Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. noted John Kenneth Galbraith. Of Constraints and Preferences focuses on how the world has changed over the past decade, why investment and corporate professionals are not equipped to deal with that change, and why the usual way of doing political and geopolitical analysis is inadequate in the age of uncertainty and disruption. Marko Papc has a unique world view, one that offers investors an original window on geopolitics and the notion of geopolitcal alpha. In Of Contraints and Preference, he shares this world view and explores how a constrait-based approach to looking at the world can produce some powerful investment inghts. Preferences are optional and subject to constraints, whereas constraints are neither optional nor subject to preferences. This is the maxim that makes up the constraint framework. It is simple and many will say that they inherently apply it already. But it is difficult remaining disciplined. Policymakers are like water. Predicting their behavior requires understanding of the relief of a hillside and knowing where water will find constraints to movement. e. Machiavelli was therefore wrong. Fortuna always wins. Policymakers are no better at beating fortuna with virtu than water is capable of willing itself to flow against the grain. Sp wamt constraits truly matter? Poltical, Economic & Financial, Geopolitical, and Constitutional. Papic demonstrates how to put an investment thesis together by reviewing the world through thiese constraint lenses. In the process, he shows how to use this einformation to make money or protect it. Like a sports gambler, the investor should not be rooting for one side over the other, but rather thinking about where the bookie/casino (but really, the market) has set the line. And bet against the line. After all, the job of the investor is to not predict who wins, but where the line is set"--

Description based upon print version of record.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Part One Scaffolding -- Chapter 1: We're Not in Kansas Anymore -- Cut off from the Yellow Brick Road -- The End of the Goldilocks Era -- The Tornado Hits Kansas: Geopolitical Paradigm Shifts -- The Nail in the Coffin: COVID-19 -- Welcome to Oz -- Beware of the Wizards -- Chapter 2: The Constraint Framework: Three Pillars -- Geopolitics Is Not a "Nice-to-have" -- The First Pillar: Materialist Dialectic -- Second Pillar: Diagnosticity of Constraints -- Diagnosticity in Practice

Third Pillar: The Person versus the Situation -- Fundamental Attribution Error in Practice -- The Three Pillars of the Constraint Framework -- And Now for Some Math -- Where Do We Go from Here? -- Chapter 3: The Wizards of Oz -- Overview: Intelligence and Investing -- The False Expert -- The Connected Player -- The Funnel -- The Insider -- The Spy -- You Cannot Outsource Your Fiduciary Duty -- Part Two The Constraints -- Chapter 4: Politics -- "You May Have All the Money, Raymond ..." -- ... But Boris Has All the Rhetoric -- Introducing the Median Voter Theorem

Predicting the Long-term: Welcome to the Buenos Aires Consensus! -- MVT …