Traced Thoughts

Panda Express makes no sense to me in an economic level this would have cost me more to make for myself

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Another total victory for the dip buyers. Bears in shambles. This is America. Stocks go up in this country.

this flow

I make thousands each week buying and selling options. Not because I'm smarter than anyone else. Because I built a system. Here's the entire framework in one thread:

I keep thinking I miss having someone like Steve Jobs in the industry. He had some standards. He cared about quality, coherence, and making great products. He could be ruthless and he had plenty of flaws, but it still felt like he and Apple were trying to make something genuinely great above all else. They had their opinions and you could respect that. They didn't try to force you, but make their case why they think it's good. Now tech feels driven by trend chasing, fear, scale, revenue comparisons, endless games and everyone talks their book. Investors come first, business goals next, and users last if not at all. I wish there would still someone like Steve still around

DAY IN MY LIFE SINCE YALL KEEP ASKING AND I KNOW YALL ARE ASKING 4:17 AM I wake up. No alarm. I haven't used an alarm since 2019 because an alarm is someone else's opinion about when you should be conscious and I don't take opinions from machines that can't even compound interest I lay there for about 40 seconds and in that 40 seconds I have an idea for a holding structure that would save a mid market logistics company €3.8M annually in tax liability through a transfer pricing arrangement between a domestic OpCo and an Irish IP HoldCo. License the proprietary routing methodology and customer data to the Irish entity at arm's length rates, OpCo pays licensing fees deductible domestically but taxed in Ireland at 12.5%, the delta across a €4M annual fee is real money. I don't write it down. If the idea is good enough I'll remember it. If I forget it then it wasn't worth €3.8M. Natural selection but for thoughts. Darwin would understand what I'm doing here even if you don't 4:22 AM Ice bath. 3 degrees. I bought this ice bath from a company that was going bankrupt and I negotiated the price down 60% because I called the founder directly and told him I know you're 90 days from insolvency based on your accounts payable aging which I estimated from your Glassdoor reviews where employees were complaining about late paychecks. He sold it to me at cost. People think networking is going to conferences. Networking is reading Glassdoor reviews of distressed companies and calling the CEO at 7 AM. Pair that with state UCC filings to see what assets they've pledged as collateral and you have a distressed company radar that costs nothing. Nobody does this. Everyone pays for expensive databases. I read employee complaints for free I sit in the ice bath and I think about the Ottoman Empire. I think about the Ottomans a lot. They ran a multi-entity structure across three continents for 600 years with no email and no ERP system. People can't run a 12 person marketing agency without having a nervous breakdown in a WeWork. The Ottomans had a tax farming system called iltizam where the state auctioned off the right to collect taxes in a region to the highest bidder and the bidder kept everything above what they paid. That was the first leveraged buyout. You pay a fixed price for a cash flowing asset and your return is the spread between cost and production. The LBO was invented in Constantinople in the 1400s. I might write a thread about it. I might not. The Ottomans don't need my help with their brand 4:41 AM Espresso. I have a machine that cost more than some people's cars and I feel nothing about this because a car depreciates and caffeine generates returns through productivity so on a risk adjusted basis the espresso machine is a better asset than a Honda Civic. I will not be explaining this further I'm currently reading "The Box" by Marc Levinson about containerized shipping and "The Prize" by Daniel Yergin about oil and Erta Kale Hywet's translation of the Fetha Nagast which is an Ethiopian legal code from the 1200s with genuinely fascinating commercial contract structures that predate English common law by 400 years. I read three books at a time always from completely different fields because the pattern recognition happens in the GAPS between disciplines not within them. If you're reading three business books you're reinforcing one mental model. If you're reading logistics history and energy history and an ancient legal code you're triangulating on principles that transcend any single field. You read things nobody else reads and your brain connects them involuntarily 4:48 AM I check overnight markets standing up because standing increases blood flow to the brain by 15% and I need that 15% because I am looking at Japanese industrial conglomerates trading below book value on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Corporate governance reforms from 2023 are forcing these companies to unwind cross shareholdings and return capital to shareholders. There are industrial companies in Japan at 0.6x book value with 30% of their market cap in cash and cross shareholdings they are legally pressured to unwind. The basis swap makes the hedge expensive but if you structure through a Singapore entity the withholding tax treatment changes the math entirely I am thinking about this while simultaneously thinking about whether the Ottoman tax farming model could be applied to modern SaaS distribution where you sell regional exclusivity to operators who keep the spread above a guaranteed minimum. I am basically an incubator for financial structures at this point. I am the womb. The ideas are the babies. I'm not going to sit down while I'm in labor 5:00 AM I open email. 247 unread. I delete most of them based on font choice alone. If your email is in Calibri you have nothing to say to me. Calibri is the font of people who have never changed a default setting in their life which means they've never questioned anything which means their ideas are as factory preset as their font. I only read emails in Georgia or Helvetica. This eliminates 80% of my inbox automatically and the remaining 20% is where all the money is There is one email from a broker I respect. Manufacturing company. €14M EBITDA. Owner retiring. The best acquisition targets right now are companies where the founder is 60 plus, has no succession plan, has never professionalized management, and has all the institutional knowledge in their head. These companies are systematically undervalued because the buyer pool is scared of key person risk. They see the owner leaving as the risk. I see the owner leaving as the catalyst to install systems and AI that should have been installed a decade ago. Key person risk is the discount. Eliminating the dependence through automation is the value creation. You are buying the problem and selling the solution to the same business 5:15 AM I am looking at something that is going to make you feel physically ill about how you spend your time There are municipalities across Southern Europe right now that are financially distressed. Spain. Portugal. Southern Italy. Greece. Their budgets are destroyed. They can't maintain their own water infrastructure. Pipes are leaking 40 to 60% of treated water before it reaches a household. They are literally losing half the water they process into the ground because the pipes were laid in the 1960s and nobody has replaced them These municipalities are legally allowed to grant long term concession rights to private operators. 