Mike Shell

Noah didn’t wait for the flood to build the ark, and neither should your portfolio. shell-capital.com/asymmetry-obse…

@MarketMike True story 😂 my Dentist follows me on here, but he probably can’t confirm with HIPAA

@MikeWShell 😭😂

Turn your volume up for this one. This is real audio from the S&P 500 futures pit at the CME during the Flash Crash of 2010. On May 6, 2010, markets were already having a rough day, down over 300 points on worries about the Greece debt crisis. Later, the bottom fell out. The Dow dropped another 600 points in about 5 minutes. Nearly 1,000 points gone on the day. About 9%, kaboom. Then 20 minutes later, most of it came right back. This clip never gets old.

@BillAckman Couldn’t agree more with that guy.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

@Ksidiii I had oral surgery that day, and first thought I would cancel. But then I realized it would be far better to be on anesthesia and laughing gas for the rest of the day. 😂

This video will always be iconic to me. If this kinda stuff doesn’t get you excited about work everyday as a trader, I’m not sure what will.

@choffstein @alphaarchitect @JeremyDSchwartz Give that credit to QuillBot.

@MikeWShell @alphaarchitect @JeremyDSchwartz You've got impressively GPT-esque tone! They must've trained on your years of writing...

Our latest 90/60 ETF idea out today This idea came from a client in our capital efficient overlays w/ gold. Problem: current portfolio was 100% US stocks --likes idea of adding international, but doesn't want to sell US core. Solution: Capital efficient Intl overlay >>>

@choffstein @alphaarchitect @JeremyDSchwartz you're welcome, but it isn't GPT ;)

@MikeWShell @alphaarchitect @JeremyDSchwartz Thanks for succinctly explaining my entire business back to me, Mike Shell GPT 👍

This isn’t really a tax strategy—it’s a timing problem. The question isn’t whether she gets the money. It’s when that capital actually matters. At 39, dollars have real utility. They can reduce fixed expenses, unlock a home purchase, extend her compounding runway, and create flexibility during the most capital-intensive years of her life. At 60, that same money shows up when most of the heavy lifting is already done. The optionality is gone. The outcome is largely set. For a $2.8M household, taxes aren’t the constraint anyway. Even above the annual exclusion, they’re typically well within lifetime exemption. The real friction is behavioral—no one reframes it this way. So the better question isn’t “how much can we give tax-free?” It’s when each dollar creates the most asymmetry across the family. That’s the shift—from inheritance to intentional capital deployment.

Couple comes in for their annual review. $2.8 million. Well invested. Solid Pension. Completely on track. I ask the question I ask everyone. "How is your daughter doing?" Mom's face changed first. Their daughter is 39. Hasn't asked for anything. Never complained. But she's been in the same apartment for six years. Daycare alone is $1,800 a month. Down payment feels impossible. Dad said "we always figured she'd get it eventually." I pulled up a simple chart. Statistically they live to 88. She inherits at 56. Maybe 60. At 60 her own retirement is eight years away. The money that could change everything at 39 arrives when her finish line is already close. Neither of them had ever seen it framed that way. The annual gift exclusion is $19,000 per parent per child. They can move $38,000 a year to her. No gift tax. No estate implications. Over ten years that's $380,000 transferred while they're healthy enough to watch it matter. Dad looked at his wife. "Why are we waiting?" Most families leave everything at death because nobody showed them the math of giving it while they're alive.

You’re both circling the right issue. If the “stack” ends up increasing equity exposure, then yes—it's mostly just leveraged global equity expressed more efficiently. That’s not diversification. That’s more of the same risk with better capital usage. The real edge isn’t the compression; it’s what you do with the freed capital. If it’s redeployed into return drivers that actually behave differently across regimes, you can improve asymmetry. If not, you’ve just increased exposure and called it innovation. The part that matters most shows up under stress: When correlations tighten and multiple exposures start trending together, the difference between “stacking” and “leveraging” becomes very real.

@alphaarchitect @JeremyDSchwartz Don't really love this for stacking more equity, but nothing really wrong with the idea of compressing $1 of global equity into $0.66 of this ETF and using the freed up capital for diversifiers.

William Eckhardt: “I know of a few millionaires who started trading with inherited wealth. In each case, they lost it all because they didn’t feel the pain when they were losing. In those formative first years of trading, they felt they could afford to lose. You’re much better off going into the market on a shoestring, feeling that you can’t afford to lose. I’d rather bet on somebody starting out with a few thousand dollars than on somebody who came in with millions….This is one of the few industries where you can still engineer a rags-to-riches story. Richard Dennis started out with only hundreds of dollars and ended up making hundreds of millions in less than two decades – that’s quite motivating.” HT: @Covel trendfollowing.com/capital/

The market is already assuming rate cuts—the plan everyone is betting on—but in business and markets, the real risk/reward shows up in what happens if that plan doesn’t play out.

@ServoWealth “Small value” isn’t a solution—it’s just what worked in those regimes. The real risk is dependence on any single outcome. Asymmetry comes from rotating across opportunities and defining downside—not replacing one static bet with another.

The scariest thing about investing isn’t bear markets. It’s “lost decades.” For the 16yrs thru 1981 and the 13yrs thru 2012, the US stock market had no real returns. Cumulative, including dividends. Thats an average of almost a decade and a half. A portfolio can survive a bad year or two. Not a bad decade or two. Fortunately the answer is simple: Small Cap Value.

Volatility Becomes a Liability After a Triggering Event shell-capital.com/selling-a-busi…

The World’s Economy Runs Through a 21-Mile Bottleneck The global economy looks diversified. In reality, enormous economic flow passes through a few narrow geographic chokepoints. The Strait of Hormuz—just 21 miles wide—moves roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply, showing how small structural nodes can transmit outsized financial risk. shell-capital.com/asymmetry-obse…

Selling a business feels like the finish line for many entrepreneurs. In reality, it marks the beginning of a new challenge: managing permanent financial capital so it can endure decades of market cycles and uncertainty. shell-capital.com/selling-a-busi…

The AI Cycle Is Shifting From Training to Inference AI’s first wave was about training massive models. The next wave is about running them continuously. Nvidia’s $NVDA push into inference infrastructure suggests the AI cycle may be shifting from episodic training bursts to persistent deployment across the economy. shell-capital.com/asymmetry-obse…

When business owners sell their company, human capital converts into financial capital. Many then make the same portfolio mistake: investing their life’s work as if nothing changed. The transition from operator to investor requires an entirely different approach to risk-taking and risk mitigation. shell-capital.com/selling-a-busi…

ARMY POINT OF VIEW FROM A HELICOPTER FLYING OVER A COLLEGE FOOTBALL STADIUM. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 AMERICA.

"Reality is...hoping that you can make a few bucks when conditions are good and praying that you’ll survive crashes, plagues, and earthquakes long enough so that someday you’ll see the pleasant light of another bull market and have some money left to play it.” - Martin Zweig

@TimmerFidelity It isn’t evidence that 60/20/20 is always superior, but when leadership broadens beyond U.S. stocks and when bond diversification is less reliable, adding additional return drivers can improve portfolio asymmetry by reducing dependence on a single correlation regime.

It has been my thesis for the past 5 years that the “new” 60/40 is more like a 60/20/20. To illustrate this the chart below shows that a hypothetical 60/20/20 portfolio, allocated as noted in the chart, could have sharply outperformed the standard 60/40 index recently, mostly due to gold and non-US equities. The table is definitely not investment advice but just my personal take on what a truly diversified portfolio might look like.