Blog Posts

The rises and declines of empires is important to understand because we’re in the middle of a big shift going on currently. Studying how these have worked is important in terms of understanding how it impacts capital flows, and the risks and attractiveness of different assets, asset classes, currencies, and different countries.  Below we’ve distilled […]

Tapering is the process of a central bank reducing its ownership of financial assets. It is sometimes called quantitative tightening (QT) or “rolling off its balance sheet”.  First, we’ll start with an overview of the circumstances behind tapering’s role in economic management (monetary policy).  Then we’ll move into the big picture forces of what major […]

Options strategies for income generally entail concepts such as the covered call and other “covered” concepts involving some combination of having a net position in the shares and options written against it (e.g., short calls if long or short puts if short). A trader or investor might try to squeeze more income out of a stock […]

Options are more advanced instruments that can help you improve your portfolio’s risk/reward when employed well. In this article, we’ll cover a specific long-short strategy for options trading to help improve your reward relative to your risk. It uses a combination of both options spreads and a covered call or put position in the underlying.    […]

In a separate article, we covered the current status of the basic reserves today; namely, the USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, CNY, and gold, as the main few. In this article, we’ll cover reserve currency history as well as reserve currency status, the benefits it brings, and how it’s lost. We are currently in a precarious […]

What is the difference between price and value? The price of anything is the money and credit spent on it divided by the quantity. While the value of something is often taken to just be the price as represented by a certain unit of accounting (dollars, euros, yen, pounds, etc.), they are different.  Fundamentals of […]

The PBOC, ECB, Federal Reserve, and Riksbank all are looking to develop central bank digital currencies (CBDC). In this article, we’ll cover the status of each, the uses, and the implications. CBDC is one of the most important topics in the currency markets at the moment. It has implications not just economically and technologically, but […]

Our brains do a poor job of processing exponentiation. But exponents and non-linearities are a big part of trading, investing, and financial markets. As a trader, your job involves assessing reward relative to risk and getting the former as high as possible relative to the latter and risk as low as possible in an absolute […]

After the large drop in oil, it’s prompted the question: can oil prices go negative? On the surface, oil should always have some residual value. It’s the world’s most important commodity. So it’s commonly assumed that oil must have some type of floor price. However, there is no reason why crude oil prices can’t go […]

The uranium market is much smaller than gold, silver, and other traditional commodity markets. The buying and selling of uranium typically occurs among utility firms with nuclear power plants, mining companies, specialist traders, and a small number of hedge funds and institutional investors.  Money managers, however, are increasingly looking to get into more abstruse markets […]