Guto Saab

Guto Saab, CFA
Amazônia Capital - Gestão de Patrimônio

🎾 ⚽️ 🍺 & 🍷
(opiniões e zoeiras são pessoais)

[Guto Saab @GutoSaab]

@RobertoReis Esse é um excelente ponto. Pega os números de 1T as pesquisas recém-divulgadas da Quaest pra SP, MG e RJ e aplica esses percentuais (70% migração pra FB, 30% pra L) e compara com o divulgado deles de 2T. Em todos os casos, dá um número bem melhor pro FB do que o divulgado.

[Rakan @1M8li]

يقول أستاذ سابق في جامعة هارفارد إن فيه 14 أسلوبًا عمليًا لو طبقتها باستمرار، ممكن تتقدم على 99٪ من الناس.

1: قاعدة الخمس ثواني

[Doug Casey @RealDougCasey]

Full article here:

Doug Casey on the Hidden Winners of the Commodity and Infrastructure Boom… And The Biggest Loser

https://t.co/E0Lu6QdwWK

[IA Gen 🤖 @IAGenMoney]

Se você tem uma conta Gmail precisa ler isso.

A IA do Google está vasculhando sua caixa de entrada. Emails, anexos, extratos bancários, documentos fiscais, cartas médicas. Tudo.

Foi ativado por padrão. E esse rollout silencioso agora enfrenta uma ação coletiva.

6 passos para desativar porque o botão está escondido em dois lugares diferentes:

[MindAI Index @MindMechanicsX]

14 HARVARD TECHNIQUES to be better than 90% of people

1. The 5-second rule

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

WARNING: Longer post (but worth reading or bookmarking for later).

Your life has seasons.

Each one is unique. Characterized by its own distinct desires, struggles, opportunities, and identity.

But one reflection I've had recently is just how easy it is to completely disassociate with the present season.

To give all your time and energy toward a longing for some nostalgic memory of a prior season or an anticipation for some beautiful state of a future season.

You look back at the past and all you see is sunshine. Because it all worked out. You forget (or glaze over) the struggle you endured. You're here today. You made it. You're alive. You're doing fine.

You look forward at the future and dream on what could be. You'll have so much more. More freedom. More purpose. More health. More deep connection. More everything.

The past is beautiful and the future feels limitless. So, logically, you slowly start to treat everything about the present as the bridge. A dash connecting your past and your future. A gap to be crossed as quickly as possible.

Everything you do today is in anticipation of some eventual end state.

I'm doing this now, so that I can have that later.

Unfortunately, the danger of that dissociation with the present is significant. You may spend your entire life living for a future that has a decidedly mirage-like property. You inch closer, but when it's right in front of you, it disappears and reappears on the horizon.

You may spend your entire life skipping through the present, deferring your presence, your joy, and your very humanity to a future that never comes.

In a classic French fable, a young boy is gifted with a magic ball of golden thread. He's told that if he simply pulls on the thread, time will leap forward. The catch, of course, is that once it's pulled, it can never be put back.

The young boy takes advantage of the newfound powers. Each time he's faced with a boring day at school, a frustrating set of chores, or a scolding from his parents, he pulls the thread, skipping through to the good parts.

As an adult, he continues, leaping through mundane struggles in his marriage, the friction of having a newborn, and the boredom at work. He finds himself pulling on the thread more and more, avoiding even the most minor inconveniences of his life.

But when he wakes up one day and sees an old man looking back at him in the mirror, he's filled with regret. He realizes in that moment that as he chose to skip through the boredom, struggles, and friction, so too did he miss the real texture of being alive.

How often do we all do the same? How easily do we default into this disassociation? Disconnecting from the present in anticipation of some future.

A mentor recently asked me this:

"Where are you going and why are you in such a rush?"

It hit me hard.

And to be honest, I haven't stopped replaying those words since he said them.

Why are you in such a rush?

The world wants you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines.

In doing so, you slowly relinquish your agency. You give up your claim on your own life. Surrender authorship to a pen that was never even yours.

In a world that wants you to rush, the ultimate act of rebellion is presence.

Be in the season you're in. Don't romanticize the past, don't fantasize the future. Be here. Be now. Be in this. All of its texture, depth, and struggle. All of its joy, tension, and pain. Sit with the uncertainty. Become friends with it. Fall in love with it.

Because every single thing you do today is something your younger self dreamed of and something your older self will wish they could go back and do.

The good old days are happening, right now.

And the next time you find yourself skipping through the present, remember these words:

Where are you going and why are you in such a rush?

[Barchart @Barchart]

Samuel Benner, a farmer from the 1800s, published a book with market analysis on periods of panic, good times to buy, and good times to sell. 150 years later, his analysis has proven to be remarkably accurate.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

LLM Knowledge Bases

Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So:

Data ingest:
I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them.

IDE:
I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides).

Q&A:
Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale.

Output:
Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base.

Linting:
I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into.

Extra tools:
I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries.

Further explorations:
As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows.

TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

[HotSotin 🇫🇮🇺🇦🇪🇺△ @HotSotin]

Crazy idea: Let's split a country in socialist and capitalist halves and check in on them in 75 years.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

By far the best piece I have read on U.S. strategic options in Iran.

[Macro Liquidity by Sunil Reddy @Macrobysunil]

The Current move in the markets is a classic liquidity squeeze.

2Y yields spike → Gold and equities roll over.(strong correlation)
At the same time, Oil rips higher.
Now here’s the key:
Gold is inversely correlated to BOTH Oil and the 2Y in this move.
That tells you this isn’t inflation bidding Gold…
this is funding stress forcing liquidation.

Oil up = immediate cash drain on the system
2Y up = cost of money rising fast ( and treasuries getting Sold)
Put together → everything gets sold to raise cash.

Gold isn’t acting like a hedge here, it’s acting like a source of liquidity.
This doesn’t sustain for long.

Either:
2Y rolls over → liquidity returns → Gold stabilizes
or
Stress deepens → broader liquidation continues
Watch the short end along with Oil
.
That’s where the break or the pivot will come from.

[Louis-Vincent Gave @gave_vincent]

The financial architecture of the post WW2 world rested on three assumptions:

- US is a benevolent hegemon with an embedded interest in maintaining global trading order
- US controls the world’s sea lanes
- US treasuries could always be transformed into commodities at a moment’s notice

These assumptions are melting away faster than morals at a bachelor party.

So how do we now position portfolios?

I wrote the following last weekend and a number of clients asked me to unlock it, so here is the paper

https://t.co/PpxYN0UswZ

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

I accidentally broke my brain reading about Nobel Prize winners last month.

There's this thing called "Janusian thinking" that basically explains why some people's minds work like magic while the rest of us think in straight lines. Named after Janus, the Roman god with two faces pointing opposite directions.

The psychologist who discovered it, Albert Rothenberg, was trying to figure out what made breakthrough thinkers different. He interviewed dozens of Nobel laureates, major artists, revolutionary scientists. What he found sounds impossible.

These people can hold two different ideas in their mind at the same time. They can explore both without switching back and forth or forcing a quick comparison. They can consider “yes” and “no” to the same question simultaneously and stay clear-headed.

Einstein too talked about this when he described his relativity breakthrough. He was imagining riding alongside a beam of light while also standing perfectly still. Both perspectives at once. Mozart said he could hear an entire symphony "all at once," every note, every contradiction, every resolution happening in a single moment of awareness.

Your average person's mind works like a courtroom. Evidence comes in, you weigh it, you reach a verdict. Case closed. But Janusian minds work more like... I don't know, like a quantum computer that can process multiple realities simultaneously until something new emerges from the overlap.

I've started noticing it in conversations. When someone can genuinely see both sides of something without needing to pick one, it drives people nuts. They want you to land somewhere definite. The ability to live in that tension space reads as wishy-washy or indecisive.

Most creative advice tells you to "think outside the box." But Janusian thinking is weirder than that. It's being inside and outside the box at the same time. It's thinking the box exists and doesn't exist simultaneously.

Which explains why truly creative people seem slightly unhinged. They think they're choosing between realities. But, they're inhabiting multiple realities at once, mining the contradictions for insights the rest of us never see.

Sadly, most of us have trained ourselves out of this ability. We've learned that holding contradictions feels unstable, so we rush toward resolution. We've been taught that changing your mind means you were wrong before, so we defend positions instead of exploring them.

But the people changing the world have kept that childlike ability to hold impossible thoughts without needing them to make sense immediately.

We just need to live in the questions everyone else is too scared to ask.

[George Noble @gnoble79]

Private credit returns 11.5% on loans that yield 9.5%.

Nobody asks how.

I'll tell you how:

Leverage.

They take a portfolio of loans yielding 9.5%, lever it 2x, and the gross return doubles to 19%. Subtract financing costs and fees, hand the client 11.5%, and show them a chart with a line so smooth it would make Madoff jealous.

That's the product Wall Street has been selling to pensions, endowments, insurance companies, and now your 401(k).

They even gave it a nice name. "Private credit."

There's a better name for it: volatility laundering.

The returns aren't smooth because the risk is low. They're smooth because nobody is marking anything to market. The same people making the loans are the ones deciding what they're worth.

When everything's going up, that's a feature. When it turns? It's a trapdoor.

And we're watching the trapdoor open right now.

Funds are gating redemptions across the industry. Loans are going from 100 cents on the dollar to zero in a single quarter. The biggest asset managers on earth are telling investors: "Sorry, you can't have your money back."

And none of this should surprise anyone who's been paying attention. Every cycle produces the SAME SCHEME wearing a different outfit.

Junk bonds in the 80s. Mortgage-backed securities in 2007. Both sold the identical promise - equity-like returns with bond-like stability. Both ended the same way.

Private credit is the 2020s version. Bigger numbers. Fancier packaging. Same math.

The leverage is the tell. Any time someone shows you returns that look too good for the underlying asset, there's leverage hiding somewhere in the structure. And leverage doesn't create returns...

It amplifies outcomes - in both directions.

