But also, a performance fee is kind of like an option in that it has an asymmetrical payoff - if you make 100 in profit, you get 20, but if you lose 100, you don't have to pay 20. All other things being equal, the expected value of a performance fee will increase with portfolio size as long as there is a chance you are right (and there is always a chance you are right).

Yes, the predicted events will have to come to pass eventually to collect on the performance fee. Nobody (not even this guy) knows when that will happen, but everyone knows that it will happen eventually, and in the meantime, you can position yourself so as to maximise the payoff when they do.

So all he's doing is timing the market. That's it. And here's the thing: it's impossible. Statistically, he and everyone else are on average bad at it. For example, over the past year he and many folk have predicted recessions, depression, stagflation and even collapse. And here in the US they've been entirely wrong. And if you invested according to them then you lost a lot of money.

The reason why this is a bad investment is because the opportunity cost of what you could be doing with your money during all the time that he's wrong up until he's right. And then you have to hope that when he's right, it makes up for all the time he was wrong. Statistically, it's unlikely.

Your best bet is to make the best investment you can that pays today, not a bet on a payday that could happen tomorrow... Time in the market beats timing the market.

"This [CBDCs] could enable central banks to encourage or discourage certain spending in more targeted ways, for example by restricting what can be spent by people in certain areas or income brackets."

There's also an argument that higher rates are better for the environment. They are a headwind to rampant consumption. They decrease investment in areas that might not generate a return, focusing resources on existing viable businesses instead of new unproven businesses that are likely to fail (wasted energy).

The forest example is very reductive and completely ignores other costs and factors: the expected price of timber and machinery in the future, and the inflation rate in general, the cost of re-planting the forest, wages, the convexity risk of the bonds (if rates appear to be accelerating higher, your bonds will drop in value), the confidence in the government, ... and so on. It also doesn't consider that higher rates curb construction loans, and thus decrease excessive demand for timber, which results in a pile up of timber inventories initially. Businesses then react by doing less logging in future.

Zero rates (or more accurately artificially low rates) encourage gambling and waste. If I can get a cheap loan, I can go buy loads of machinery and land and start logging, whereas I wouldn't have bothered if the financing wasn't available. Financial repression in China for instance allows for the cheap financing that builds enormous ghost cities. All that sand-dredging they do emits huge amounts of CO2.

Lots of people want that. Particularly those with tax bills to pay in dollars.

Why repeat the myth?

But you cannot make statistical claims about such numbers, the calculations are done over the entire very small population (if you want to abuse the maths a bit and call a time series a population), not over a sample.

Thanks for confirming me in regards to my thoughts about the people commenting.

You're not even thinking this through. These people have been exposed to so much doom-saying, they've lost their ability to actually see it coming despite evidence being right out there.

If pointing that out makes me the "bad guy", then I rather be the "bad guy" who loses useless internet points, than being the guy on your end of the equation, because how it's going to end for all the ignorant morons in here is rather predictable:

Badly.

That being said ... I'll dismiss myself from this pool of ignorance. Enjoy what's coming for you.

Here's my "I told you so!" in advance.

Soon enough you'll choke on it.