First headlines, then specifics.
Master, Minion is out! You can buy it here.
A new podcast is out, a conversation with Vitaliy Katsenelson, an investor and author of Soul in the Game. You can hear our conversation here.
Today, the WSJ published an op-ed I wrote, which you can read here.
I’ve made some shifts in my asset allocation as my view of what comes next is shifting…I am getting more optimistic about future returns. Subscriber only.
More on each below.
Master, Minion
Creating this book fell squarely in the “stay hungry, stay foolish” category. I wanted to share with you the view inside Russia and China, to immerse you in a world that is both made up and true, fast-paced and reflective. Fiction allows you to do this in ways you can’t in any other form. The author gets to show everyone’s internal dialogue, the thing we always wonder about in real life. Writing this was a lot of work but also so exhilarating.
Fiction writing is the only profession I know of where you get rewarded for making things up. This will sound kooky but it is true—the characters became very real to me over time. My hope is when you read it, the same happens to you. If you could have the key characters over for a meal you’d encounter:
Chernikov, a cagey, vicious ranking member of the Russian secret police, who cut his teeth fighting in Chechnya and is now charged with a messy clean-up job and
The Boss, a brilliant Boston-based trader who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and is convinced the US is about to implode, in part due to past sins, like slavery and
Nick, a linguistic savant, hoping to get out of the money game but instead stuck hunting down leads for The Boss following a violent murder, which leads him to
Lola, a Chinese woman who grew up in Western China near Laos, made her way to Beijing and is now stationed in Hong Kong.
There is also Ling, Leskov and Treasury Secretary Linda Brown, who collectively have navigated everything from purges to car bombs. These aren’t all nice people, but they are interesting. I’ve beta tested it with a Navy Seal, an ex CIA agent, Wall Street expert and Russian dissident, all of whom were kind enough to endorse it.
MY ASK: buy the book and if you like it, post a review. Amazon runs on algos and feeds off of “verified” purchases that post a review. If you hate the book, email me and tell me why. If you are a subscriber, send me your address and I’ll mail you a signed copy, if you’d like.
Podcast
A real-life interesting character is Vitaliy Katsenelson. A mutual acquaintance introduced us, he sent me his most recent book Soul in the Game and we decided to follow up by having a podcast conversation.
Vitaliy was born in far north of Russia and emigrated to the US as a young man. He is now a money manager. Said differently, he grew up in a place where speculation was criminal and now invests for a living.
He’s also the rare money manager that sees the paradoxical downside of pursuing money. “Scarcity could be a bad thing but it could also be a good thing and the same thing with abundance…scarcity makes me appreciate what I have a lot more,” he said. Pleasure loses meaning when it is excessive.
It’s also true that the costs to pursue abundance can be high. Take Warren Buffet. In the popular imagination, Buffet is a sage, an American cultural hero. The reality is that he is obsessive in his money pursuit, to the degree his wife abandoned him and even furnished him with a replacement from her dance group!
WSJ Op-ed
My most recent WSJ op-ed is out today. For those of you who aren’t subscribers, below is the text.
I’m American, and my wife is from Russia. We met when I was working as a reporter there in the early 1990s. My wife loathes Vladimir Putin and the security services he served. As a student in Moscow, she was expelled from university at the KGB’s behest for watching a film at the American Embassy. I’ve written on these pages before about my Moscow-based, Putin-supporting mother-in-law, Maria.
When the Ukraine war started, my wife took to rebutting the Facebook posts of Mr. Putin’s chief propagandist, Maria Zakharova. Facebook is banned in Russia, but Ms. Zakharova used it to make Moscow’s case to the world. My wife, from the safety of our Connecticut home, dared to note that Bucha and other possible war crimes did indeed occur. I too wrote articles that could be deemed critical of Mr. Putin’s invasion.
At the same time, we continued to talk to the other Maria, my wife’s mother, via Skype even though that too is banned. Maria has an eighth-grade education and is a former hospital janitor—hardly a target I thought the security services would monitor. My wife and I joked about the FSB listening in to our calls. We aren’t laughing anymore.
My wife recently underwent significant surgery. After the fact, she mentioned this with her mother on a Skype call. Shortly thereafter, Maria received a phone call on her Moscow landline from a man who didn’t identify himself.
“We know your daughter has a medical condition,” he said. “This is retribution for her traitorous behavior toward Russia.” Then he hung up.
I can’t say for sure, but who else beyond the FSB would conduct such an operation? Maria was too scared to call us. Instead she phoned an intermediary, who relayed the details and said Maria was putting a halt to our conversations and didn’t support traitors. She instinctively sided with the secret police against her daughter.
“I can’t understand her,” I said to a Russian friend.
“This is normal for Russians,” he replied.
On reflection, I realized he was right. It is like Pavlik Morozov, a touchstone of Soviet propaganda. In 1932, 13-year old Pavlik turned his black-marketing father in to the secret police. The father was promptly shot and Pavlik lauded as a hero. Relatives in turn killed Pavlik and were then also shot by the secret police.
A police state brings out the worst in people, and Maria has lived under that influence all her life. She grew up under Stalin. She has an instinctive fear of the state’s power. Certain thoughts aren’t to be thought.
What’s now the FSB has been, with some modifications, the KGB, NKVD, Cheka and Okhrana—a lineage that stretches back to Czarist times. The FSB’s purpose today is the same as the KGB’s during the Soviet era, even if the tools—social media—have evolved. They want to silence debate, to get my wife and others to stop speaking out. It’s a line of work more developed in some cultures than others.
Investment Update—How to Pay For It
The trickiest thing in investing is seeing the forest for the trees. When we invest, we are basically renting out our savings I think the forest now is this:
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