Last week, I moderated an amazing panel of emerging Hedge Fund & Alternative Managers at the Bloomberg 2025 Forum. As promiosed, here is the full video of the conversation

The panelists on the Emerging Managers Panel were:

Matthew Cherwin: Co-Founder & CIO, Marek Capital Management

Imran Khan: Founder & CIO, Proem Asset Management

Matt Jozoff: Co-CEO & Portfolio Manager, Trevally Capital

Hear from new and emerging fund leaders on the opportunities and obstacles of launching and growing a differentiated investment strategy in today’s competitive alternatives landscape, including how they are leveraging AI to enhance investment processes, streamline operations, and navigate the early stages of building a fund.

 

 

 

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My 4-day week Monday reads:

• The Business of Betting on Catastrophe: World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn calamity into capital. (The MIT Press Reader)

• The Stock-Market Rally Is Moving Beyond Big Tech and Investors Are Thrilled. One measure of market breadth recently touched a new high, as financial and industrial names fuel stocks’ climb. (Wall Street Journal) see also Bonds Have Underperformed. Why You Should Own Them Now. Barron’s has long favored dividend-paying stocks for those seeking income. But bonds now deserve a hard look because they are so attractively priced. (Barron’s)

• Why gold prices are forecast to rise to new record highs: “We have seen this before in 2008, 2020, and even in August 2024. Times like these are good buying opportunities, because gold typically rebounds shortly afterwards as investors seek safe assets. The same thing played out in April.” (Goldman Sachs)

• Lucky Breaks: Skilled management can take the limited resources and luck they’ve been given and multiply it. Mediocre management can’t. (Micro Cap Club)

• A Recipe for Doubling Your Stock Returns, Again and Again: Time is the secret ingredient of investing, a market veteran says. Over many decades, diversified stock index funds have produced extraordinary results. (New York Times)

• The Global A.I. Divide: Where A.I. Data Centers Are Located Only 32 nations, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, have A.I.-specialized data centers. (New York Times)

• The Future of Abundance and the Left: Left-wing commentators say abundance is their opposition. Left-wing politicians say it’s a credit to the Democratic Party. What if they’re both right? (Derek Thompson)

• How the Universe Differs From Its Mirror Image: From living matter to molecules to elementary particles, the world is made of “chiral” objects that differ from their reflected forms. (Quanta Magazine) see also The Largest Camera Ever Built Releases Its First Images of the Cosmos: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is poised to discover billions of new astronomical objects, revolutionizing understanding of everything from the history of the solar system to the workings of dark energy. (Wired)

• How one program is changing surf culture in San Francisco: City kids in SF spend their Fridays learning to surf through this cool project. (The San Francisco Standard)

• The essential listening guide to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Tracks II: The Lost Albums’ It’s a great day when your favorite artist releases a new record. But what if they released seven new records at once, recorded across almost three decades, full of music you didn’t even know existed? (NPR)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week Velina Peneva, where she manages more than $100 billion of Swiss Re‘s internal cpaital as the firm’s Chief Investment Officer: Previously, she was Private Equity practice leader in Zurich for Bain & Company.

 

What does it cost the IRS to collect taxes?

Source: USA Facts

 

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Bullish:

Boaz Weinstein on Card Counting, Private Credit and Night Sweats:

Strategy. Risk. Pattern recognition. Wall Street pros often play poker, chess, blackjack and other games that rely on skills that are highly transferable to their work. What role does game theory play in the markets? And how are successful traders using it? Sonali Basak interviews Boaz Weinstein and Liv Boeree for Bullish.

 

 

 



 

 

 

Source:
Bullish with Sonali Basak
Episodes 1-9

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Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:

• Dollar’s Decline Meets Rising Dedollarization: The Threat Comes from Within. The Bloomberg Dollar Index has fallen nearly 8.5 percent, its steepest drop since the 1980s. Elsewhere, incremental signs point to emerging alternatives. (The Daily Economy)

• The End of Publishing as We Know It: Inside Silicon Valley’s assault on the media. (The Atlantic) see also You can’t do your own research without doing your homework first: Here in 2025, many of us claim to come to our own conclusions by doing our own research. Here’s why we’re mostly deluding ourselves. (Big Think)

• How the United States Helped Create Iran’s Nuclear Program: A reactor in Tehran is a monument to the U.S. relationship with Iran when the country was led by a secular, pro-Western monarch. New York Times)

