Sosnoff frames Lost Dog as trading-style "quantitative leverage" applied to pay. He describes moving from 25 years building brokerages (thinkorswim, tastytrade) to this new venture as carrying over the same analytical approach, now aimed at the wage gap and wealth inequality, without specifying a mechanism.
Lost Dog's chief AI engineer repeats the November launch and fairness pitch. Zhou Jiajun describes Lost Dog as a Chicago startup founded by Thinkorswim and Tastytrade's founders, aiming to make labor compensation fairer by adding "leverage" to pay — without detailing the mechanism.
Lost Dog's lead product manager repeats the pay-gap pitch, in French. Younes Bichra introduces himself and names Sosnoff and Sheridan as Chicago's successful founders of Thinkorswim and Tastytrade, framing the company's goal as making sure "everyone is paid at their true value."
The same Chicago Stock Exchange presenter repeats her pitch, in Spanish. Sol describes joining Tom and Scott as a host on the new streaming network, One Lucky Dog, framing its mission as bringing "economic justice" to workers.
Ferguson sees a geopolitical echo of Nixon's 1972 opening to China, but with the roles reversed. China is now the senior partner and Russia the junior one in what he calls the "axis of authoritarians," with Xi and Putin meeting more often than any two world leaders — making a Nixon-style wedge strategy against Russia unworkable, as the failed Alaska summit showed.
He predicts Trump will instead pursue a summit with Xi, possibly in Beijing next year, over Taiwan and semiconductors. He forecasts Trump will "milk" the visit on television and social media much as Nixon did in 1972.
Understanding a city requires understanding its culinary staples, and the author argues the bagel is New York's. He frames the bagel as more than kettle-boiled dough — a marker of the city's immigrant history and culture — and treats trying it as a way to understand New York better, not just eat well.
He tested every bagel on the New York Times's "best bagels" list and found the list itself flawed and incomplete. The project, including a stop at the iconic Russ & Daughters, is presented as a corrective to relying on the first social-media or Yelp recommendation when exploring a new place.
He previews an upcoming piece on Putin's economic war machine, arguing it is designed never to stop, with parallels to the Soviet Union's failures in Afghanistan. That analysis is flagged as forthcoming behind a paywall rather than argued in this post.
Ferguson calls the current era a new "Gilded Age," arguing the AI capex boom is propping up the entire US economy. He says data center investment is so dominant that without it there would be little underlying growth, drawing a parallel to the 1890s railroad capex boom that preceded the financial crisis of 1893.
He is watching for an "1893 moment" when markets could decide the AGI payoff behind hyperscaler spending won't materialize. Such a panic, he says, would at minimum force a repricing of the hyperscalers currently funding that spending.
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Ferguson says the dollar and gold, not equities, are the more telling signals right now. The dollar is down roughly 8–9% since Trump's inauguration — modest by historic standards — while gold's record highs reflect investors effectively betting on negative real rates and further dollar weakness.
He frames the key choice as between a benign 1980s-style outcome and a "nightmare" rerun of 1970s stagflation. The good scenario, which he says is what Treasury Secretary Bessent wants, pairs dollar weakness with rising growth and contained inflation, echoing the 1985 Plaza Accord; the bad one is why he says smart investors have wanted to hold both gold and Bitcoin over the past five years.
Lait argues US recession risk is underpriced. He points out cyclical consumer stocks are trading at premium multiples on the assumption of a quick earnings recovery, even though weaker consumers have been under pressure for roughly two years with high youth unemployment and social unrest — and he believes the US would already be near recession without heavy stimulus and AI-related investment propping up growth.
Lait argues the missing ingredient in fundamental equity investing today is patience. He says short-term price moves are now driven more by mechanistic, passive fund flows than by fundamental traders, so capturing real value requires building a portfolio that can wait five, ten, or even fifteen years for returns to show up.
Real bread needs only four ingredients — starter, flour, water, and salt — and commercial bread, even from upscale grocers like Whole Foods, fails that bar. The author argues most of the work is passive once the initial learning curve is cleared, so the time excuse for not baking at home doesn't hold up.
