"An irreverent train wreck of a podcast...yet irresistible."
“Over a long enough time horizon, everyone agrees with IBWOC.”
Listen to Podcasts
|
Follow us on Twitter
|
Platinum Member Tier
|
July 20, 2024 - "Losses aren’t assets you stupid fuck."
May 17, 2024 - There are no coincidences
May 5, 2024
April 8, 2024 - Photo by Adam George. Rest in Peace.
March 19, 2024 - Roll the dice
February 29, 2024 - Back in the Day
Old Chestnut with Jay Moskowitz, inventor of the Zero coupon bond and Bimble, the refreshing Beverage mentioned on IBWOC.COM.
Photo credit DB. All rights reserved.
February 22, 2024 - The Waterfall
MB Sachs and Marty Molitoris - Cave Creek, AZ.
February 19, 2024 - Just saying...
February 18, 2024 - Prospect Park - Look at me, look at me...
February 4, 2024 - Welcome??
January 13, 2024 - Do the math...
January 8, 2024 - Still going strong...
December 29, 2023 - The Sachs Box. Best seat in the house.
December 27, 2023 - Anyone feeling lucky?
December 24, 2023 - Upcoming IPO
December 9, 2023 - Join the Flat Earth Society here.
December 6 - Principles
December 4 - Phish Rules!
November 29, 2023
November 28, 2023
November 27, 2023 - Thanks for the shout out.
November 22, 2023 - Ride like you stole it! TDA Spring 2011
Click to watch commercial.
November 19, 2023
November 18, 2023 - We have arrived!
| |||||||
| anthony_peters_panic.pdf |
May 11, 2022 - The Paper of Record
May 11, 2022
May 6, 2022 - The Great Resignation...
May 5, 2022
April 25, 2022
April 24, 2022
April 20, 2022
April 17, 2022
April 13, 2022 - Wealth Destruction
April 12, 2022
April 9, 2022
April 8, 2022
April 7, 2022
March 31, 2022
Sachs' Brothers Trading LLC New Office
March 31, 2022
March 31, 2022 - "You'll Be Okay."
March 27 - Options
Click PDF below to read the entire article.
| optionsjump.pdf |
March 26 - Warren Buffett/Katharine Graham Letter on Pensions
Click PDF link below to read the entire article.
| warren_buffett_katharine_graham_letter.pdf |
March 18, 2022 - Eddowes Development
March 17, 2022 - Two Generals' Problem
Click above image for more info.
March 16, 2022
March 15, 2022
March 14, 2022 - Check out the first 3 minutes.
Click above image for full video
March 13, 2022
March 13, 2022
March 8, 2022
Click for full article
March 6, 2022
March 4, 2022
The Sachs family meets the Oligarchs.
February 11, 2022 - I'm right and they're wrong.
Click image for full interview.
February 6, 2022
February 4, 2022
From left to right • 13 Time Emmy award winning producer Ted Shaker, Liam Allen, Executive producer and host of Inside Baseball with Old Chestnut,
Morris Sachs, Uncle Mark.
February 2, 2022 - Anthony Peters
I well remember my excitement when in 2016 a TV show called “Billions” appeared on the TV. A mercurial hedge fund manager and an equally mercurial public prosecutor – Damian Lews as Axe Axelrod and Paul Giamatti as Chuck Rhodes – battle it out, both playing on the edge of the law, as the latter tries to bring down the former. It has battled on for five series with the plotlines becoming evermore confusing and both characters progressively more unappealing while one of the basic tenets of the show has been lost in the mists of time. It was that Axe, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who made great headlines after “9/11” by donating millions to NYFD charities had in fact cleaned up by positioning huge trades whilst the Twin Towers were falling. From the outset we are left in no doubt that Axe’s morals stink.
I have my own memories of those days and recall being called in on September 13th by Bank of America, London’s American head of credit research. While we still had no clue how many of our colleagues had perished in the towers’ collapse – if my memory serves me, we were lucky in that all of them escaped the carnage - he wanted to sit down with some of the senior credit specialists in order to compile a “picks and pans” list. Which credits will shine and which will sink in the aftermath of the disaster? To be honest, although I remember the meeting in a café not far from the office, I have no recollection of what we came up with although I’m pretty sure most of our choices will have been wrong. I also recall feeling mildly uncomfortable with the concept of trying to make money out of the tragedy. I guess one needs in such situations to be able to remain totally dispassionate with an eye on the prize and that is a gift I am not particularly well imbued with.
