I’ve organised the posts in my archive according to the following broad topics:

Markets and finance

Things were crazy back then — or were they? (March 2021) – What if the stock market is something like a Google Trends for stock-related memes, and bull markets are driven by the culture being overweight such memes?

Bubbles in fast-forward (January 2021) – A dissection of the GameStop saga and how it can help us understand the role of sentiment in shaping the world’s financial markets.

Boredom, bubbles, and economic vampires (January 2021) – A look at how self-sustaining speculative processes can lead to inflation in both economies and financial markets.

Bubbles and hurricanes in financial markets (January 2020) – Using thermodynamics to understand how bubbles in complex financial systems are born, live, and die.

Stocks, inflation, and Big Macs (July 2020) – A look at inflation and how it’s measured, including a discussion of asset-price inflation and what it means for income inequality in the US.

Tech stocks as a quasi-currency (July 2020) – I take a look at the post-COVID market rally in American stocks and suggest that the Big Tech stocks might have become gold proxies.

Finding patterns in markets (May 2020) – Part book review and part introduction to the logic and beauty of quantitative finance.

Ecosystems and economics

Luxury economics and reverse aggregators (September 2021) – A discussion of how the winner-take-all economics of the luxury industry are driven by a form of economics running in reverse (and what this might mean for luxury aggregators).

Cynical Theories and political energetics (September 2020) – An outline of how energy flows in an economy relate to its contemporary politics, seeking to contextualise the struggle between liberalism and more authoritarian ideologies.

Why does America feel so broken? (August 2020) – A look at the thermodynamics of complex systems and how they relate to ecosystems and economics.

Energy and sustainability

Maturity and efficiency: Progress in a post-growth world (May 2022) – A world withought fossil fuels will be a world without high-technology. Concludes with a reading list.

The conceit of synthetic biology (May 2022) – When considering the energetic efficiency of organisms, synthetic biology starts to look a bit more suspect.

The art of investing and company analysis

The hypocrisy of sustainability demands and ESG investing (September 2020) – A rant on how investors making sustainability demands to companies boils down to them not being willing to make the hard decisions themselves.

Shareholder activism and centralised decision-making (June 2020) – A rant on how investors use shareholder activism to push their responsibilities onto company management teams.

Company cultures

The qualitative nature of talent and merit (November 2020) – Some thoughts on the challenge of recognising talent (especially early on) and how valuable it is for organisations to articulate what constitutes ‘merit’.

Miscellaneous

Approximating reality (August 2020) – A love letter to knowledge and some musings on the analyst role. This post doubles as a Prolumine mission statement, of sorts.

Debt, destabilisation, and market crises (May 2020) – A look at collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) which might be at risk due to the economic impact from COVID and their similarities with the collateralised mortgage obligations (CMOs) that came under pressure during the Great Financial Crisis.