American food culture consistently trades quality for convenience, and bread is one symptom of that pattern. He connects this to an earlier essay on 7-Eleven, framing the additive-heavy commercial bread aisle as part of a broader habit of choosing convenience over what the rest of the world would recognize as real food.
The Mariners clinching the AL West for the first time in 24 years becomes a meditation on gratitude and mindfulness in success. The author notes his father endured 22 losing years and missed this one, using the team's long drought to argue that even at the height of success "the ledge is always nearby."
Wood pushes back on the view that Ethereum will eventually surpass Bitcoin. She argues Bitcoin plays three distinct roles — a rules-based global monetary system, a layer-one blockchain technology never hacked, and the founding instance of an entirely new asset class — that Ethereum does not replicate.
She says Ether still matters within DeFi, though layer-2 networks are capturing a disproportionate share of fees. This raises an open question, she says, of whether competition among too many layer-2s like Coinbase's Base will eventually push value and importance back to the Ethereum layer-1 itself.
Wood expects robotaxis to be "winner take most" rather than winner-take-all, with the US as the largest market. She cites US ride costs of $2–8 per mile versus roughly 35 cents per mile in China as the reason the US opportunity is bigger.
She bets Tesla beats Waymo despite Waymo's earlier 2018–19 commercial launch. Tesla's vertically integrated manufacturing and nine-sensor, vision-only stack is cheaper than Waymo's 23-sensor hardware, which depends on other automakers, and she projects Tesla's self-driving will be roughly 10 times safer than a human driver within a few years, nearly matching that already.
Wood argues founder-led companies are essential in the current period of rapid technological change. She sides with Musk and Zuckerberg's skepticism toward "governing by consensus," arguing consensus only works when the world isn't changing quickly.
She calls Musk the greatest innovator alive today, recalling she made the same claim publicly back in 2015. That was shortly after founding her own company, and she says the years since have proven her right.
Bands have nearly vanished from the charts — from about 41% of top chart slots in 1995 to roughly 4% by 2023, per the analysis the author cites. He attributes the collapse to three forces: streaming economics that no longer justify splitting revenue among multiple members, bedroom-production technology that removes the need for a full lineup, and labels finding it easier to market a single artist than a group.
The shift trades collaborative, organic sound for solo, electronically produced music, and the author sees that as a loss. He points to songwriting partnerships like Lennon-McCartney as evidence that some of music's best output came from friction and synergy between multiple musicians — synergy that's structurally disappearing as bands disappear.
He turns to sourdough baking, including a pumpkin loaf, as a personal counterweight to cultural and political trends he finds troubling. The baking is framed as grounding rather than escapist — a deliberate slowing-down rather than avoidance.
Stepping back from the news cycle after the Charlie Kirk assassination and the push to cancel Jimmy Kimmel is not a neglect of civic duty. The author argues that constant engagement with algorithm-driven outrage during an unusually divided moment in American life harms people without producing any corresponding civic benefit.
He offers six concrete steps for a "timeline cleanse": go outside, read physical books, create something, focus on work, prioritize family, and concentrate energy only on what you can actually control. The last point, credited to his wife, explicitly allows for continued political engagement — writing representatives, posting — but reframes most of one's energy as better spent on self, family, and home.
Feeling powerless about world events doesn't mean having no power at all. The author locates real agency in daily choices — what content to consume, which businesses to patronize, where to live — arguing that individual choices, aggregated, are what have historically shaped America.
Morrissey argues some DEI initiatives became counterproductive, developing jargon that made people feel policed rather than included. She says this left people afraid to speak freely, even as she maintains the underlying business case — that half the world's talent is women and diverse backgrounds bring valuable ideas to the table.
She sees the current moment as an opportunity for DEI to "evolve" toward more genuine inclusion. She explicitly rejects the idea that it should be a zero-sum game of replacing one demographic with another.
Morrissey's career advice inverts the usual saying to "leap before you look." She argues that in her experience, especially among women, people look too long and never take the chance, and that she knows far more peers who regret not trying something than who regret trying and failing.
Her investing advice draws on Kipling's "If": keep your head while others lose theirs. She says that means avoiding panic in fearful moments and hubris when things go well, while staying alert for the rare moment worth seizing — which she says is how her own career was made.