Thus I was mildly amused when I switched on the morning’s financial news to hear some bods discussing what to be long and what to be short of in the event of a Russian incursion into Ukraine. I confess to not really having taken the time to listen for, based on my own experience on “9/13”, it’s all talk and no trousers. Ironically, all this was on just minutes after I’s caught a headline which reported that Our Vlad was bemoaning how the West was busily trying to push poor, pacifist Mother Russia into a war. Is this life imitating art? Is this something akin to Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” developing? I think not although if I were to look to a film, it would be “Thirteen Days”, the very stylish docudrama – more drama than docu, to be sure - which re-enacts events in the White House in October 1962 as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. Central to the story is not as much the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Unites States as the open warfare between President Kennedy and the members of the General Staff.
The generals were gung-ho to launch a first strike and one sees them on the cusp of formal insurrection against their Commander in Chief who steadfastly refuses to be pushed into probable nuclear war. I sadly fear that there must be similar scenes being played out in Washington at the very moment in time except that Joe Biden is no Jack Kennedy. Please don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to suggest that the nuclear codes are in the process of being dusted off but I do fear that my observation that just as on Wall Street foreigners are seen as Americans who talk foreign, the same naïvety most probably stretches straight into the situation rooms in the Pentagon and under the White House. The Yanks, and with them their Western allies, seem to blunder with gay abandon into every diplomatic trap set by Putin and his merry men. On a near daily basis the West is handing Moscow’s autocrats propaganda material with which they can convince their huddled masses that the Motherland is under increasing threat from NATO’s warmongers. You can’t blame the Germans who can feel the Russian bear’s hot breath on the back of their neck from trying not to get dragged in.
So now what? The incomparably brilliant “Alex” cartoon which so accurately documents the lives and loves of everyday City folk is this year celebrating its 30th anniversary and my congratulations go out to its creators, Charles Peaty and Russell Taylor. Russell is a member of our little cabal of Teenage Scribblers and also an occasional follower of this column. Thus I hope to be able to claim to have made small contribution towards keeping “Alex” fresh and pertinent. I do recall at one of our more recent meetings – pre-Covid so already quite a long time back – to have said to Russell that my favourite “Alex” ever was from the very early days when in a single picture his desk partner Clive looks over his shoulder and asks “What do you recommend your clients do in the event of thermonuclear war?” to which Alex nonchalantly replies “Sell everything”.
Anyhow, I remain convinced, as I have done since the outset that Russia will not invade and that therefore the discussion as to which stocks will benefit the most from an armed conflict is a waste of time. And so back the more immediate issues of monetary policy.
One of the greatest and also most well-known quotes from the world of US politics is that of Theodore Roosevelt who advised “Speak softly but carry a big stick”. I was on the blower yesterday to an American chum. Views on whether the volatility of the past weeks is just another little wobble by markets on the way to the moon or whether in the three day bounce-back we have just experienced is that of a dead cat marking nothing more than a Churchillian “end of the beginning” remains moot. Anyhow, I repeated my opinion as expressed in my first or second column of the year that the Fed will talk tough but act soft. My interlocutor suddenly perked up and instructed me to open today’s column with a reference to ongoing Fed policy as “Speak loudly but carry a small stick”. We appear to agree that there are signs emerging that the great post-pandemic rebound is maybe not quite as great as markets want to be pricing in.
After more than a decade of stocks behaving like bonds and rallying on economic weakness along with the concomitant prospect of easy and stimulative monetary policy, they no longer know whether to celebrate or fear a strong economy. As often discussed here, the asymmetric elasticity of demand and supply has in my view been the principal driver of inflation. Both my Yank friend and I anticipate our economies beginning to significantly slow before 2022 is out, for inflation to tail off and for the Fed to be prepared to play closer to home than the current Eurodollar strip forecasts. Whether stocks would like a pause in the monetary policy tightening cycle more or less than they would hate the emergence of a slowing economy scenario remains the great imponderable. As it stands, it could go either way.
If there is one thing which bolsters my confidence that not all is well in the garden, it is Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator of the FT getting bullish. I can think of no senior financial journalist who got the GFC so wrong and who for so long remained in denial. It must be a good five years since I first suggested that Mr Wolf, now 75, had probably passed his sell-by date. He would then have been 70 and now that, if I stand on my tip-toes I can see my own 70th approaching, I’d like to revise the opinion that its an age matter.
Anyhow, in his column of today Mr. Wolf gives a lesson on William McChesney Martin, former and long-serving chairman of the Fed, who is the very one who coined the phrase about it being the Fed’s responsibility to remove the punchbowl before the party has really got going. Whatever the party is, Wolf is a very late comer. His column is accompanied by a scad of graphs which demonstrate that the US economy is right back on its pre-pandemic trajectory. One might have thought that after 30 years as an economics correspondent for the FT, he might have learnt that extrapolating economic forecasts on the back of past performance is a mugs’ game. The global debt profile has in the past two years changed beyond all recognition and with that most, if not all, past models are out of date. Changing the label on the bottle does not by osmosis also change the content.
