environment isn’t safety...it’s a slow-motion guarantee of getting hosed.

So when people ask me if we’re “reducing risk”... I’d ask them: relative to what?

Our portfolio is roughly two-thirds positioned in energy-adjacent themes...coal, natural gas, oil and gas services, producers, tankers. The rest spans precious metals and emerging markets, with short positions on the Nasdaq providing both protection and upside in the event of a meaningful unwind in the most overvalued corner of global equities.

That short is not incidental. The whole AI-driven Bag 7 thesis is largely a revenue-free business model dressed up in extraordinary valuations. As stagflation bites and cost of capital rises, gravity isn’t a risk...it’s a schedule.

On the geographic side, the emerging markets case hasn’t changed, it’s strengthened. Argentina, Chile, Brazil...these are assets trading at valuations that would make a value investor weep with joy, in jurisdictions where the relative setup looks extraordinary compared to the priced-to-perfection developed world. We’ve been up around 50% over the last twelve months in this positioning. And I think we’re only just getting started.

The hardest thing about being early...and we have been early on some of this, make no mistake...is that the market eventually forces even the sceptics to acknowledge what’s happening. We’re in that phase now. The themes that have been unloved for years are coming back into vogue. And if you waited until now to notice, well...the asymmetry is still there, but it’s smaller than it was.

That’s the lesson worth taking from all of this. Not “what do I do now that the bombs are flying?” But “what did I do for the last five years while the conditions that led to this were building daily, weekly, monthly?”

The short term is unknowable. The long term, when you look at historical cycles honestly, is more predictable than most people are comfortable admitting.

As always, do your own research. Nothing here is advice.

Claim Your Discount

Greetings, friends!

What do you do when the financial system is hanging by a thread and about to collapse?

Why, of course, you call on an alien invasion.

I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with this…

Hedge funds…including ours…know what’s coming.

The Bank of England and the Ultimate Shock Scenario

If a government ever rolled out an official disclosure in a way that genuinely shook people, the real impact wouldn’t be aliens. It would be permission. Permission to say the old rules no longer apply. Permission to move fast, centralize decisions, and explain later.

It’s what happens in every crisis. And if you need to get these things done, it is logical that a crisis is needed. If needed badly enough…then created.

This leads us to false flags. And false flags, despite what the fact-checkers would have you believe, are not the province of tin-foil-hat merchants on the internet. They are a recurring feature of recorded history…used by governments for centuries to take nations to war, justify emergency powers, and silence opposition.

The examples are not subtle.

The Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933 is probably the cleanest. Someone set the German parliament building alight. Hitler immediately blamed the communists, and within days President von Hindenburg signed an emergency decree suspending civil liberties across Germany. The Communist Party’s parliamentary delegates were arrested. Seats cleared. Hitler’s National Socialist party went from plurality to majority…and never looked back. Whether the Nazis lit the match themselves remains debated by historians. What is not debated is what followed: the fastest consolidation of executive power in modern democratic history. One building. One decree. Game over.

Then there’s the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964. The US National Security Agency claimed North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox…twice. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting President Johnson broad authority to wage war in Vietnam without formally declaring it. Over 58,000 American soldiers died in what followed. Then, in 2005, declassified NSA documents confirmed what insiders had known for decades: the second attack never happened. Radar ghosts. The war that consumed a generation was greenlit on an event that did not occur.

And lest you think this was uniquely American creativity: in 1939, Nazi SS troops staged an attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, dressed in Polish uniforms and planted bodies as evidence. It provided the pretext for the German invasion of Poland. The Second World War began with a theatrical production.

There’s also Operation Northwoods — a 1962 US military plan, declassified in the 1990s, which proposed staging terror attacks on American soil and blaming Cuba to justify an invasion. Fake funerals. Remote-controlled planes painted as civilian airliners. The whole thing. President Kennedy rejected it. But the fact that it was conceived at the highest levels of the Pentagon…put on paper and formally proposed…tells you everything about how power thinks when it needs a pretext badly enough.

The pattern is not complicated. Crisis creates fear. Fear suspends judgment. Suspended judgment creates consent. Consent enables action that would otherwise be impossible. This is not conspiracy thinking…it is the documented playbook of state power across centuries.

Remember the Convid plandemic. You would certainly die without lockdowns and the poison shots…fear. And to add to it, you’d be killing granny…shame and guilt. It’s ancient. It works every time.

When people are scared and disoriented, they don’t ask for elegant policy. They ask for stability. And they’ll often accept limits they would normally resist, simply because uncertainty feels worse than control.

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When the Numbers Stop Making Sense

Markets are simply the collective decisions of many people, and people are emotional creatures who build their lives on stories and expectations. This is why markets price stories, not just numbers. But what happens when the stories break?

Think of any boom. At some point it almost always becomes irrational. The numbers stop making sense. Then they price stories about growth, safety, and institutional competence.

The history of this is long and consistent. And it never stops being instructive…because the psychology that drives it doesn’t change.

The Dutch Tulip Mania of 1636–37 is the canonical case. Tulip bulbs…flowers…became a speculative vehicle. At the peak, certain rare varieties were trading for the equivalent of a skilled tradesman’s annual salary. Forward contracts required no margin. Anyone with a pulse could speculate. Eventually someone showed up at an auction and refused to pay the expected price. The whole thing collapsed in days. The phrase “greater fool” exists because of what happened in that Dutch winter.