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The SNB's $167B tech-heavy US stock stake is currency management, not investment. Built from an $855B balance sheet that includes $42B across Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia, the position exists because Switzerland printed francs during COVID and bought foreign stocks/bonds instead of its own bonds, to avoid pushing already-low Swiss rates negative — a pattern analysts now call "foreign quantitative easing."
Repatriating the portfolio is structurally blocked by the e-franc. Since the francs used to buy foreign assets have no matching physical franc, selling those assets and buying francs to bring money home would spike the currency (deflationary for an export economy) and risk negative rates — the exact outcomes the SNB is trying to avoid; the franc is already up 15% against the dollar since the author's earlier coverage, eroding the portfolio's franc-denominated return.
This differs from Japan's carry-trade risk, where the BOJ holds its own currency's assets. The author flags a scenario where yen weakness forces Japan to choose between raising rates (breaking its fiscal position) or letting the yen fall, potentially triggering sales of Japan's $1.1T in US Treasuries and $900B in foreign stocks/bonds — a risk distinct from Switzerland's, where the SNB, owned by cantonal banks, has no clean mechanism to unwind its position at all.
Governor Hochul's endorsement of Mamdani despite her own stated disagreements with him is reckless given his thin record. The author notes Mamdani, 33, accomplished little of substance in the State Assembly and won the Democratic primary largely because he faced two weak opponents, not because of a tested governing platform.
Rent freezes have a consistent history of causing decay rather than fixing affordability, the author argues from three cases. He cites 1970s-80s New York City landlord abandonment, a Stanford-linked finding that San Francisco's rent control since 1994 cut rental supply by about 15%, and Berlin's 2020-21 rent freeze, which was struck down by Germany's Constitutional Court after housing supply collapsed.
Government-run grocery stores to fix food deserts have failed everywhere the model has been tried, per the author's examples. Kansas City spent nearly $18 million reviving a market that lost foot traffic and nearly $900,000 before closing in 2025; Detroit's 1980s-90s municipal markets shut down or were privatized; Chicago's proposal remains stalled — evidence, the author argues, that city governments aren't built for retail supply-chain management.
Mamdani's public-safety record is a specific point of concern: he previously advocated fully defunding the NYPD without specifying a replacement, and has been slow to denounce phrases like "globalize the intifada" despite New York having the country's largest Jewish population. The author distinguishes this record from Mamdani's current, softened campaign rhetoric, arguing the earlier positions are what voters should weigh.
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The September 11th anniversary was overshadowed by Charlie Kirk's assassination, which itself changed nothing about the gun debate. The author notes 357 mass shootings in America this year and that online discourse remained pro-gun even after a high-profile public killing — evidence, to him, that tragedy alone doesn't shift entrenched positions.
The author disputes Ezra Klein's New York Times claim that Kirk was "practicing politics in exactly the right way." He agrees Kirk's willingness to debate anyone was commendable, but argues Klein ignored that Kirk operated in bad faith — cherry-picking facts and staging clips of unprepared college students to manufacture outrage — so the willingness to show up doesn't excuse the method.
His hope rests on countering algorithm-driven outrage with deliberate good-faith dialogue, not on any single event resolving division. He frames this as the explicit mission of both this newsletter and The Political Prism: since outrage generates more engagement than measured argument, sustaining honest dialogue requires active, ongoing effort rather than passive optimism.
Master InvestorNick Clegg: Why free speech IS under threat in the UK
Clegg argues the UK has "overdone" restrictions on free speech. He cites reporting that police make around 30 arrests a day for online speech offenses under statutes passed before the internet "fully flourished," while acknowledging some of the speech involved is genuinely "egregious" or "ugly."
He positions himself as a classical, "Gladstonian" liberal rather than a right-wing partisan on the issue. He argues progressives on both sides of the Atlantic — most prominently in the US — have lost their "north star" on free expression over the last 10 to 15 years.
Polis PanditWhat the Murder of Charlie Kirk Reveals About Our American Crisis
Political violence in America comes from both sides, and selectively excusing your own side's violence while condemning the other's erodes the rule of law itself. The author lists violence across the spectrum — January 6th, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband by a Trump supporter 12 weeks earlier, and Kirk's killing — as evidence neither side can credibly blame only the other.