What pisses me off is that the people running this know exactly what they're doing.

The risk disclosures are 400 pages long. The gates are buried in footnotes. It's not technically illegal. But doing something because you can get away with it - not because it's right - is a special kind of rotten.

After 2008, NOBODY went to jail. Banks paid fines that amounted to rounding errors on their balance sheets. The message was clear: heads you win, tails the taxpayer covers it.

So of course they did it again. Why wouldn't they?

And here's where the realist in me takes over from the idealist:

They're not going to let this blow up cleanly. They NEVER do...

The playbook is extend, pretend, and print. Special vehicles. Special accommodations. More liquidity injected into a system that's already drowning in it.

Every time they paper over a crisis, they confirm the only trade that matters.

Gold pulled back hard this week - from $5,000 to around $4,575. Every shakeout over the past two years has been a buying opportunity.

The structural case (debasement, central bank accumulation, collapsing confidence in sovereign debt) hasn't weakened. It's accelerated.

The worse private credit gets, the more they'll have to print. And the more they print, the HIGHER gold goes.

It's not complicated. It's just math that most people don't want to accept.

[The Shift Journal @TheShiftJournal]

In 2018, Stanford professor Matt Abrahams gave a masterclass on why most people fail to communicate well.

[George Noble @gnoble79]

We're watching a financial crisis unfold in real time.

The last time funds started blocking investors from getting their money back, Bear Stearns collapsed six months later.

In 2007, BNP Paribas froze €1.6 billion in funds.

Bear Stearns declared 2 funds "essentially worthless" and gated a third.

Everyone said it was "contained."

6 months later the entire financial system nearly went under.

I'm not saying we're there YET...

But I am saying the pattern is rhyming.

BlackRock just capped withdrawals from its $26 billion HPS Corporate Lending Fund after investors demanded 9.3% of their shares back - nearly DOUBLE the fund's 5% quarterly limit.

Investors wanted $1.2 billion out. BlackRock gave them $620 million and said no to the rest.

BlackRock stock dropped 7%. KKR, Ares, Apollo, Blue Owl - all down 5-6% on the same day. The financial sector ETF is off 9% in a month.

This is the same BlackRock that just slashed a $25 million private credit loan from 100 to ZERO in 3 months. Full value one quarter. Worthless the next.

And they'd already done the exact same thing months earlier with Renovo Home Partners.

But this isn't just a BlackRock problem.

Look at the dominoes:

Last summer, Tricolor and First Brands went unexpectedly bankrupt. $10-15 billion in combined liabilities. Write-offs hit JPMorgan, UBS, and Jefferies.

Then a UK lender called Market Financial Solutions collapsed with a £2.4 billion loan book.

Fraud allegations. Double-pledged collateral. Barclays exposed for £500 million. Apollo, Elliott, Santander - all caught in the wreckage.

Then Blue Owl permanently halted redemptions. Stock cut in HALF.

Then Blackstone's $82 billion flagship fund got hit with $3.8 billion in redemption requests. They had to pump in $400 million of their own money just to meet demands.

Now BlackRock is literally blocking the exits.

Even Apollo's own CEO warned a shakeout is coming.

When EVERYONE at the top is waving red flags - pay attention.

UBS raised its worst-case default forecast to 15%. Defaults sit at 3-5% today. The trajectory is ugly.

Here's the structural problem:

After 2008, regulations pushed risky lending OUT of banks and INTO private credit.

The sector ballooned to $3 trillion. But these funds make 5-7 year loans while promising investors quarterly liquidity.

That works until everyone wants out at once. Which is exactly what's happening.

40% of sponsor-backed loans are tied to the software industry - the same sector AI is threatening to destroy.

The Fed pumped 40% more money into the system after Covid and kept rates at zero.

That easy money funded garbage underwriting. And now there's a $162 billion maturity wall hitting THIS YEAR.

I've been warning about private credit for weeks. The story is always the same:

Opaque valuations. Illiquid assets. Limited transparency. And the false promise of steady returns with no volatility.

The whole sales pitch was equity-like returns with bond-like stability. But you can't eliminate volatility - you can only HIDE it...

Until you can't.

When the WORLD'S LARGEST ASSET MANAGER starts blocking investors from getting their money back, that's not "noise".

That's an alarm.

Get out before the exit gets more crowded.

[The Shift Journal @TheShiftJournal]

Ray Dalio gives a 39 minute master class on wealth creation.

[Finding Compounders @F_Compounders]

Berkshire 2025 Annual Report

Written by Greg Abel

https://t.co/N6PoNjrZMe

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

Things I’ve Learned
What I wish I knew at 18…

1. College is mostly a scam

I’m glad I went to college, because I wanted to work on Wall Street. But today, I wouldn’t waste $300,000 on it, and I wouldn’t want to work in banking. Instead, I’d load up on college credits during high school, go to a school like the University of Texas to have fun, graduate in 3 years debt-free, and travel around the world for a year.

[Jesse Cohen @JesseCohenInv]

Ray Dalio gives a 39 minute master class on wealth creation.

Watch this instead of Netflix.