The recent Viktor Shvets of Macquarie Capital preso "How to Embrace the Chaos Clouding Markets" was well worth the watch. Not sure I agree with all that he says, particularly on "moats no longer existing", but the other points he makes helps to make sense of the chaos today.

My Key Takeaways

• Today and our times are “truly different” - won’t go back to traditional thinking, traditional investment style
• Need to change about how we think of societies, politics, history, economics, investment, investment styles
• “Fujiwara effect” - where 2 or more hurricanes/strong forces are close enough that they merge to displace everything very quickly/change the world so much such that it is different/unrecognisable to the generation before the present
• The old world ended/changed again around the GFC in 2010 - anything prior to that is “no longer the case” - this change happens frequently every 50-100 years
• Technology has disrupted the functioning of labour and capital, and how they interact
• The current Information Age goes back to the early 1970’s, but it did not become disruptive until the late 1990’s, and will become even more disruptive in the next 10-15 years
• AI is reaching “escape velocity” - final stage of AI/technology is to achieve “singularity” where you will not be able to tell the difference between human and non-human contribution - at least 15-20 years away, but it is a clear path
• All the technological innovation is coming with rapidly declining marginal cost

• Combo of technology and finance starting to displace societies contributing to a massive rise in inequality - anybody close to digital assets and capital have become incredibly wealthy vs anybody who relied on wages and household chattels have become incredibly poor, relatively speaking - “you are either 0.01% or a peasant, nothing in between” - that creates a very explosive social and political climate - this translates to economic, trade, geopolitical uncertainty
• Too much capital chasing diminishing returns - Capital is ~5-10x underlying economy
• Buffet “moats” now no longer exist - you can pierce through those moats very quickly by using the Fujiwara effect - combining technology and financialisation to accelerate productivity as a company at a much faster pace than the peers or frontier in your industry or adjourning industries
• Macro is becoming so complex and touches on so many elements that it becomes more irrelevant
• Abundant capital + how quickly you can create and destroy companies is unique - this combination implies that you might have rolling bubbles rather than 1 bubble collapsing, bringing down the market and an extensive period of recuperation 

Key portfolio themes:

• Gold is simply insurance against a dystopian future