Across the Channel a century later, the South Sea Bubble of 1720 achieved something similar. The South Sea Company…granted exclusive trading rights in South America by the British government…saw its shares soar on rumors and insider dealing. The mania swept through British society. Sir Isaac Newton, the man who gave us gravity and calculus, reportedly lost a substantial sum. He is said to have remarked: “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Newton. The smartest man alive at the time. Destroyed by narrative.

The 1840s brought Railway Mania in Britain — frenzied investment in railway companies, fuelled by genuine excitement about a transformative technology. Sound familiar? Companies rushed to build thousands of kilometres of track far outpacing any sustainable demand. When it collapsed, companies failed across the board, enormous debts were left behind, and investors were ruined. The technology was real. The valuations were codswallop.

Then came the dot-com era. The Nasdaq in early 2000 was pricing stories about disruption and a new economy where traditional valuation metrics simply didn’t apply. From March 2000 to 2003, the Nasdaq fell 80%. The S&P 500 and Russell Growth fell 45% and 50% respectively. Value stocks, by contrast, were up 7%. The boring, unloved, numbers-actually-make-sense stuff. Imagine that.

Today, the S&P 500 sits at a price/cashflow of 23x. The peak of the dot-com bubble…which we just described as an 80% Nasdaq wipeout…was 15x. In other words, the current US market is roughly 50% more expensive than the most irrational moment of the internet bubble. And the story holding it all up? Artificial intelligence…genuinely transformative technology, just like the railway, just like the internet. The technology may be real. The valuations are something else entirely.

Gravity isn’t a risk…it’s a schedule.

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When the Story Breaks: What Happens Next

A reality-shattering event doesn’t just move prices; it breaks the story itself. When that happens, you get volatility, a rush toward anything that feels safe, stress in banks and payment systems, and eventually spillover into the real world. That’s what the former Bank of England analyst is really describing. Not science fiction…fragility.

The historical case studies here are unambiguous.

When the story broke in 1929, investors fled to cash and gold. The Dow Jones lost almost two-thirds of its value. Meanwhile, Homestake Mining…then the largest gold producer in the United States…delivered over 500% capital appreciation between October 1929 and December 1935, even as the broader market was being destroyed. Five hundred percent. Gold stocks initially fell with everything else, as they always do in the first wave of liquidation panic. But then they became the trade of the decade.

When 2008 arrived, the same pattern repeated. Global stocks fell 49%. US Treasuries gained 17%. Gold rose 47%. The US dollar, Japanese yen, and Swiss franc soared against most major currencies as the world’s investors scrambled for any anchor of perceived stability. Currencies that felt safe. Countries that felt solvent. Assets that felt real.

But here is where the current moment diverges from the history books.

In 2008, investors could flee to US Treasuries and call it safety. The US government was still considered creditworthy. The dollar was the unquestioned reserve currency. The flight-to-safety playbook had a clear destination.

Today? The Bank of England is warning about hedge funds holding £100 billion in gilt bets. Sovereign debt…the traditional safe haven…is itself the problem. Global bond yields are simultaneously at multi-decade highs. Four drivers, none of which are going away: soaring deficits, sticky inflation, central bank credibility collapse, and geopolitical pressure reducing foreign demand. Bond vigilantes are already active. When the traditional safe haven is the problem, the flight-to-safety playbook gets rewritten.

And capital, as it always does, starts sniffing this out ahead of the headlines.

Just look at gold and silver…

Capital has been voting with its feet. Not because of inflation expectations…gold’s relationship to CPI is notoriously unreliable as a timing tool. But because of something more fundamental: loss of faith. Gold moves on loss of faith in institutions, in fiat, in the competence of the people running things. We are watching that unfold in real time.

And geographically…

The East is building financial architecture that routes around Western systems. Hong Kong and Shanghai positioning themselves as the global gold trading center. This is the geographic expression of the same capital migration…away from Western sovereign debt, toward hard assets and Asian economies with actual manufacturing, actual energy production, and actual balance sheets.

And I’ve not even touched on energy, which is life. China now generates 40% more electricity than the US and EU combined.

The correlation between energy and living standards is well documented. At this point, based purely on that, you’d be betting on Asia…China in particular…over the EU or US. That’s before looking at valuations or any other metric. When you do, the answer becomes even more obvious.

Reframing This Through the Bank of England Lens

Now, let’s flip the lens. If authorities needed that destabilization as cover, a disclosure-style shock becomes a master key. You can introduce emergency measures without calling them permanent. You can blame instability on “the event” instead of past policy mistakes. You can centralize decision-making because coordination suddenly sounds like survival. And the stranger the event, the fewer people argue the details. Nobody debates balance sheets when they’re trying to re-anchor reality.

History indicates that societies rally around threats. Fear unifies behavior faster than persuasion. This is why you’ll see politicians driving fear. It is ancient, and it works every time.

Project Blue Beam was a theory popularized in the early 1990s by Serge Monast, which claimed that advanced technology could be used to simulate a massive religious or extraterrestrial event in order to unify populations under centralized authority. There’s no credible evidence such a project exists…but that’s almost beside the point. What it captures is a logic of power: spectacle creates fear, fear suspends resistance, and consent follows faster than debate ever could.

