Another rare weekly post

Hello friends,

Here‘s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to since my last weekly newsletter to you,  about a month ago...

• I completed my third (and hopefully last) Grand Tour de Taipei 145km bike race. 

• I finished reading Trust, by Hernando Diaz (7.5/10)

• I published an essay, Why do I Preach the Glory of Risk?, which I wrote for the Write of Passage (WoP) writing course

• I started alternating my almost-daily runs between sprints and ‘zone 2’ pacing

• I made three trips to Brisbane to progress a transaction

• I published my semi-annual list of 12 Favorite Problems, also a Write of Passage assignment

• I had lunch with my mother in law (“mum”) in Singapore, and was asked some probing questions

• I met an Uber driver in Taipei really into Rammstein and the Ukraine war. We let our disagreement about Ukraine get lost in translation of my lousy Chinese...

• I got my kids back into a daily piano-practice and fighting routine

• I structured a term sheet for an energy company looking to raise $20m in secured convertible notes

• I wrote a memo about bilateral investment treaties (“BIT”), litigation funding, creeping expropriation, and how the International Court for Settlements and Disputes (“ICSID”) in Washington D.C. can enforce on the offshore assets of States gone rogue. In an era of deglobalization and resource nationalism, this might just become an exciting new asset class.

• I was contacted by a Bloomberg journalist for comments on offshore USD China credits, offered some juicy and insightful soundbites to the delight of the journalist, only to then realize that she had somehow confused me for the Chief Investment Officer of a hedge fund in Singapore.

So, my mother in law,  "mum".  We were at the Singapore Tanglin club for lunch, coincidentally sitting next to a gaggle of my biological mami’s friends, and the gentle volley of questions began.  I thought I was just partaking in a no-one’s-keeping-score chit-chat before almost getting whacked by a cross-court zinger with top-spin.  Mum reminisced that up until the moment she first met me at a lunch with my parents she had no idea her daughter had been dating me.  I played along with that fascinating rendition of history until she then said, almost in a whisper, and rapidly while going for a last bite of chicken-rice,   “Sowhenyoufirstmetmydaughter, wereyoulikeohWOWshe’s so amazing, was it like love at first sight?”  I should have immediately exclaimed YES and for good measure recounted how upon the radiance of this beauty - in fact, a mirror image of her younger self - I inexplicably tripped and then slammed onto a lamp-post (not true, I was actually sitting down, right next to her, on an airplane when we first met), but for some dumb reason I said something idiotic like "mum, it wasn’t quite like that - I mean, I was really impressed - but at the time she was going out with someone else."  “Oh but that relationship was nothing serious at all, he wasn’t really a boyfriend or anything like that” my mum responded.  Hmm, anyway, that pointless ex-boyfriend resurrection allowed me to salvage it with a true anecdote that I think paid for most of my lunch.  Mum, I said, you’re daughter has often asked me what I would do without her, and I’ve always answered her emphatically with the exact same words: “I would shrrrivel up...  and die!”  Big smile on mum’s face.  Time for dessert.  Next.  She’s not happy that we live in Taipei.  It’s not just because China will attack, and it's like Singapore in the 1960s.  Dirty.  What about the earthquakes, and where do your kids think they’re from?  Nothing I say, short of a firm relocation commitment, will really resolve this angst, so I just tried to find a way to emphasize all the reasons why I think Taiwan is so great for my kids.  But where will you go if there’s war, America or Singapore?  Of course, I fly SQ lah.. Good good.  We shared dessert.

Quick review of Trust, by Hernando Diaz.  Look, I liked,  did not love.  7.5/10 - airport readable.  Loved learning about 1920s stock market shenanigans.  Brilliant twists of a story told from many perspectives.  The hidden power of the female protagonist was thrilling, though far fetched.  The portrayal of the billionaire - his insecurities, his emotional frailty, his propensity to start believing his own made up narratives - super believable, I've seen that with me-own-eyes in a few of the UHNW-types I've had to endure. The transformation of  Ida, from fawning over Billionaire Benjamin Rask to seeing the cockroach side of him - very credible.  A few favorite quotes:

Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control. During the last week of October 1929, it took most speculators—from the high-powered financier in downtown Manhattan to the amateur housewife trading at the San Francisco Stock Exchange—a matter of days to shift from the agents of their success, with nothing to thank but their own acumen and relentless will, to the victims of a profoundly flawed and maybe even corrupt system, which was the sole responsible for their demise. A dip in the indexes, an epidemic of fear, a selling frenzy driven by pessimism, a widespread inability to respond to margin calls . . . Whatever caused the slump that, in turn, became a panic, one thing was clear—none of those who had helped to inflate the bubble felt responsible for its bursting. They were the blameless casualties of a disaster of almost natural proportions.

Telephone lines had yet to reach the Institute, radio signals were too weak in that deep valley surrounded by tall mountains, and the relay system he had designed to transmit information from New York and London to Bad Pfäfers was much too slow. The developments of the market reached him only as “news,” which is how the press refers to decisions made by other people in the recent past.

“The orchestra played the kind of music where you know what’s coming next, where you can listen ahead.” In 1929, everyone heard D F ♯ E A and, listening ahead, thought A E F ♯ D. But when I heard D F ♯ E A, the response ringing in my mind was G C B ♭ D. In ’29 no bells were knelling in my mind. But looking back, this seems like an accurate allegory of what I perceived + thought. My wager against the mkt. was a fugue that would read backwards and upside down. Where every voice would result from vertical + horizontal mirroring of orig. motif. A radical version of Musik. Opfer.

But, back to mum's question, of where to live next.  Look, I've lived in places where the energy is good, where the energy is bad, and where the energy has quickly gone from good to bad.  Conclusion: nothing beats living in a place with good energy.  I love big cities.  So, if at all possible, I hope I can always have the choice to live in a big city with good energy.  At this time, Taipei is fully in the middle of that 'big city' + 'good energy' venn diagram.

Hope you've been well,

Stefan