Three Years.
One Unbroken
Record.

Every Sunday evening for the past three years, a market commentary has gone out to the same recipient: a nephew learning to make sense of a world in which the financial and the geopolitical have become impossible to disentangle. The format was always the same — macro picture, UK politics, equities, volatility, commodities, bonds, a trade idea, and a sign-off. All the Best

It was never written for publication. That is precisely what makes it worth publishing now.

Professional financial commentary is constrained in ways that private commentary is not. It hedges, it qualifies, it avoids the call that might embarrass the firm. This commentary did none of those things. It made direct predictions, assigned probabilities, named the moment when consensus was wrong, and — crucially — kept writing the week after, in full view of whether the previous week's call had aged well or badly.

The archive now spans March 2023 to the present. It covers the SVB banking crisis, the AI bubble from ignition to interrogation, the Yen carry trade from warning to event, three UK governments in various states of disintegration, Trump's first and second administrations, the Ukraine war's shifting geometry, and the emergence of a new and considerably less stable global order.

Four themes run unbroken through the entire archive. They were not declared as themes at the outset — they emerged from the weekly discipline of having to say something true and useful.

The end of the post-1990 global order. From the 2023 observation that the US Navy was no longer acting as a global public good, through "New Economic Nationalism" at Davos 2026, to Europe's strategic vacuum — a continuous argument that the liberal international order is not merely fraying but actively being dismantled by each of its principal architects simultaneously.

Japan as the underappreciated systemic risk. The USDJPY 150 intervention threshold was identified in the first weeks of the 2023 commentary and tracked weekly for two years. When the Nikkei fell 12% in a single session in August 2024 — the largest single-day move since Black Monday 1987 — the mechanism had been explained in advance, repeatedly.

The AI bubble: buy it, then question it. The May 2023 NVIDIA earnings spike was identified as a possible bubble starting gun when most commentators were calling it a paradigm shift. The business model questions — revenue versus compute cost, the OpenAI profitability problem — were being raised in this commentary a year before they reached mainstream financial media.

UK resilience against consensus doom. In a period when the British economic narrative was relentlessly negative, this commentary consistently pushed back — tracking the fiscal headroom building in gilt markets, the FTSE 100's strength, and the gap between establishment gloom and actual economic data.

What follows is a selection of significant calls from the archive. The purpose is not to claim an implausible record of infallibility — one entry here is demonstrably wrong — but to show the kind of thinking that produces calls that matter, and the intellectual honesty to present the full picture.

The CrowdStrike call is included deliberately. Any honest track record contains errors, and presenting only the correct calls would be a form of the very institutional dishonesty this commentary has always avoided.