Moving on, I can happily report that thanks to the extraordinary volatility in markets over the past weeks I completely missed the Davos World Economic Forum and with it the opportunity to be suitably rude about that miserable and vastly overrated shindig. Like all great conferences, the most valuable bits take place in the bars and at the receptions where introductions are made and where personal relationships are struck up and forged. Take that way, hold the conference virtually on Zoom or whatever and it becomes little more than a parade of strutting peacocks.
One can debate the chicken and egg of the WEF but it was surely originally conceived partly as ruse to fill Davos’ many hotels during the dog-watch lull between the Christmas and New Year frenzy on one hand and the beginning of the busy half-term skiing holidays which begin in February on the other. As I said, I missed it entirely and therefore never got the opportunity to listen to the great and the good extoll how the planet is to be saved and what they intended to do about, when they go around to it. My old dad had a round tooit. He actually kept a bunch of them in his briefcase. They were round pieces of paper on which was written “tooit” and which he liberally handed out to people who insisted that they would to this or that job when they got around to it. What India’s Prime Minister Modi and China’s President Xi have to tell us on the back of their having ruthlessly torpedoed COP26 last year escapes me. Davos has become, I’m afraid, little more than a Torremolinos version of the Bilderberg.
As a dedicated fan of the ICE, I have as yet to get my head around the many putative advantages of driving electric. I’m sure there are many although long-term environmental sustainability simply does not appear to be one of them. I was therefore particularly interested when one old motoring friend of mine whose luxury brand marketing agency has developed into a significant supplier to Porsche and has become a cheerleader for the German carmaker’s EV offering a few days ago pitched up on Twitter. He noted that, having spent many an hour in the dark and remote corners of service areas charging up his very smart Porsche Taycan, he will have to consider carefully whether he wants to put his 17 year old daughter in the same position, should he choose to kit her out with an EV as her first car. She might be safe when locked in during charging but she won’t be when she gets out to unplug. Fine and dandy when in the middle of a big city but not nice at some motorway service area in deepest nowhere when on the way home from university. I hadn’t thought to that. Had you?
I have my own memories of those days and recall being called in on September 13th by Bank of America, London’s American head of credit research. While we still had no clue how many of our colleagues had perished in the towers’ collapse – if my memory serves me, we were lucky in that all of them escaped the carnage - he wanted to sit down with some of the senior credit specialists in order to compile a “picks and pans” list. Which credits will shine and which will sink in the aftermath of the disaster? To be honest, although I remember the meeting in a café not far from the office, I have no recollection of what we came up with although I’m pretty sure most of our choices will have been wrong. I also recall feeling mildly uncomfortable with the concept of trying to make money out of the tragedy. I guess one needs in such situations to be able to remain totally dispassionate with an eye on the prize and that is a gift I am not particularly well imbued with.
Thus I was mildly amused when I switched on the morning’s financial news to hear some bods discussing what to be long and what to be short of in the event of a Russian incursion into Ukraine. I confess to not really having taken the time to listen for, based on my own experience on “9/13”, it’s all talk and no trousers. Ironically, all this was on just minutes after I’s caught a headline which reported that Our Vlad was bemoaning how the West was busily trying to push poor, pacifist Mother Russia into a war. Is this life imitating art? Is this something akin to Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” developing? I think not although if I were to look to a film, it would be “Thirteen Days”, the very stylish docudrama – more drama than docu, to be sure - which re-enacts events in the White House in October 1962 as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. Central to the story is not as much the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Unites States as the open warfare between President Kennedy and the members of the General Staff.
The generals were gung-ho to launch a first strike and one sees them on the cusp of formal insurrection against their Commander in Chief who steadfastly refuses to be pushed into probable nuclear war. I sadly fear that there must be similar scenes being played out in Washington at the very moment in time except that Joe Biden is no Jack Kennedy. Please don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to suggest that the nuclear codes are in the process of being dusted off but I do fear that my observation that just as on Wall Street foreigners are seen as Americans who talk foreign, the same naïvety most probably stretches straight into the situation rooms in the Pentagon and under the White House. The Yanks, and with them their Western allies, seem to blunder with gay abandon into every diplomatic trap set by Putin and his merry men. On a near daily basis the West is handing Moscow’s autocrats propaganda material with which they can convince their huddled masses that the Motherland is under increasing threat from NATO’s warmongers. You can’t blame the Germans who can feel the Russian bear’s hot breath on the back of their neck from trying not to get dragged in.
