Long-form observations on capital, history, and the structures that persist beneath the noise of markets — written from a practitioner's vantage point.
This proposal did not begin as a policy idea. It began as a data problem — the operational friction encountered when building systematic, machine-readable analysis of Chinese listed companies. What emerged was the recognition that this friction is structural, and it is costing China's equity markets a valuation premium they have already earned on fundamentals.
China's capital markets have spent a decade opening their financial channels. Stock Connect, QFII expansion, MSCI A-share inclusion — each has incrementally lowered the barrier for foreign money to enter. Yet foreign institutional ownership of A-shares remains structurally depressed relative to China's weight in global GDP and corporate earnings. The standard explanations are real but incomplete. The underappreciated constraint is information liquidity.
A US 10-K is not merely a legal document. It is a data product — structured in XBRL, centrally hosted on EDGAR, consumed simultaneously by algorithms and analysts within minutes of filing. A comparable Chinese annual report arrives as a Mandarin-primary PDF, hosted across three separate exchange portals, with ad hoc announcements in variable formats that resist automated parsing.
Read Full EssayHistory is the long memory that markets pretend not to need. The investor who reads Braudel alongside a 10-K is reading two different timescales of the same thing: the economics of human organisation under constraint.
Perspectives returns repeatedly to a set of deep structural questions — long-cycle forces that shape market outcomes over decades, not quarters.
How financial systems are structured, who controls the plumbing, and why the infrastructure of capital intermediation shapes outcomes as much as the capital itself.
Market StructureInspired by Braudel's materialist history — the sub-surface forces of demography, geography, and resource economics that operate below the visible economy.
Longue DuréeWhere capital concentrates, why it moves, and the spatial logic of economic development that persists across centuries of political change.
GeopoliticsThe historical pace of technological adoption, why institutions lag, and what this gap implies for investors trying to price disruption before it completes.
Innovation CyclesAcross every era, the ability to process information faster or more accurately than peers has been the defining edge — exploring its current form in quantitative and AI-enhanced investing.
Information TheoryThe contested boundary between state authority and market autonomy — a tension that has never been resolved and is currently being renegotiated across every major economy simultaneously.
Political EconomyRandom musings — each a reference point, not a prediction.