WiAgree

Trying to learn and improve. Hopefully Wi Agree on that.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@EricBalchunas Certainly not very "through clients' eyes" of them. Really bad news for investors.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@JRogrow @RayDalio All 4 days at the festival, and the meals in between were divine! Napolean house, Irene's, café du monde, Parkway poboy, Gianna Restaurant, Drago's charboiled oysters, and la Petite Grocery for our final brunch. I miss new orleans already.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@JRogrow @RayDalio Haha, i don't blame you. We kept looking at each other saying this is crazy, but it was worth it.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@buccocapital

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@eightmoremiles That band rocked so hard in the early 2000s! Great memories, thanks for sharing.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@gnoble79 UM consumer sentiment pollsters should have gone to North Park mall on Saturday. They would have gotten a completely different result.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@compound248 @ContrarianCurse Agreed, another real problem is the flopping and phantom foul calls. Nobody wants to see a free throw contest.

[Christian Ruf @pinpulleddrmf]

Veteran buried his eldest and it’s not looking good for his two others.

Posting for any connections, help that can be made while they fight for time.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@MebFaber Enjoying your tax day posts Meb! I always say, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was turning tax day into refund day for the majority of people. If everyone had to write a check, we wouldn't be arguing about whether tax rates should be 30-40%, but rather 0-1%. Cheers!

[Meb Faber @MebFaber]

If the political candidates were serious about their tax proposals they would voluntarily pay a personal wealth tax plus a voluntary higher income tax.

People like @BernieSanders, @SenWarren and @TomSteyer are the top 5%, 1%, and 0.1%.

They could lead by example...

But they won't.

Why not?

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@buccocapital I have seen that visceral look of disgust.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@choffstein Love $blndx! Have owned it since 2020. Added $rsst and $tfpn to the trend following allocation last year.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@MetamateDaz Couldn't agree more!

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@Will_Schryver When the aquirer is trading at 20x ebitda, acquisitions at 10x are very accretive.

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@Ross__Hendricks @Rafael_L_Spring Yes it did. Storing and distributing digital video at that scale was very expensive at the time. They had to invest in a distributed network of data centers and fiber to get it to consumers. The difference is youtube didn't have 10 competitors willing to out spend them every year

[WiAgree @WiAgree]

@MebFaber $eyld and $fyld riding the wave!

[Jim O'Shaughnessy @jposhaughnessy]

Two thoughts from Martin Amis

"Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline."

“When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.”

[Jorge Jraissati @JraissatiJorge]

The United States captured Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro.

The situation remains delicate and the upcoming days are crucial.

After two decades of communism and hunger, today could mark the end of the darkest period in our history.

🧵