So now what? The incomparably brilliant “Alex” cartoon which so accurately documents the lives and loves of everyday City folk is this year celebrating its 30th anniversary and my congratulations go out to its creators, Charles Peaty and Russell Taylor. Russell is a member of our little cabal of Teenage Scribblers and also an occasional follower of this column. Thus I hope to be able to claim to have made small contribution towards keeping “Alex” fresh and pertinent. I do recall at one of our more recent meetings – pre-Covid so already quite a long time back – to have said to Russell that my favourite “Alex” ever was from the very early days when in a single picture his desk partner Clive looks over his shoulder and asks “What do you recommend your clients do in the event of thermonuclear war?” to which Alex nonchalantly replies “Sell everything”.
Anyhow, I remain convinced, as I have done since the outset that Russia will not invade and that therefore the discussion as to which stocks will benefit the most from an armed conflict is a waste of time. And so back the more immediate issues of monetary policy.
One of the greatest and also most well-known quotes from the world of US politics is that of Theodore Roosevelt who advised “Speak softly but carry a big stick”. I was on the blower yesterday to an American chum. Views on whether the volatility of the past weeks is just another little wobble by markets on the way to the moon or whether in the three day bounce-back we have just experienced is that of a dead cat marking nothing more than a Churchillian “end of the beginning” remains moot. Anyhow, I repeated my opinion as expressed in my first or second column of the year that the Fed will talk tough but act soft. My interlocutor suddenly perked up and instructed me to open today’s column with a reference to ongoing Fed policy as “Speak loudly but carry a small stick”. We appear to agree that there are signs emerging that the great post-pandemic rebound is maybe not quite as great as markets want to be pricing in.
After more than a decade of stocks behaving like bonds and rallying on economic weakness along with the concomitant prospect of easy and stimulative monetary policy, they no longer know whether to celebrate or fear a strong economy. As often discussed here, the asymmetric elasticity of demand and supply has in my view been the principal driver of inflation. Both my Yank friend and I anticipate our economies beginning to significantly slow before 2022 is out, for inflation to tail off and for the Fed to be prepared to play closer to home than the current Eurodollar strip forecasts. Whether stocks would like a pause in the monetary policy tightening cycle more or less than they would hate the emergence of a slowing economy scenario remains the great imponderable. As it stands, it could go either way.
If there is one thing which bolsters my confidence that not all is well in the garden, it is Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator of the FT getting bullish. I can think of no senior financial journalist who got the GFC so wrong and who for so long remained in denial. It must be a good five years since I first suggested that Mr Wolf, now 75, had probably passed his sell-by date. He would then have been 70 and now that, if I stand on my tip-toes I can see my own 70th approaching, I’d like to revise the opinion that its an age matter.
Anyhow, in his column of today Mr. Wolf gives a lesson on William McChesney Martin, former and long-serving chairman of the Fed, who is the very one who coined the phrase about it being the Fed’s responsibility to remove the punchbowl before the party has really got going. Whatever the party is, Wolf is a very late comer. His column is accompanied by a scad of graphs which demonstrate that the US economy is right back on its pre-pandemic trajectory. One might have thought that after 30 years as an economics correspondent for the FT, he might have learnt that extrapolating economic forecasts on the back of past performance is a mugs’ game. The global debt profile has in the past two years changed beyond all recognition and with that most, if not all, past models are out of date. Changing the label on the bottle does not by osmosis also change the content.
Moving on, I can happily report that thanks to the extraordinary volatility in markets over the past weeks I completely missed the Davos World Economic Forum and with it the opportunity to be suitably rude about that miserable and vastly overrated shindig. Like all great conferences, the most valuable bits take place in the bars and at the receptions where introductions are made and where personal relationships are struck up and forged. Take that way, hold the conference virtually on Zoom or whatever and it becomes little more than a parade of strutting peacocks.
One can debate the chicken and egg of the WEF but it was surely originally conceived partly as ruse to fill Davos’ many hotels during the dog-watch lull between the Christmas and New Year frenzy on one hand and the beginning of the busy half-term skiing holidays which begin in February on the other. As I said, I missed it entirely and therefore never got the opportunity to listen to the great and the good extoll how the planet is to be saved and what they intended to do about, when they go around to it. My old dad had a round tooit. He actually kept a bunch of them in his briefcase. They were round pieces of paper on which was written “tooit” and which he liberally handed out to people who insisted that they would to this or that job when they got around to it. What India’s Prime Minister Modi and China’s President Xi have to tell us on the back of their having ruthlessly torpedoed COP26 last year escapes me. Davos has become, I’m afraid, little more than a Torremolinos version of the Bilderberg.