• Landmark AI ruling is a blow to authors and artists.Books are particularly valuable for LLMs precisely because humans have taken such care to produce them. If you want to teach a computer the nuances of many different topics — and how to write clearly — there is no substitute for books. But when it came time to train Claude, Anthropic did not start by buying books. Instead, it “downloaded for free millions of copyrighted books in digital form from pirate sites on the internet,” including books by the three authors who filed the lawsuit. (Popular Information)

• Why Did It Take 65 Seasons to Pay the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders a Living Wage? For decades, their pay was embarrassingly low, but that is (finally) about to change. (Texas Monthly)

• How to Steal a House: When Arash Missaghi was murdered in suburban Toronto last year, his killer accused him of swiping properties and ruining his investors’ lives. (Businessweek)

• The Hollow Men of Hims: An admittedly partial–but deeply troubling–case against America’s most brazen medical grift, involving Chinese knockoffs, subscription traps, and prescription gas station sex pills. (Alex Kesin)

• The Department of Veterans Affairs Is Not O.K. V.A. insiders describe themselves as miserable—and they worry that the Trump Administration will do long-term damage to the agency. (New Yorker)

• A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy: Content generated by artificial intelligence has become a factor in elections around the world. Most of it is bad, misleading voters and discrediting the democratic process. Artificial intelligence has long threatened to transform elections around the world. Now there is evidence from at least 50 countries that it already has. (New York Times)

• Ben McKenzie Made One of the Best Documentaries in Years. Will Anyone Get to See It? The O.C. heartthrob’s crusade against crypto continues with Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. But in a crypto-friendly climate, finding a distributor may be a challenge. “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money” (Texas Monthly)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week Velina Peneva, where she manages more than $100 billion of Swiss Re‘s internal cpaital as the firm’s Chief Investment Officer: Previously, she was Private Equity practice leader in Zurich for Bain & Company.

 

U.S. companies with greater foreign revenue exposure have outperformed their domestic counterparts since the start of 2017

Source: Indexology

 

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After a few month run, I took a break from talking about the book. Going forward, I’ll be speaking about HNTI occasionally.

This was a fun pod worthy sharing: Peter Lazaroff hosts The Long Term Investor, and asks very thoughtful questions:

In this engaging episode, Barry Ritholtz—author of the influential Big Picture blog, host of the renowned Masters in Business podcast, and author of the new book How Not to Invest—shares invaluable insights into making smarter investment decisions. Barry challenges common financial myths, explores why we’re drawn to faulty financial forecasts, and highlights red flags in popular financial advice.

Good stuff!

 

 

Sources:
EP 210: How Not to Invest: Avoiding Common Mistakes and Dangerous Financial Advice with Barry Ritholtz
by Peter Lazaroff |
The Long Term Investor, June 25, 2025

Audio: Apple Podcasts, Spotify

 

 

 

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The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Colombia Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry Organic coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• What’s Better Than U.S. Bonds for Downside Protection? If you want return, you have to take risk. There is no avoiding this universal truth of investing. So while you may employ one (or more) of the strategies discussed here to limit your future downside, keep in mind that the possibility of downside is how we earn our long-term returns in the first place. (Of Dollars and Data)

• No One Knows. Quantum Living: A Lifetime Of Uncertainty (The Uncertainty Of It All) see also Why Macro Forecasting Is So Hard Impossible: This is why I keep discussing why forecasting market prices or macroeconomic data is so challenging: There are simply too many variables, each dependent on and reflecting even more variables, to pretend we truly know what will happen next: “Solve for ∞”  (The Big Picture)

• McDonald’s around the world: A discussion with author of McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches, Gary He (Chris Arnade Walks The World)

• Young People Face a Hiring Crisis. AI Is Making It Worse. Artificial intelligence is transforming the entire pipeline from college to the workforce: from tests and grades to job applications and entry-level work. (Derek Thompson)

• Revisiting the Hunt: First-Time Buyers Share What Went Wrong and Right: Being a new homeowner comes with a steep learning curve, especially in New York City. (New York Times)

• It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses: Only a select few researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them— even if it takes pay packages of $100 million. (Wall Street Journal) see also At Amazon’s Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I. On 1,200 acres of cornfield in Indiana, Amazon is building one of the largest computers ever for work with Anthropic, an artificial intelligence start-up. (New York Times)