This all sounds like a World Economic Forum wet dream. War and crisis have always been the fastest paths to expanding authority. Seen through that lens, disclosure wouldn’t be about knowledge. It would function as a global threat narrative…one that makes consolidation and control feel not just acceptable, but necessary.

Remember: fear that overwhelms normal reasoning can be used to justify sweeping changes in governance.

Viewed this way, the Bank of England is acknowledging how fragile the system already is. Trust is thin. Narratives move faster than institutions. And once belief breaks, authorities suddenly have cover for actions that would normally be politically impossible.

A disclosure-style shock would provide that cover instantly. Strip away the conspiracies and the core point is simple: markets don’t fail because numbers change…they fail because belief collapses.

And if anyone ever needed a fast excuse to centralize power or expand emergency authority, a shock to belief would do it. That doesn’t prove a plan exists…it explains why the idea lingers, and why systems built on trust quietly fear the moment trust itself becomes the variable.

The Reichstag burned in 1933. The Gulf of Tonkin happened…or didn’t…in 1964. These are not stories from the fever swamps of the internet. They are declassified history. The pattern is old. The stakes today are simply higher.

Position accordingly. Do your own research. Or join us inside Insider where we do most of the research for you. 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

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Greetings, friends!

As I write this, the US and Israel have struck Iran. Brent crude closed on Friday around $72. Markets don’t open until Sunday evening.

I suspect Monday morning will be interesting.

But here’s the thing. The Iran strike isn’t the story I want to tell today...not primarily, anyway. It’s the punchline to a story that’s been building for two years. A story about the most aggressively misrepresented market in modern finance. A story about how the world convinced itself that oil was drowning in supply...while the data said something else entirely.

Let’s start there. Then we’ll come back to Iran.

The Surplus That Wasn’t

For the better part of eighteen months, the consensus view on oil has been simple: glut. The IEA said it. Goldman Sachs said it. Bloomberg ran the headlines. Oil is oversupplied. Prices must fall. Producers are toast.

Except the surplus doesn’t actually exist. And I don’t mean that in a vague, contrarian-for-the-sake-of-it way. I mean it in a very specific, accountable, show-your-work way.

Dr. Anas Alhajji...former chief economist at NGP Energy Capital Management, a man who’s been navigating these markets for decades...has been almost alone in pointing this out. And he’s been right. Here’s what the consensus got wrong, specifically.

Error one: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. US crude production has been rising since early 2025. That part is true. But the US government purchased and locked away more oil in the SPR than all of those production increases combined. That oil is not available to the market. It doesn’t flow to refineries. It doesn’t show up at the pump. It’s locked in salt caverns in Louisiana. When you count it as a surplus, you’re counting something that functionally does not exist in the commercial supply chain. In other words, someone built their bearish model on a spreadsheet error.

Error two: China. Since mid-2025, Chinese inventories built by over 100 million barrels, reaching record highs. The IEA and others counted this as a global surplus. But ask a different question: why is China simultaneously stockpiling oil, natural gas, coal, and building out battery storage at enormous expense? None of those things make sense as commercial decisions. The economics don’t support it. What makes sense...and what the evidence points to clearly...is that China is preparing for either sanctions or war. Every energy item is being treated as a strategic reserve. When you understand that, you stop counting Chinese strategic petroleum stockpiles as commercial supply, just as you wouldn’t count America’s SPR in your balance sheet of available crude. Strip China out, and what remains is largely inventory replenishment from genuinely low levels, not a surplus at all.

Error three: demand forecasting. At the start of 2025, the IEA projected US oil demand would grow by 60,000 barrels per day. The actual number, when revised late in the year, came in at 170,000 barrels per day...and even that was below the actual figure. So the agency that publishes the bearish outlook, and which the financial press treats as gospel, was off on US demand alone by a factor of nearly three. That manufactured demand shortfall fed directly into the manufactured surplus. Shulbit in, shulbit out.

And then, just to top it all off: Kazakhstan. In late 2024 and into 2025, roughly 700,000 to 800,000 barrels per day went offline from the CPC terminal when it was attacked...supposedly by Ukrainian drones, which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it for thirty seconds. Kazakhstan is not Ukraine’s enemy. The primary loser was Chevron. The sequence of events mirrors what happened in Venezuela, where Chevron was also the main target. Someone was playing hardball. The oil disappeared from the market anyway. Add Brazil’s export declines, and Iraq burning oil domestically after Iranian gas supplies were cut. At peak, the world lost over two million barrels per day in a matter of weeks.

A surplus with no legs. That’s the phrase. And yet the narrative has dominated the tape.

The Post-Shale World

In early February, an energy symposium gathered in Riyadh...the IEA, the EIA, OPEC, and the world’s major energy thought leaders all in one room. The mood was, as one participant put it, characterized by “profound energy realism and pragmatism.”

The central theme wasn’t peak demand. That debate, apparently, is over. The central theme was the looming supply crisis.

OPEC’s view: global oil demand will grow by 19 million barrels per day between now and 2050. And...this is the one that landed hardest in that room...shale oil production has peaked. This year. The non-OPEC countries are peaking in the next several years. The shale revolution that saved the world from an energy crisis in 2008-2010, that extraordinary feat of American engineering and capital deployment, appears to have run its course in terms of net growth. One month into 2026, global inventories had fallen by 14 million barrels against the IEA’s forecast of a 4.25 million barrel build. That’s a gap of 146 million barrels. In one month.