As a dedicated fan of the ICE, I have as yet to get my head around the many putative advantages of driving electric. I’m sure there are many although long-term environmental sustainability simply does not appear to be one of them. I was therefore particularly interested when one old motoring friend of mine whose luxury brand marketing agency has developed into a significant supplier to Porsche and has become a cheerleader for the German carmaker’s EV offering a few days ago pitched up on Twitter. He noted that, having spent many an hour in the dark and remote corners of service areas charging up his very smart Porsche Taycan, he will have to consider carefully whether he wants to put his 17 year old daughter in the same position, should he choose to kit her out with an EV as her first car. She might be safe when locked in during charging but she won’t be when she gets out to unplug. Fine and dandy when in the middle of a big city but not nice at some motorway service area in deepest nowhere when on the way home from university. I hadn’t thought to that. Had you?
January 20, 2022 - What's an NFT?
Click here for explanation.
January 19, 2022 - Take off your Sunglasses...
Click image for full video
|
January 12, 2022
December 29, 2021
December 16, 2021
December 12, 2021
December 7, 2021 - "Ride it like you stole it."
"Leadville Buckle Dinner, 2021"
From left to right: Left to Right: John Benson, Chad Beyer,
Chad Douglas, Morris Sachs, Kevan Millstein, Ethan Millstein, Jason Tullous, Kale Kelt, Hudson Kelt, Shannon Day November 30, 2021
November 20, 2021
November 20, 2021
November 20, 2021
November 19, 2021 - This equation will change how you see the world (the logistic map)
The logistic map connects fluid convection, neuron firing, the Mandelbrot set and so much more. https://youtu.be/ovJcsL7vyrk
November 16, 2021
November 16, 2021
|
November 12, 2021 - The Market Huddle
Comfortable With Uncertainty
In this episode, Patrick Ceresna and Kevin Muir welcome Leslie Harris to the show to talk about his career - from his early days at the COMEX, to life on the Greenwich Capital desk with our good friend Morris Sachs, to his latest venture as an executive coach. Listen here. November 7, 2021
November 6, 2021 - Not all heroes wear capes.
|
November 3, 2021 - The Earth Foundation
The Earth Foundation is a newly incorporated Swiss not-for-profit foundation based in Geneva that aims to inspire, educate, mentor, and empower students and young entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to tackle environmental challenges.
The Earth Foundation's first initiative is The Earth Prize, a global $200,000 environmental sustainability competition for students between the ages of 13 and 19, which will reward the teams whose projects have the most potential to tackle environmental challenges. We have partnered with highly influential individuals, such as Rina Kupferschmid Rojas, The Global Head of Sustainable Finance at UBS, who chairs the Judging Panel, or Suzy Amis Cameron, who is one of The Earth Prize Ambassadors. You can find further information on The Earth Foundation website and on The Earth Prize website.
Yet The Earth Prize is much more than this. It will become a platform for inspiration, education, and opportunities. Participants will have access to bespoke learning videos, which will teach them key concepts about environmental sustainability and showcase change-makers from around the world. Our vision is to create an opportunity for every young person on this planet to acquire the inspiration, skills, and self-confidence needed to become a change-maker and live their passion - and help create a better world.
The Earth Foundation's first initiative is The Earth Prize, a global $200,000 environmental sustainability competition for students between the ages of 13 and 19, which will reward the teams whose projects have the most potential to tackle environmental challenges. We have partnered with highly influential individuals, such as Rina Kupferschmid Rojas, The Global Head of Sustainable Finance at UBS, who chairs the Judging Panel, or Suzy Amis Cameron, who is one of The Earth Prize Ambassadors. You can find further information on The Earth Foundation website and on The Earth Prize website.
Yet The Earth Prize is much more than this. It will become a platform for inspiration, education, and opportunities. Participants will have access to bespoke learning videos, which will teach them key concepts about environmental sustainability and showcase change-makers from around the world. Our vision is to create an opportunity for every young person on this planet to acquire the inspiration, skills, and self-confidence needed to become a change-maker and live their passion - and help create a better world.
November 2, 2021
October 30, 2021
October 29, 2021
October 28, 2021
|
October 26, 2021
|
October 24, 2021 - PHISH
The important stuff is all here...
Popular podcasts you might have missed
3 Card Monty |
I Lost It |
Inspector Gadget |
Inside Baseball with Old Chestnut - ©2021
Contact Us at [email protected]
Contact Us at [email protected]