25 to 50 year concessions to operate, maintain, and collect revenue from the water distribution network of an entire region. You are being handed a regulated monopoly on water delivery to every home and business in a geographic area for half a century. In exchange you fix the pipes I am in the process of acquiring concession rights in a region I will not name where the municipality is losing €11M annually in water that leaks out before it can be billed. The current tariff base generates approximately €38M in annual billings except they're only collecting about €22M because of the leakage and metering that doesn't capture actual usage Infrastructure rehabilitation costs approximately €45M over 5 years. I am financing this through the European Investment Bank at 1.8% fixed for 20 years because the EIB is desperate to deploy capital into Southern European infrastructure and the terms are so favorable it borders on charity. Rehabilitation reduces leakage from 55% to 12%. This alone recovers approximately €14M in previously unbilled water. Combined with smart metering total billable revenue goes from €22M to approximately €36M annually The structure is a Luxembourg SCSp holding the concession operating entity. Participation exemption on distributions. Regulated tariff revenue escalating with inflation for 35 years. EIB debt non recourse to anything except the concession assets. Operating margins stabilize at approximately 40% after rehabilitation. Annual free cash flow roughly €14M on a €45M total investment financed almost entirely with 1.8% debt €14M in annual free cash flow. Inflation protected. From a monopoly concession. For 35 years. Financed at 1.8% The NPV of this cash flow stream at any reasonable discount rate is €180M to €240M. On €45M invested. Almost none of which is my equity This is a water concession in a region most people couldn't find on a map that I found by spending six months reading EU municipal budget reports published in languages I don't speak and running them through translation software at 5 AM The Ottomans called this tax farming. I call it concession acquisition. Same model. Pay a fixed cost for the right to collect revenue in a defined territory. Return is the spread. The LBO was invented in Constantinople 600 years ago I think about this and I think about some guy named Dave in Florida who retired from a logistics company and took €7.8M in annual fuel optimization knowledge with him in his brain and I think about the PE operating partner who doesn't know what a PropCo is and I realize that institutional knowledge is stored in the wrong places everywhere. In municipal budget offices. In retired employees' heads. In ancient legal structures nobody reads. The information is all there. Nobody is looking at it 5:34 AM Gym. I only do compound lifts. Isolation exercises are the fitness equivalent of running a single entity C corp with no subsidiaries. You're working one thing at a time. Compound lifts work multiple muscle groups simultaneously which is the physical manifestation of a multi-entity holding structure extracting value through parallel related party transactions. When I deadlift I am my own leveraged buyout. The barbell is the debt. My spine is the equity. My legs are the operating entities. This metaphor is perfect and I will not be taking questions 5:36 AM A man at the gym asks me what I do. I have given a different answer every single time someone asks. Today I tell him I am a commodities speculator who primarily trades in rare earth minerals and human attention. He nods. Nobody at this gym understands what I do including me sometimes. I am doing things that don't have job titles yet. Kanye invented the celebrity architect shoe designer genre. I am inventing the financial engineering shitposter to pipeline operator genre. We are the same except I have better margins 6:15 AM Post gym shake. I negotiated a bulk discount with the supplement company by sending them a 9 page pitch deck on why they should give me product at cost in exchange for what I described as "implied brand association with an emerging cultural figure in the alternative finance space." They said no. I bought the supplements at full price. But the pitch deck was excellent and I stand by it 6:30 AM Shower. 7 minutes. I timed it. I used to take 12 minute showers and one day I calculated the opportunity cost and almost had a medical event. 5 extra minutes per day is 30.4 hours per year. I billed €22,000 per hour last quarter on one specific engagement which means my shower inefficiency was costing me €668,800 annually. Obviously I wasn't billing anyone for shower time but the principle matters. Waste compounds. I see it everywhere now. In showers. In traffic patterns. In the way my neighbor waters his lawn at 2 PM when evaporation rates are 3x what they'd be at 6 AM. My neighbor is running a negative margin irrigation operation and doesn't know it The most valuable thing you can do at any company is quantify the cost of the current process before proposing a new one. Don't walk in saying AI can improve your routing. Walk in saying your current routing costs €7.8M more annually than optimized routing would and here are the 6 data sources. The specificity creates urgency. Nobody panics about abstract inefficiency. Everyone panics about €7.8M in quantified annual waste. Same problem. Different framing. Completely different reaction from the decision maker. You sell the math not the technology 6:37 AM I get dressed. All black or navy. I decided this in 2021 and I have not thought about clothing since. Every decision about something that doesn't generate revenue is a decision you didn't make about something that does. Steve Jobs understood this. I understand this. The difference between me and Steve Jobs is that he made consumer electronics and I make money through financial structures. Also he is dead and I am alive which gives me a significant competitive advantage in the current market 6:50 AM I check Twitter. Someone has posted "Day 47 of building my AI startup in public" and their startup writes Instagram captions. I look at this post for a long time. I zoom in on his face. I'm trying to understand what he sees when he looks at the world. Because he and I are looking at the same world and he saw Instagram captions and I saw a €120M EBITDA improvement opportunity across PE portco operations and I need to understand how two human brains process the same reality and arrive at conclusions that far apart. I think it might be related to the Ottoman tax farming thing but I haven't connected those dots yet. Give me a week 7:00 AM Call with my attorney. €2,200 an hour. Transfer pricing documentation between my OpCo and my Irish IP HoldCo. Transfer pricing studies have a shelf life. The tax authority expects contemporaneous documentation reflecting current market conditions. Most people use a study from 3 years ago and think they're covered. They are sitting on a time bomb. Updated study costs €40K to €80K. Losing the dispute costs the entire tax benefit plus penalties plus interest which in my case is approximately €11M. I update every 12 months. The documentation is the asset. Not the structure. The documentation of the structure My attorney says probably we're fine. I say definitely we're updating. The difference between probably and definitely is the difference between aggressive tax strategy and a conversation with the tax authority that you lose. I once argued with a toll booth operator for 6 minutes about whether the senior discount structure constituted an illegal tying arrangement under antitrust law. I was wrong. But I was confident. And in finance confidence that is well documented is functionally indistinguishable from being right 7:48 AM Second call. successor of an business, inherited from his grandfather. Wants help with his business. €18M EBITDA. 16% margins. Three facilities worth about €22M. I ask him if they've separated the real estate into a PropCo. He asks what a PropCo is I hang up. I call back 30 seconds later because that was rude You take the real estate the operating company owns and spin it into a separate legal entity. PropCo buys the real estate at fair market value financed with a non recourse mortgage. OpCo leases the facilities back at market rates. Three things happen simultaneously. Real estate moves off OpCo's balance sheet into a bankruptcy remote entity creditors can't touch. OpCo gets a new annual deduction through lease payments. You can finance the real estate separately at better rates because non recourse real estate debt has better terms than corporate operating debt. On €22M in real estate you're looking at €18M in mortgage proceeds flowing to OpCo plus €1.2M to €1.5M annually in lease deductions This man earns €1.8M base plus carry. He didn't know what a PropCo was. I think about this and I think about Dave in Florida and I think about the Ottomans and somehow all three of these are the same thing. Institutional knowledge stored in the wrong places 8:30 AM Breakfast. Four eggs. I crack them with one hand because I taught myself in 2022 and it saves approximately 1.3 seconds per egg which is 31 minutes per year which is not meaningful financially but the discipline of optimizing something that small transfers to optimizing things that are large. The person who optimizes egg cracking is the same person who finds €3.8M in Irish tax structures. Same muscle. Same pathology. I have simply chosen to direct my pathology toward activities that generate eight figure returns instead of activities that generate restraining orders