The question hanging over that Riyadh conference was simple: where does the 19 million barrels per day come from?

Nobody had a clean answer.

The Math Nobody Wants to Do

Let’s go to the IEA’s own research...a September 2025 report analyzing approximately 15,000 oil and gas fields worldwide. The findings weren’t buried. They were stark.

Global conventional oil fields decline at an average annual rate of 5.6% after peak. Without new upstream investment, global oil supply drops by 5.5 million barrels per day every single year...a volume equivalent to the combined production of Brazil and Norway, vanishing annually. Roughly 80% of global oil production in 2024 came from fields that had already passed their peak. And here’s the kicker: approximately 90% of the $540 billion in annual upstream investment is required just to maintain current production levels. Not grow it. Maintain it.

US shale fields decline at over 35% per year. Not a typo. Thirty-five percent of output, gone in twelve months, before a single new well is drilled to replace it. European mature offshore fields average over 15%. Even the great Middle Eastern supergiants...the pillars of global supply...decline at under 2%. Every year, the treadmill runs faster.

Three years from now, even in a moderate growth scenario, the world will need somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15 million barrels per day of fresh oil production. Venezuela, if everything goes perfectly and foreign capital floods in, might add one million. Welcome addition. Not a market-mover.

In other words: the supply problem is structural, not cyclical. It doesn’t go away when sentiment shifts. It gets worse.

That chart shows the Bloomberg World Drilling and Drilling Support index. Peaked around 2007-2008 at roughly 500, normalized from the 2003 base. Today it sits at 22.96. Down approximately 95% from peak.

Whowouldathunkit. The sector that needs to drill its way out of a structural supply deficit is sitting at prices not seen since the early 2000s.

There is no new offshore rig capacity coming for at least seven years. Not because nobody wants to build them...because the lead times, the capital commitments, and the contracting frameworks required simply don’t allow it. Day rates could double and it wouldn’t produce a rig in the next three years. This is the same structural constraint we saw in tankers, in bulk carriers, in every capital-intensive commodity sector that spent a decade being starved of investment before the cycle turned.

We own names across this space. Do your own research...these are not recommendations, and they carry real risk. But when a sector is at generational lows precisely as the fundamental case for its services reaches a generational peak, that’s the kind of asymmetry that tends to reward patience.

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Iran, Hormuz, and the Asymmetry of This Moment

Back to today.

The reflexive fear on a US-Israel strike on Iran is always the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty million barrels per day...roughly 20% of global seaborne oil...passes through that chokepoint. The headlines write themselves.

Here’s what doesn’t fit the narrative: Iran cannot block the Strait of Hormuz for too long. Not sustainably. Not without destroying itself in the process. Most of Iran’s own imports and exports flow through it. Blocking the Strait hurts India and China enormously...Iran’s actual friends and primary oil customers...while leaving Israel essentially unaffected and the US only marginally impacted. Iranian leadership understands this arithmetic. Proxies can cause disruption. A rogue militia can light something on fire. But a sustained, deliberate blockade by the Iranian state would be an act of economic self-immolation.

What this strike does do is remove from the market whatever comfort the bears derived from “Iran will just keep exporting.” Iran produces roughly 3.5 to 4 million barrels per day. Exports run 1.5 to 2 million, mostly to China. Those Chinese strategic stockpiles...the ones the IEA was counting as a surplus...start to look rather less like irrational hoarding and rather more like preparation for exactly the scenario we’re now entering.

The pre-strike consensus was a manufactured surplus and sub-$75 Brent. We now have a structural supply deficit, a declining services sector incapable of rapid response, a post-shale world confirmed by OPEC itself, and a direct military strike on the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. OPEC spare capacity...and the audit later this year is likely to confirm this...is meaningfully below consensus. Our own working estimate is around 1.5 million barrels per day, not the 3-4 million the market assumes.

The bear case relied on everything going right simultaneously: shale keeps growing, Iranian exports keep flowing, Chinese inventories keep rising, OPEC compliance keeps cracking, and demand stays weak. Every single one of those pillars has been kicked out from under the thesis, one by one, over the past eighteen months.

Sometimes the market needs a dramatic event to accept what the data has been saying all along. Perhaps that’s what today is.

Gravity isn’t a risk. It’s a schedule.

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“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” -Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd

Something useful today, particularly if you spend any meaningful time on social media...which I suspect most of you do, even reluctantly.

What follows is a systematic methodology for identifying psychological operations before they fully materialize. Five analytical phases. Run through them in sequence and you’ll start to see what’s actually happening behind the curtain, rather than reacting to whatever they’ve decided you should be reacting to this week.

Let me be clear upfront: I’m not interested in arguing for or against any specific cause célèbre...BLM, ICE, fill in your preferred tribal flashpoint. That’s the noise. The whole point of this framework is to stop getting dragged into the noise and start watching where the pressure is building. The probability that those in power have our interests genuinely at heart is, to put it charitably, vanishingly thin. History makes this point rather forcefully. It’s not cynicism...it’s pattern recognition.

PHASE ONE: WHERE’S THE PRESSURE BUILDING? (SORAM)

Watch for pressure accumulating across five areas simultaneously.

• Societal - moral panics, us-vs-them language.

• Operational - drills and simulations (always a tell, always).