President Trump blamed the "radical left" for Kirk's death before any suspect was in custody or a motive established. The author treats this premature blame-casting as itself dangerous, arguing it inflames division regardless of what the eventual investigation shows, and calls on readers to ignore it rather than be provoked into the same behavior.
The prescribed response is to condemn all political violence unconditionally while continuing to criticize either party's conduct without fear. The author is explicit that he disagreed with much of what Kirk argued and found him prone to misinformation, but insists that disagreement is irrelevant to the moral clarity required after a political assassination.
Clegg argues the US-China AI competition won't be settled by one decisive "knockout blow." He says Silicon Valley and Washington seem to assume the US can simply outspend China in AI the way it outspent the Soviet Union in the Cold War, but he sees no equivalent "Berlin Wall moment" or AGI "Eureka" given how dispersed AI technology is and how capable China remains.
He contends the close alignment of US political and commercial power now resembles the pattern long criticized in China's own system. He argues Silicon Valley and DC will eventually need to abandon a "belligerent America first" posture of tariffs and insults in favor of working in partnership with allies.
Most self-help writing is illegitimate because its authors haven't lived what they're advising on. The author argues that someone who isn't Warren Buffett teaching you to invest, or isn't Stephen King teaching you to write, is selling secondhand advice — and that readers would be better served going to primary sources like Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder letters directly.
His alternative is what he calls "lived-help": personal essays drawn strictly from his own experience, citing five pieces — on turning 30, on marriage after reading Anna Karenina, on friendship fading after 30, on climbing from associate to executive director in finance, and on watching his father die — as the model for advice earned rather than borrowed.
He argues AI and grifters can mimic and remix advice but cannot replicate lived experience, positioning this distinction as the reason personal, first-hand essays remain valuable in a landscape increasingly filled with recycled or AI-generated self-help content.
Truss says it's impossible to know whether being a woman specifically makes politics harder. She argues factors like background and class are just as hard to disentangle from how politicians are treated.
She expresses no sympathy for Chancellor Rachel Reeves, blaming her for reversing Truss's own policies. She argues Reeves and Starmer abandoned the low-tax, pro-fracking, deregulation agenda she pursued, pointing to gilt yields now higher than during her own time in office, a worse economy, rising debt, and what she calls a coming "calamity."
Truss credits the Labour government's early US trade deal. As a former UK trade secretary who negotiated with the first Trump administration over whiskey tariffs, she says Starmer's government secured a deal with Trump before the EU did, showing the benefit of acting nimbly.
She argues Trump's bespoke dealmaking has strengthened US leverage over the EU. She says Trump upended the World Trade Organization and the broader global trading system, and that the EU — after threatening retaliatory tariffs — has had to "suck it up," reflecting a shift in relative economic power toward the US that didn't exist 30 years ago.
Most submissions to The Political Prism, the Medium publication the author edits, are rejected for failing basic requirements or being obviously AI-generated. He distinguishes AI as an acceptable research or editing tool from AI writing the actual prose, arguing the ideas and language must remain human or "what are we (the humans) doing here?"
Good political writing requires a genuine, well-supported edge, not a regurgitation of the news. He invokes Orwell's definition of political writing as a "desire to push the world in a certain direction" and Rick Rubin's line that failing to divide an audience means the work failed — but only when the perspective is backed by personal experience or quality sources.
He separates productive division from unproductive ranting: dividing an audience by making them think differently is good writing, but dividing by taking extreme positions with no acknowledgment of counterarguments is therapy, not journalism. Submissions that vent grievances without evidence or engagement with the other side, he argues, don't meet the bar regardless of how strongly the writer feels.
Mellon says AI and better batteries have made robots autonomous and mobile. AI now lets robots learn human-like tasks such as gently picking fruit, while improved batteries let them move freely and recharge themselves instead of staying plugged into the grid.
He predicts robots will eventually outnumber humans on the planet. He cites a Morgan Stanley forecast of 39% compound annual growth in robotics through 2040, expects more robots than people by 2050, and says he'd rather invest in robotics than in the Mag 7.