Jen Martin

Today I sat down with Jordan Levi, the Kosher Cowboy - a Jewish kid from the Chicago suburbs who became the largest cattle feeder in America. Jordan runs Five Rivers Cattle Feeding with a capacity of nearly a million head. He started as a runner on the Chicago Board of Trade at 13 and found his way to cattle through a hedge fund that sent him to a feedlot in Amarillo. He showed up in Gucci loafers and never left the industry. We go deep on how he trades the curve instead of making binary bets, why the cattle supply is the tightest since the 1950s, and what it takes to manage risk on nearly a million animals across 13 feedlots. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. 02:16 - The Belted Galloway 03:51 - The Kosher Cowboy 08:05 - Pulling value of the futures forward 11:43 - Learning Cattle trading 16:48 - Daily average gain in cattle 18:20 - Jordan’s Eureka moment in the cattle industry 21:08 - What does trading in animals actually look like? 27:05 - How Jordan defines his ROI in trading cattle 31:17 - The Cattle curve 33:37 - The state of the cattle market 42:10 - Buying the largest cattle feeder in the world 46:09 - Grass vs. grain fed cattle 49:15 - Predictions for the cattle supply over the next 10 years 50:54 - The international market 53:17 - Trading frequencies and macro thesis 01:00:27 - USA beef vs. international beef 01:05:21 - The cattle supply chain 01:07:32 - The future of auction yards and ranchers 01:09:40 - AI in AgTech 01:12:52 - The biggest problem facing the industry 01:14:42 - Livestock as a commodity that dies and how that impacts trading theory 01:20:51 - Is there a market for new entrants into cattle? 01:21:41 - Beef prices and the impact of a closed border on the industry 01:24:39 - Jordan’s biggest ideas for the industry 01:26:49 - Philanthropic efforts 01:31:24 - a day in the life of Jordan 01:26:42 - Risk management in cattle 01:41:17 - Does what you do show a leading indicator to the broader health of the American economy?

The new Pope has a degree in mathematics from Villanova University. This guy doesn’t just understand sin. He understands cos.

The federal government doesn’t ‘give’ money to Harvard. The $2.2 billion in frozen payments isn’t for Harvard sophomores’ tuition or library books. The US government is buying services from Harvard: scientific & medical research & development. These aren’t ‘woke donations.’ They are contracts. Proposed, reviewed, awarded, with metrics and deadlines and standards of performance. Harvard is a government contractor in that sense — lab by lab, scientist by scientist — just the way any other company is a contractor. That’s true of Columbia’s $400 million in ‘frozen’ contracts — and all the rest. R1 research universities do crucial research the federal government can’t do itself, but that we as a nation have decided we need done. Mission driven. Pioneering. Essential. They can’t be done — as Sean Hannity just suggested — at community colleges & vocational schools. That’s not what the $2.2 billion is being spent on. …You could Google it. Of course.

There’s never a bad time to point out the best basketball player on Earth is a 300-pound Serbian guy who passes like Magic Johnson and hits 42% of his threes.