• Regulatory - laws being passed “just in case.”

• Alignment - when government, media, tech companies, academia, and NGOs all start singing from the same hymn sheet.

• Media - everyone using identical language and talking points.

Here’s what these look like in practice right now.

Societal. The pressure shows up as manufactured division...framing resistance to official agendas as dangerous extremism, softening the population for whatever control measures come next.

California’s 2026 education laws mandate gender-neutral bathrooms, require LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, added The Trevor Project to student IDs, and created a new state Office of Civil Rights to investigate gender/LGBTQ “discrimination.”

Parents raising concerns are implicitly cast as threats to “inclusive environments” or child safety. Classic us-vs-them.

Meanwhile, anyone who questioned the 2020–2023 mass-vaccination rollout still gets quietly grouped with “conspiracy elements” in polite institutional discourse. These people are nothing if not persistent.

Operational. The drills and simulations deserve particular attention...Event 201 preceded COVID, and anyone paying attention at the time could see what was being rehearsed.

In 2025–2026: WHO-led pandemic preparedness simulations in Bhutan and Korea (fictional virus, rapid vaccine development), Operation Outbreak (used by FBI and CDC for student and government scenarios), avian influenza tabletop exercises in the Netherlands, BioHub expansions for mpox and SARS-CoV-2 variants. All running alongside the May 2025 WHO Pandemic Agreement and September 2025 IHR amendments. The script is familiar. Whether the sequel matches the original remains to be seen.

Regulatory. California’s AB 715, SB 760, AB 727...civil rights offices, gender-neutral bathroom mandates, LGBTQ resources on student IDs...all passed under the banner of “protecting vulnerable youth”.

Some jurisdictions are also quietly retaining COVID-era emergency infrastructure, the tools conveniently kept sharp for the next “public health” moment. Laws passed “just in case” have a funny habit of being used exactly as intended.

Alignment. When disparate institutions suddenly harmonize, pay attention. The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther (2025) coordinates public-private efforts to brand broad criticism of Israeli policy as “Hamas support network” activity. Targeting, defunding, deportation, and professional ostracism is their strategy. Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Antisemitism, State Department briefings, and IHRA-style definitions pushed across academia and NGOs...all running on the same track like they were all racing the same 100 meter dash.

On the pandemic side: WHO’s Pandemic Agreement, governments, academia, and NGOs coordinating on “equity and preparedness,” building on the original institutional lockstep of 2020–2023. The word “coordination” does a lot of heavy lifting here.

Media. Watch the language. “Israel’s right to defend itself.” “Hamas support network.” “Gender-affirming care is lifesaving.” “Inclusive learning environment.” “Safe and effective.” “Politicization of science.” These phrases don’t emerge independently across hundreds of outlets. Identical talking points appearing simultaneously is not a coincidence...it’s a distribution network.

PHASE TWO: WHAT SEEDS ARE BEING PLANTED? (PRISM)

Five things to look for:

• precursor anomalies (weird stuff happening that makes no sense yet),

• repetition cycles (same slogans on loop),

• introduced villains (suddenly there’s a simple enemy),

• symbolism injection (branded messaging everywhere), and…

• manufactured urgency (act now or die).

The goal is to plant acceptance of top-down restructuring...economic, behavioral, financial, technological...so that populations eventually demand or at least tolerate “the fix.”

Precursor anomalies. The ECB completed preparatory work on the digital euro by late 2025, and India expanded its e-rupee pilot...up 334% in circulation, now the second-largest CBDC program globally. The BIS Innovation Hub ran cross-border pilots (Rialto, Aurum 2.0), and the U.S. blocked retail CBDC via executive order while pushing stablecoin regulation. On the surface: modernization. In practice: building the rails for programmable money, behavior-linked payments, and financial surveillance. These are precursors that only connect once adoption is pushed. Also worth noting...the U.S. Genesis Mission, under executive order (November 2025), launched a coordinated federal AI push modeled explicitly on wartime urgency, alongside efforts to override state AI regulations in favor of a single national framework. Nothing suspicious there.

Repetition cycles. “Net zero.” “Just transition.” “Tipping point.” “AI dominance.” Pick up any institutional report from 2025–2026 and these phrases appear with metronomic regularity...IEA, WRI, OECD, UNEP, Davos. A UK study showed public support for faster-than-2050 net-zero targets has roughly halved since 2021. Doesn’t matter. The institutions repeat anyway. The point isn’t persuasion anymore...it’s normalization.

Introduced villains. A UK government educational role-play game, widely circulated in 2025, introduced the villain “Amelia”...a character proud of her heritage and worried about mass immigration...as the archetype far-right extremist for schoolchildren. Quite something. Meanwhile, another villain, “climate deniers”, remain a reliable institutional punching bag, and China plays the existential villain in the AI narrative. Simple enemies, simple solutions, no nuance required.

Symbolism injection. Corporate ESG badges, “net-zero aligned” product lines, circular-economy logos, sustainable packaging...everywhere, on everything, regardless of whether underlying policy support is strengthening or collapsing. The 2026 Kantar marketing trends show green branding accelerating even as the politics fragment. The association being built is compliance = virtue = modernity. Whether you’ve noticed it or not, you’ve been marinating in it.