• The Wild Within the Walls: From antiquity to modern times, Rome has been entangled with the wild animals who creep, slither, scurry, and nest among its pillars and palaces. (bioGraphic)

• My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them: I found people in serious relationships with AI partners and planned a weekend getaway for them at a remote Airbnb. We barely survived. (Wired)  but see also Inside ‘AI Addiction’ Support Groups, Where People Try to Stop Talking to Chatbots: People are self treating themselves and other community members in subreddits like character_ai_recovery, ChatBotAddiction, and AIAddiction. (404)

• Inside Hollywood’s $200 Million Bet on Formula 1: Hollywood didn’t just make a racing movie — they built a real F1 team, filmed at live races, and spent $200 million doing it. Here’s how Brad Pitt, Apple, and Mercedes pulled it off. (Huddle Up)

• Bruce Springsteen Reveals His Paths Not Taken: An album “is a record of who you are and where you were at that moment in your life,” he said. With “Tracks II,” he adds seven full ones to his catalog. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week Velina Peneva, where she manages Swiss Re‘s internal cpaital as the firm’s Chief Investment Officer: Previously, she was Private Equity practice leader in Zurich for Bain & Company.

 

Record-High Foreign Ownership of the US Equity Market

Source: Apollo

 

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This week, I speak with Velina Peneva, group chief investment officer at insurance giant Swiss Re. We discuss the business of reinsurance, managing risk, her career path and more.

Peneva started her career at Bain & Company in 1998 and later became Partner in 2011. While she was there, she worked with fund managers and investors, became a leader in the private equity practice in Zurich and became a member of the firm’s global investment committee. Peneva joined Swiss Re in 2017, becoming co-head of client solutions & analytics, before being named Group Chief Investment Office and member of the Group Executive Comittee in 2023.

She explains the importance of matching your assets to your future liabilities, and why liquidity and quality are so important.

A list of her current reading is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Kate Moore, Chief Investment Officer of Citi Wealth; responsible for overseeing investments, portfolio strategy and asset allocation for the trillion dollars Citi Wealth manages. Previously, she was Head of Thematic Strategy and PM for the Global Allocation Fund at BlackRock.

 

 

Favorite Books

 

 

 

 

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My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

• The Business of Betting on Catastrophe: World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn calamity into capital. (MIT Press Reader)

• EU Considers Lowering Tariffs on U.S. Imports in Effort to Woo Trump: European leaders to debate what they could give up to secure speedy trade deal. (Wall Street Journal)  but see also Tracking Every Trump Tariff and Its Economic Effect.  Here’s a compilation of measures both implemented and planned, accompanied by a Bloomberg Economics view on the effect. (Bloomberg)

• Lessons on Money & Life I Learned From Warren Buffett. The 94-year-old “Oracle of Omaha” announced at his last shareholder’s meeting that he’s stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of this year. Though I never met him, he has taught me a lot about money — and life. Here are some brilliantly simple lessons for us all that I learned from Warren Buffett. (Advisor Perspectives)

• Happy Birthday, Money. This currency proved to be both a blessing and a curse for the war effort. It’s not mere history: Both the successes and the failures offer crucial lessons about how monetary and fiscal decisions affect the economy, and how they shape the credibility of the nation as a whole. Those lessons have resonated through all the intervening years of independence, expansion, conflict, depression, war, reinvention and more. Today the prospects for our currency are starting to turn ominous again. (New York Times)

• Don’t Be Fooled by Treasury Yields: Adjusting appropriately for inflation is key to understanding the expected payoff from government securities versus stocks. (Bloomberg)

• The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting: Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. (The Atlantic)

• Is Mark Cuban the Loudmouth Billionaire that Democrats Need for 2028? He’s a sports mogul, small-business influencer, media personality, health-care disruptor—and the ultimate Trump foil. (Businessweek)

• When Does Consciousness Emerge in Babies? Answering the question of when consciousness emerges is deeply tied to the mystery of what it actually is and how it can be measured. (Scientific American)

• When Iran’s supreme leader emerges from hiding he will find a very different nation: After spending nearly two weeks in a secret bunker somewhere in Iran during his country’s war with Israel, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, might want to use the opportunity of the ceasefire to venture out. (BBC)

• This songwriter shaped today’s country music. You’ve never heard of him. Ashley Gorley spent years trying to crack the code behind a hit song. It paid off. We asked him for the stories behind some of his record-breaking 83 No. 1 songs. (Washington Post)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week Velina Peneva, Group Chief Investment Officer, Swiss Re: Previously, she was PE practice leader in Zurich ay Bain & Company.

