A way of thinking.Not a way of starting out.
Field guides to the parts of the market everyone assumes you already understand. Successful investment distilled into its parts, and then reassembled. One market at a time.
Each guide takes a market apart. How it is put together, what it has done before, and which few relationships drive most of the movement. Where there is a view, it is stated and reasoned so that you may disagree.
Written for people who use markets, not people who work in them. If fixed income is a subject you nod along to rather than one you could argue about, you are the reader.
The research leads. Each guide picks up the market the research assumed you already knew. Prose, light data, simple charts.
That which cannot be made simpler.
A bond tells you the answer in advance — dated cash, a fixed amount. The work is deciding what that answer is worth today, and whether it will be paid. Fixed income is where the arithmetic is simple and the judgement is not.
Dated cash, a fixed amount. Price and yield are one fact stated twice.
Who must issue, who chooses to, and whose balance sheet the market borrows in order to trade.
Where the spread comes from, what the shapes mean, and why bonds hedge growth but not inflation.
Four cycles that ended the same way, and what to do when the market already agrees with you.
Live markets
Worked against what is happening now
Every idea is put through the market as it stands, with the date on it. When an example ages, the guide says so.
Historical precedent
What it has done before
Dated episodes, not theory. The cycles, and the certainty that ended them. Pattern recognition, not prediction.
Structure
How it is actually put together
Who issues. Who intermediates. Who is obliged to buy. The plumbing, because the plumbing is where the surprises come from.
Relationships
What moves with what
Price to yield. Government to corporate. Spread to cycle. A few links explain most of the movement, and they are the part worth learning.
Guide One, soon.
Leave an email and the first part comes to you the day it publishes, along with the research. Issue One of Beyond Institutional Thinking is free and on the site now.