George Moody

SaaS company sales leader. Past roles include Trintech, @ Kronos. Interests - sales, markets, getting outdoors, music.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

The great thing about dogs — one of the great things at least — is the rules that govern ranking other things don’t apply to dogs. I have never doubted that someone was telling the absolute truth when they said their dog was the best dog ever, even though I know for a fact that I’ve owned two of the best dogs ever and my current dogs will one day join them on Mount Rushmore as the four greatest dogs ever. It’s just not like mountains or money. There’s only one tallest mountain or richest person. But the number of obviously best dogs ever is almost infinite.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@mark_dow We're all Keynsians now, right? That stimulus is addictive.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

This is important. And for some of us, it takes a few of failures to get there.

[Russell Ybarra @russellybarra]

If you haven’t experienced failure, you’re probably not as well-rounded as you think you are.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@MebFaber @BobRobotti Sporting the FYLD gear - Nice! Great performing fund.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

This is the best music thing you will see today, guarantee it...

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

Bruno Mars singing Billie Jean while playing the iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit on stage.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@choffstein Thanks for sharing - this is simplistic in a really good way.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@JakeSherman Shouldn't get 60 votes in the house either, but likely would if it was put to vote.

[Howard Luks MD @hjluks]

Don’t let your life 'narrow'.

I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The thing I watch happen to people — more than any injury or surgery — is what I call the narrowing.

Most of my patients have no idea it’s happening. They think it’s just aging. It’s not...

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@Duderichy There's always been lots of this. Play the long game with your personal finance. When the tide goes out, you'll see the people who don't save or incur lots of debt to fund lifestyles wearing no clothes.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

This is a great framing of the US / China competitive situation via capitalism instead of democracy. Great read.

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

I think part of it, at least vis a vis US/China competition, is that US and western chattering classes find it hard to believe that the market-driven outcome of frontier AI could possibly be right. They basically believe, in their hearts, that the Chinese system, with its “industrial strategy,” has eclipsed capitalism. So they harbor the same inferiority complex toward the Chinese system that many Americans once harbored toward the EU’s system. Their heuristic is that the industrial strategists of China have grasped the whole picture of the technological competition in a way that US industrialists, with their “profit maximizing incentives,” could not possibly have matched. And so any outcome in the economy that is not the result of “strategy” is therefore prima facie worse than what the “strategists” have concocted. They also believe the Chinese strategists possess awesome powers of foresight and the ability to evade all tendencies of financial and economic gravity, due of course to “strategy,” really it’s almost a kind of orientalism.

Meanwhile the U.S. industrialists are making new advances in math and science, and the fastest-growing businesses in history, by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on high-margin chips whose legacy is in rendering video games, cramming them underneath tents if need be, and investing generational capital into new energy generation technologies as they do it, and perhaps even colonizing space as an instrumentally convergent result. But none of that is “strategy,” you see.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@dailydirtnap that dude pisses excellence!

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@Jesse_Livermore @ns123abc All the revenue!

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.

I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.

That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.

You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.

"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."

What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.

Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.

What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.

In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.

And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.

A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.

A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.

The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?

Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.

That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.

Which is exactly where Albania stands.

Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.

And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.

Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.

The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.

And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!

I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.

That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@Rory_Johnston Put another way, stay long XLE!

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

1/ Preview of a speculative hypothesis

hormuz > fertilizer shortage > vulnerable food supply chain > food insecurity > existing migratory pressures exacerbated > peripheral country crisis in EU
=mkts 📉

unassimilated immigrants + rise of Right > violent clashes in EU
=mkts 📉

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@cullenroche This is a good conversation. The range you give is enormous. $2m is a drastically different lifestyle than $10m. Also, key point on this is that many people in that range are not focused on "flying private" and other lifestyle choices that would make living on $10m challenging.

[Jeffrey Currie 🆔++ @CommodMkt]

Welcome to the most asymmetric trade in modern financial history.

The thread below lays out why. The opportunity exists because capital has chased the AI trade while ignoring the physical assets AI requires to run — assets that have quietly become the best-performing asset class of the decade. Since October 2020 when we first called for the commodity super cycle: QCI Total Return +217%, GSCI Total Return +205%, Gold +140%. NASDAQ trails at +130%. S&P 500 at +85%. The top three are all commodities. Yet oil cannot get out of its own way while copper and the broader atom complex prints fresh highs . That is the dislocation. That is the trade.

Get long. Buckle in. Hang on for the ride.

Forgive the longer posts in this thread — attempting to mimic my old 10-bullet commodity takes. On to it.

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@Jesse_Livermore clean energy, baby!

[George Moody @GeorgeMoody]

@TheStalwart on heavy rotation right now. The new one is a great album all the way through.