Manufactured urgency. The WRI 2025 report declares “we are not on track,” “irreversible cascades,” “shift into emergency gear,” and “angels must step in where governments fall short.” The Genesis Mission is a “pivotal moment” requiring an effort “comparable to the Manhattan Project.” Davos 2026 warns: dominate AI now or lose the century to the villain, China. The window is always closing. It’s always the last moment to act. After enough iterations, you start to notice the pattern.

PHASE THREE: HOW LIKELY IS THIS? (NARS/PPI)

This phase turns your gut feeling into structured probability. Score the operation against five variables. High scores across multiple variables means treat it as probable coordinated effort, and not organic chaos.

• Narrative volatility...hysterical emotional language.

• Authority involvement...experts and officials are endorsing it.

• Repeat historical patterns...we’ve seen this playbook before.

• Cognitive load...the population is exhausted and overwhelmed.

• Sentiment inversion...suddenly everything you believed is backwards.

On narrative volatility: climate “tipping points” hysteria is running at full volume...“emergency gear,” “irreversible cascades,” “we are not on track”...even as public urgency drops. The AI narrative swings between “transformative revolution” and “existential race against our villain, China.” Neither register is particularly calm.

On authority involvement: the ECB, BIS Innovation Hub, 137 jurisdictions representing 98% of global GDP...all coordinated on digital finance infrastructure. Federal agencies, Davos participants, and tech lobbying blocs all aligned behind Genesis Mission AI mandates. When central banks and governments and international bodies all arrive at the same “independent” conclusion simultaneously, it’s worth wondering about the meeting that preceded it.

On repeat historical patterns: the net-zero cycle mirrors the 1970s global cooling scare, then the Al Gore “12 years left” era, then the current “tipping points” campaign...emergency declarations, missed deadlines, revised emergency declarations. The UK’s Amelia game echoes the post-9/11 “domestic terrorist” expansion playbook almost exactly. The scripts don’t change much because they work.

On cognitive load: persistent energy cost spikes from net-zero policies, AI-driven job displacement anxiety, CBDC uncertainty, geopolitical tension, inflation, policy whiplash. A population already battered and beaten down by overlapping crises is a population more receptive to “just let the experts manage the big transitions.” Authorities know this. After all, it’s by design. For example, the reports on waning public climate urgency explicitly note the burnout...and then leverage it.

On sentiment inversion: cheap reliable energy and secure borders used to be bipartisan common sense. Now one is “denialism” and the other is “extremism.” AI was a job-killer and surveillance risk; now it’s “essential for national survival.” Physical cash and financial privacy were defaults; digital programmable currencies are “modern inclusion.” The speed of these inversions is itself informative.

Score four or five of those variables and you’re looking at probable coordinated operation, not spontaneous social development.

PHASE FOUR: WHAT COMES NEXT? (TRAPN)

Predict the progression:

• Tension (fear-based messaging ramps up),

• Rally (coordinated calls to action),

• Authority (enforcement and censorship kick in),

• Polarization (you’re with us or against us), and…

• Normalization (new habits form, old reality gets memory-holed).

Tension is running at full volume...“tipping points imminent,” “existential AI race,” crisis language across climate, digital finance, and geopolitical narratives.

Rally is underway...24 U.S. Climate Alliance governors coordinated new emissions initiatives in September 2025; corporations issued fresh net-zero pledges; the ECB rallied member states around the digital euro as a “strategic safeguard”; BIS coordinated cross-border pilots with public calls for adoption framed around “resilience.”

Authority has begun activating...California’s CARB opened enforcement dockets on climate disclosure laws; EU sustainability disclosure rules moved into enforcement phase; New York AG set precedent with settlements over “unsubstantiated net-zero claims”; the European Commission launched investigations into Meta and Google AI policies; U.S. executive orders directed agencies to override state AI rules and withhold funding from resistors.

Polarization is sharpening...the February 2026 IEA meeting ended without a communiqué, with the U.S. pushing to abandon net-zero while Europe doubled down. Binary framing is now explicit: “with the transition or blocking progress.” The UK educational materials cast national sovereignty concerns as the lone villain in an otherwise tolerant world.

Normalization is locking in...CBDC pilots and stablecoin frameworks are presented as inevitable modernization; cash and financial privacy concerns are quietly repositioned as quaint. Corporate ESG reporting has become standard business practice. AI integration in governance is framed as “essential,” not optional. Previous debates about energy abundance or unregulated innovation are already being treated as historical curiosities.

This operation is well into the back half of the playbook. That’s worth understanding.

PHASE FIVE: HOW DOES IT WORK ON PEOPLE?

Two models are useful here.

The FATE model...focus, authority, tribe, emotion. Under coordinated pressure, those four levers predictably narrow what people are willing to consider, who they trust, what group identity they’re defending, and what emotional state they’re making decisions from. When all four are engaged simultaneously, behavior becomes remarkably predictable.

The Six-Axis model maps suggestibility across focus, openness, connection, suggestibility, compliance, and expectancy. Exhausted, tribally activated, emotionally elevated populations score higher on the suggestibility axes. This is not accidental.

The practical takeaway is simple enough: if you understand how the manipulation operates on human cognition, you stop being quite so susceptible to it. You’re not catching yourself arguing about the individual wedge issues ... the BLMs, the ICEs, the Amelias ... because you’ve stepped back far enough to see them as components of a larger pressure system.

Don’t try to predict events. Predict where pressure is building.

