Thomas Fry

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@unusual_whales The strait normally moves around 6 Billion barrels a month, the scale of the shortage cannot be ignored forever

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@PantexCap China was not building at a rate of 730M barrels per year, which is what you are claiming

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@mattvanswol These guys are all traitors, they refuse to hire Americans and pay American wages, it is disgusting

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@mattvanswol It is literally legal to murder people, but only if they are the wrong color

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@AstorAaron @aeberman12 Art is not remotely aware of even the 101 basics for the current market, I don't know why anyone bothers to engage him

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@robin_j_brooks @GavMcCracken China dropped imports by almost 5mmbpd

This market is filled with oil tourists who know nothing

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

"Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44."

grim

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

🚨 ANOTHER MASTERCLASS FROM @3BLUE1BROWN

The compressibility of language isn’t just a math curiosity, it’s the hidden engine behind every LLM you use.

Grant’s new video reframes Shannon’s entropy through one elegant lens:

Prediction IS compression.

→ The better you predict the next word, the fewer bits you need to store it
→ Shannon measured English at ~1 bit per character: astonishingly compressible
→ This is exactly what GPT-style models optimize
→ Intelligence, in this framing, is compression

FUN FACT: Von Neumann told Shannon to name it “entropy” because nobody truly understands it anyway 😄

Decades later, that same concept became the bedrock of modern AI.

Deep-dive resources in the 🧵 ↓

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@GavMcCracken We already have that

Most people gravitated to the major easy to use & centralized web platforms, such as Twitter

[Chris @chriswithans]

Wait a minute though. I'm just an unfrozen caveman so I don't understand the ways of this modern world, but the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare's individual mandate was just a "penalty" instead of a tax. But Trump's $100,000 penalty on H-1B employers is now a tax?

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@aeberman12 Chinese and US SPR releases are only "offsets" if the disruption is temporary

If Iran keeps it closed then they are not offsets but simply delaying the inevitable tank bottoms

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@BasilTheGreat Is there a National White Police Association?

If there is not but there is a black police association, then by definition the police are racist against Whites

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@avionsunantiqu1 Iran does not want a deal, they want to win and keeping the strait closed is their only option

They know perfectly well that if they open the strait then once oil has had time to restock Trump will attack again, so why would they open it?

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@GavMcCracken He truly has no idea what the situation is or how screwed everything is

[Porter Stansberry @porterstansb]

My son's elite private high school school held graduation last week.

There were roughly 100 kids in the graduating class. Lots of extremely bright kids. Probably 20 IB diplomas. And maybe a dozen of those kids were Cum Laude Society too, including my son. These kids are incredibly smart and hard working. They had straight A's throughout high school, at an elite school, in the most challenging curriculum and earned the highest SAT scores.

Out of the entire class, there was only one student who was accepted into an Ivy League school. One. But he didn't earn an IB diploma. He wasn't Cum Laude Society. Or on the Head Master's List.

He is a great kid. And I'm happy for him. This isn't, in any way, a criticism of him. But, you already know -- he had something none of the highest achieving kids had.

Something has gone terribly wrong with our society when the very brightest kids are systematically barred from the most elite academic colleges in the country. And especially when the board of the school and its staff see absolutely nothing wrong with this outcome.

In fact they will, undoutably, call me a bigot -- again. But when will they fight for our sons?

They won't. Our sons are the wrong color.

P.S. In the middle of the ceremony, the American flag left of the stage fell over and hit the ground. The school's headmaster picked it up. But he didn't know how to fix the mount. So, he just stood it back up and let it fall over again. Twice. Finally a man who was obviously a former member of the armed services came over and, standing at attention, held the flag upright. Tells you 100% everything you need to know about the headmaster and the culture of that school.

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

A thought

In the 1950s to the 1970s, information channels were so scarce that even the most studious investor, reading the same New York Times as everyone else on the morning commute, inevitably absorbed the same narrative, producing classic groupthink.

Today, I fear we might be recreating that exact dynamic at digital speed: millions of users generate daily AI briefings with near-identical prompts fed into overlapping models, receiving essentially the same market summaries, signals, and conclusions.

The result? A new era of synchronized thinking, just like 50–70 years ago, when alpha generation was far higher precisely because consensus created exploitable edges.

Independent thinkers who step outside the AI echo chamber will soon regain that same advantage.

Active stock-picking is poised for a comeback.
----
The era of Google searches, circa 2005 to 2024, was always ad hoc, so they never produced groupthink on the level we saw in the 1950s, and may see again.

(AI image of what I'm arguing)

[Thomas Fry @FryThomas]

@TRHLofficial This is explicitly unconstitutional two tier justice, but nothing will happen because the US is not a democracy and the constitution is no longer in effect

It is up to you to either consent or not to this state of affairs

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

INTERVIEW: GULF BOMBED, HORMUZ CLOSED, RED SEA NEXT: OIL'S PERFECT STORM – w/ Economist Jeffrey Curie (@CommodMkt)

[Josh Rainer @JoshRainerGold]

We didn’t vote ourselves into this. We explicitly voted against it. It was forced upon us.