LPs won’t tell you “no.” They’ll give you a sentence you can spend 3 months overanalyzing. Here’s what they actually mean 👇

just spent 2 weeks in china. went into it thinking we're cooked. came back more bullish on america than ever. here's why: 1. chinese citizens are way more chronically online. on the subway, train, anywhere, literally everyone is glued to their phone. gaming, short form, wechat. "don't walk and look at your phone, it's dangerous!" announcements flood crowded areas. their tiktok isn't any better, its still garbage, soft-core porn, etc. 2. everyone's using AI — deepseek, kimi, doubao. but nobody's afraid of losing their job to it. here it feels like there's an existential crisis every week. in china, nothing. i think the CCP won't let companies mass-layoff workers. great for short-term stability. terrible for long-term competitiveness on a global scale. 3. china doesn't produce weirdos. i sat in on a class at tsinghua (china's MIT). not one student spoke unless the professor read their name out loud. no questions. no debate. chinese education produces world-class executors, not contrarians. it does make it a safer place to live though. 4. china doesn't have christianity but it has something america doesn't have: a shared story everyone believes in. every person age 25-70 watched their country go from abject poverty to skyscrapers in one lifetime. that kind of collective proof has a deep unifying effect. compare that to how divided we are right now. america has a huge meaning vacuum that needs to be filled. nevertheless, i return back to my home in america reinvigorated. because everything i saw confirms one thing: china optimizes. america innovates. and the innovators always win.