And learn to tell the difference between solutions that actually solve problems versus those specifically designed to teach you to adapt to a new reality.

Those are very different things.

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Greetings, friends!

From partner in crime at Subvertere Capital and Mavericks, Andrew in Alentejo, Portugal:

Fellow Insider member Marlon shared this stunner from Kruger National Park:

And this one from fellow member Peter: “Just thought I’d offer up a pic I took in July 25 in the Australian Outback about 400km North of Alice Springs while doing a lap with our Troopy and van.”

Brad’s recent trip to Queenstown, New Zealand, taken from the hills above Cromwell on the Nevis Crossing road. That’s not an Orc from Lord of the Rings on top of those rocks...it’s his son. Why did he climb it? Because it was there!

And given our focus on Argentina, this one from the Falkland Islands from subscriber Dave is appropriate.

In This Week’s Issue

• Theme Focus: Silver and Precious Metals

• Aliens? But Why?

• Artificial Intelligence

• You Can’t Own Enough Oil Assets

• Dubai

• Ideology Knows No Bounds

• A Bull Market Powered by Debasement

• Contrary Signs: Materials to AI

• Silver: What to Do?

• Is Bitcoin a Prelude to the Nasdaq?

• The Giant Rotation

• Debunking the Oil Oversupply Myth

• The Big Five:

Read more

What if the stocks that could double...or triple...your money are sitting just out of reach, locked behind the wrong account? As global wealth quietly migrates eastward, the average investor’s toolkit is looking more outdated by the day. But there’s a way around it, one that doesn’t require a finance degree or a second mortgage. It starts with rethinking the most basic piece of your investing setup: the brokerage.

The Brokerage Trap That’s Silently Sabotaging Your Gains

Picture the typical setup. You’ve got an account at one of the big names...Fidelity, Schwab, maybe even Robinhood if you’re stateside. It feels familiar, easy to log into, and it handles your domestic trades without a hitch. But here’s the rub: these platforms are built for a world that no longer exists in quite the same way.

They’re optimized for U.S. markets, sure. But venture beyond the borders, and the options thin out fast. A hot play in Singapore’s agribusiness sector? Forget direct access. An intriguing offshore energy name listed in Milan? Good luck pulling the trigger. It’s not that these brokerages are bad...they’re just… limited. Vanilla, as some might say. Fine for parking your 401(k) or chasing the latest meme stock, but when the real alpha is shifting to places like Asia, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe, you’re left watching from the sidelines.

This isn’t some abstract worry. Power and capital are flowing east at a pace that’s hard to ignore. The West’s dominance in global finance is eroding, and the opportunities are following suit. If your account can’t keep up, you’re not just missing out on a few trades. You’re ceding ground in a landscape where the next big winners are increasingly born outside the NYSE or Nasdaq.

So, why does this matter now? Because the game has changed. Investors who cling to these domestic-focused setups risk turning what should be asymmetric upside...buying low, selling high, and riding trends that others overlook...into a frustrating game of catch-up. The frustration builds slowly at first, then hits like a wall when you realize half the world’s investable ideas are off-limits.

But what if there was a brokerage designed to sidestep this entirely? One that treats borders as suggestions rather than barriers?

👉 Invest in the same things we do…

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The One Brokerage That Actually Gets the Global Game

Enter Interactive Brokers, the quiet giant that’s been quietly dominating for those in the know. It’s not flashy. No gamified apps or viral TikTok ads. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear why it’s the go-to for anyone serious about capturing returns beyond the familiar.

First off, cost. These guys are cheap...dirt cheap compared to the alternatives. Low commissions, razor-thin spreads, and no hidden fees that eat into your edge over time. In a world where every basis point counts, especially on international plays, that efficiency adds up.

Then there’s the access. We’re talking dozens of exchanges worldwide. European bourses, Asian powerhouses, even some of the more esoteric markets that the vanilla crowd wouldn’t touch. Want exposure to an Italian offshore oil driller? Done. A Thai logistics play or a Brazilian miner? Straightforward. It’s not every market on Earth, but it’s a hell of a lot more than what your neighborhood bank app offers.

Setting it up isn’t a walk in the park...brokerage switches never are. Paperwork, transfers, the occasional headache. But the payoff? A platform that scales with your ambitions. No more scrambling to move funds or accounts when the next opportunity pops up in Kuala Lumpur or Warsaw. It’s the kind of setup that future-proofs your portfolio against the very shifts we’re seeing: the rise of non-Western economies, the fragmentation of global trade, and the hunt for value in overlooked corners.

Of course, not everyone’s ready to make the leap. Some have deep roots with their current provider...loyalty, familiarity, maybe even employer ties. If that’s you, don’t sweat it. There’s a workaround that’s been hiding in plain sight for decades, one that bridges the gap without forcing a full reset.

When You’re Stuck: How OTC Becomes Your Secret Weapon

Stuck with a legacy account? Here’s the good news: you don’t have to abandon ship to chase the same plays.

The key is something called over-the-counter, or OTC, trading. It’s not as mysterious as it sounds. Think of it as the back door to international stocks, where broker-dealers like the big banks step in to make markets that centralized exchanges won’t.

At its core, OTC is just a different way to buy and sell. No ringing the bell on the NYSE floor. Instead, you’re dealing directly with market makers...think Citigroup or Goldman Sachs...who quote prices and handle the trade. It’s how many foreign companies give U.S. or European investors a taste without jumping through the hoops of a full U.S. listing.

