I am known by a number of names, some derogatory, mostly descriptive. I started life as a Clive, now I answer to Bear.
I spent 45 years inside the investment business. I was taught the Gaussian way of the world, efficient markets, normal distributions, optimal portfolios et al, and spent most of a long career building portfolios on that learning. Then I read Mandelbrot, looked at what the markets really do, and found that the bell curve is the wrong shape for the thing it claims to describe. Markets are fractal and fat tails aren't anomalies. Black Monday in 1987 being a case in point. The 25% drop in the Dow was a 20-sigma event; it should only have happened once in a number of years vastly larger than the age of the universe, according to Gauss.
I left, for several reasons. Officially I retired; hasn't happened yet! The main inspiration was to ride around the world on a motorbike. So in 2009 I rode the Long Way Round, a la McGregor and Boorman. London to New York via Mongolia and Siberia. 21,000 miles and 17 countries in 4 months.
I write The View from the Bridge, which had its beginnings when I was working in Marlow, which has a splendid bridge that begat the title.
I day-trade global equity indices on my own account: the S&P, the FTSE and the DAX. It tops up the coffers — yes I make money trading — and keeps me close to the market action that I write about.
On top of which I run my own family office. Sounds impressive; it's my pension fund. I count myself lucky to have discovered Hedgeye, which confirmed what I already knew deep down, that Modern Portfolio Theory was a crock of the proverbial. Keith McCullough the CEO is, shall we say, an acquired taste, and I have acquired it; I suggest you do too.
The View from the Bridge goes out regularly on Substack. Your definition of the word may differ. I only write when I feel I have something useful to impart, particularly for second and third-order effects of events, the consequences of which tend to show up after the news cycle has moved on.
I concentrate on framing outcomes as probabilities, because the future isn't knowable and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Yogi Berra famously said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" and "The future ain't what it used to be". Follow the money, in market nomenclature the flows, and you will be on the right track.
The newsletter is free. I may monetise it in future; who knows.
Markets are only half of it. The rest is self-knowledge, which turns out to matter far more to how people invest than any system does.
I use Human Design as my inbuilt guide to making correct decisions and being the best expression of who I really am. I'm a 5/1 self-projected Projector, which took me 50 years to discover and explained where I had been going wrong.
I use Conscious Language, learned from Cynthia Lengefeld, to catch what my own sentences are doing behind my back. Your body takes everything you say literally.
I sit with inquiry, which I first met through Salvador Poe. And I keep the body moving: the Five Tibetans and Original Strength, most mornings, for years. Real food, cooked from scratch, eaten with my wife Bambaji, who is a Human Design teacher, a far better cook than I am and an inspiration to everyone who crosses her path.
That's what the workbook is. Everything above, written down properly, with the exercises that made it stick.
I'm not a financial adviser and I don't give advice. I have nothing to sell you except a modestly priced workbook, and I'd rather you read Part I free and decided it wasn't for you than bought it on a whim.
I don't do price targets, hard predictions, or the guru act. If the data changes, I change my mind. What do you do?