 

Due to historical and geographical reasons, European countries tend to spread their populations across many medium and smaller cities rather than concentrating everyone in a few megacities

Source: @simongerman600

 

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“One of the most bullish things that can happen to any market is for it to reach new multi-year highs.“   Bloomberg, March 5, 2014

 

Markets closed at a new all-time high today.

The usual suspects have already proffered their litany of horrors – valuations are too high, gains are too narrow, we havbe market concentrated and a toppy feel, to say nothing about all of the new geopolitical risks that continue to accumulate in tariffs war and oil prices.

The problem is that the data simply does not back up their fears:

“Consider the actual historical data. New highs occur very regularly during bull markets. This makes the crash insistency much less compelling. Indeed, we tend to see many more new highs during the secular bull markets than we do during the bear cycles.”

A column I wrote for Bloomberg in 2014 pointed out that the Dow made 492 new all-time highs from 1982-1999; in the 12 years covering 1952 to 1965, it made 279. Admittedly, the last all-time high always takes place before a bear market. But the data shows that if you invest during all time highs, you do better than you would if you’re investing randomly on any other day in a market cycle (see chart at top).

You might be wondering when to skip an all time high, but making that bet seems like a fool’s errand. Note we were having this same discussion 11 years ago; consider howe disastrous selling the 2014 all-time highs 9pandemic and all) would have been.

Yes, it’s true: To avoid that very last all time high, the 479th ATH, you would have had a miss a substantial number of the 478 prior highs that preceded it over the prior 16 years or so.

That seems like a terrible bet to me…

 

 

Previously:
No, Market Highs Are Not a Bad Sign (March 5, 2014)

 

See also:
All-Time Highs in the Stock Market are Usually Followed by More All-Time Highs (A Wealth of Common Sense, February 8, 2024)

Nothing is More Bullish than All-Time Highs (The Irrelevant Investor, February 03, 2024)

Should You Buy An All-Time High? (Dollars & Data December 29, 2020)

 

 

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At The Money: Navigating War, Tariffs and Geopolitics (june 25, 2025)

The U.S. has just bombed Iran’s nuclear sites. This follows weeks of Israeli drone and aircraft bombing raids. This comes after months of noisy Tariff announcements and geopolitical wrangling. What are investors supposed to do when war breaks out?

(Full transcript coming tomorrow).

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About this week’s guest:

Sam Ro is a veteran financial journalist and CFA known for his clear, data-driven insights into markets and and the economy. We discuss how to manage your way through war, tariffs and all manner of headline risks. He spent 2 decades of working in the trenches for Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, and Axios he launched his own Substack, TKer. In 2022, TKer earned SABEW “Best in Business” award.

For more info, see:

Substack: TKer by Sam Ro

LinkedIn

Twitter

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Find all of the previous At the Money episodes here, and in the MiB feed on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Bloomberg. And find the entire musical playlist of all the songs I have used on At the Money on Spotify

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

 

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Find our entire music playlist for At the Money on Spotify.

 

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Today, I am participating in a few events at Bloomberg’s Hedge Fund Forum 2025.

I will be moderating the Emerging Managers Panel:

Hear from new and emerging fund leaders on the opportunities and obstacles of launching and growing a differentiated investment strategy in today’s competitive alternatives landscape, including how they are leveraging AI to enhance investment processes, streamline operations, and navigate the early stages of building a fund.

Matthew Cherwin: Co-Founder & CIO, Marek Capital Management

Imran Khan: Founder & CIO, Proem Asset Management

Matt Jozoff: Co-CEO & Portfolio Manager, Trevally Capital

I did this same panel with different managers each of the past two years. It is a great collection of three emerging managers in a variety of areas who have put up solid numbers. I have been skeptical of the costs of the overall sector, but I am always fascinated by high-performing managers in the alt space who earn their keep. I am looking forward to this conversation.

I will drop the full panel discussion into the MiB feed as a bonus Masters in Business live.

 

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