This is where Pink Sheets and ADRs come into play. Pink Sheets? The name conjures images of shady penny stocks and boiler-room scams, but that’s a misconception.

Sure, some low-quality names trade there. But for legitimate global firms, these are the vehicles that let them reach investors abroad without the eye-watering costs and red tape of a major exchange listing. We’re talking half a million dollars just to get on the NYSE, plus layers of SEC scrutiny that many solid companies would rather avoid.

ADRs...American Depositary Receipts...are the polished cousins. They’re essentially bundles of foreign shares, repackaged for easy trading on U.S. soil. One ADR might represent five, ten, or even more shares of the original stock, all adjusted for currency quirks. It’s a neat trick that keeps things accessible.

Let’s make this real with a concrete case. Take Wilma International, a standout in the agricultural space that’s been on the radar for its growth potential in Southeast Asia. If you’re on a full-access platform, you can snag it directly on the Singapore Exchange under the ticker F34. Simple enough.

But if your account is more homebound? No sweat. The same company trades as WLMIY on the Pink Sheets. It’s an ADR version, and while the price tag looks different...say, around $40 in U.S. dollars versus five Singapore dollars on the primary listing...it’s not a red flag. That’s just how these structures work: bundling plus forex conversions create the illusion of disparity. Zoom out to the charts, though, and they move in lockstep. Same underlying business, same fundamentals, same upside.

The beauty? This setup levels the field. Whether you’re eyeing capital gains from a breakout trend or steady income from dividends, Pink Sheets deliver. Payouts flow through just like they would on the main exchange...no funny business.

Liquidity Myths: Why Long-Term Winners Don’t Sweat the Spreads

Now, a word of caution, because not every OTC play is created equal. Liquidity can be the wildcard. On Pink Sheets, bid-ask spreads tend to run wider. Your order might sit for a bit before filling, depending on the dealer handling the market. It’s not the lightning-fast execution you’d get on a high-volume exchange.

But here’s where perspective kicks in: if you’re in this for the quick flip, yeah, it might sting. Day traders and scalpers? Steer clear. The delays could kill your edge.

For the rest of us...the ones playing the long game, holding through months or even years as sectoral trends unfold...it’s a non-issue. Execution speed fades into the background when the real prize is capturing multi-bagger moves in undervalued names.

Think about it: a nickel miner riding a commodity supercycle, or a logistics firm capitalizing on shifting supply chains. These aren’t one-week wonders. They’re stories that play out over time, where the entry price and the fundamentals matter far more than shaving a few minutes off your trade.

And this applies across the board. Capital gains portfolio? Dividend income plays? The mechanics hold. Dividends arrive on schedule, reinvested or cashed out as you see fit. The structure doesn’t change the economics; it just opens the door wider.

The Proxies Play: When One Door Closes, the Sector Still Beckons

Of course, even the best workarounds have limits. Some recommendations might not have an OTC equivalent at all. No Pink Sheet, no ADR, nada. It happens...regulatory quirks, corporate decisions, you name it.

Don’t let it derail you. The secret sauce here isn’t chasing individual heroes. It’s nailing the bigger picture: the sectoral waves that lift entire industries. Spot a booming trend in nickel demand from EVs and batteries? If your top pick is MIA, pivot to the next best miner in the space. Or better yet, layer in an ETF that blankets the sector, giving you diversified exposure without the single-stock drama.

The same logic applies to income strategies. Can’t find the exact high-yield name? The field is vast. Dozens of alternatives pop up, each with its own merits. No need to force a square peg into a round hole.

This flexibility is what keeps the strategy resilient. It’s not about being the world’s greatest stock picker...though that’s a nice bonus. It’s about reading the macro currents and positioning accordingly. Miss one? The next one’s right around the corner, often in the same thematic bucket. This is what we do inside our Insider service.

Beyond the Basics: Other Roads Worth Exploring

If Interactive Brokers isn’t your jam, alternatives exist. IG Group and Saxo Bank have carved out niches in global trading, offering solid access for certain clients. They’re worth a look, especially if you’re outside the U.S. and craving that borderless feel.

But fair warning: U.S. residents might hit a wall. Regulations being what they are, not every platform rolls out the welcome mat. It’s a reminder that the rules aren’t always investor-friendly, but savvy navigators find ways around them.

Wrapping the Global Edge

In the end, the brokerage question boils down to this: are you equipped for a world where the next fortune-maker could emerge from a Singapore boardroom or a Dubai trading floor? Or are you content with the echo chamber of domestic listings?

The shift is happening, whether we like it or not. Wealth is redistributing, opportunities are globalizing, and the tools that served yesterday’s investors are showing their age.

Interactive Brokers stands out as the pragmatic choice for those ready to adapt...affordable, expansive, and built for the long haul. For everyone else, the OTC toolkit provides a surprisingly robust lifeline, turning potential roadblocks into mere detours.

The real question isn’t which path you take. It’s whether you’re positioned to seize the asymmetric bets that define outsized success. The markets don’t wait for perfect setups. They reward the prepared.

So, take stock of your account today. Audit its reach. Test the waters on a foreign name that’s caught your eye. Because in this evolving game, the biggest risk isn’t volatility...it’s obsolescence.

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