As a reminder investing is a game of probabilities. So even if I am getting this completely wrong, you should still rest assured that my process is rock solid.

With that said, let’s start.

Global Macro

• There won’t be a recession in nominal terms, but the world will produce less stuff, so that counts as a recession in real terms. Pundits will be confused.
• However, in the capital markets conditions are set for a serious liquidity event. Not sure if it happens, but I am entering the year with this bearish tilt, and I am not ruling out a quick rebound.
• Dollar will be strengthening again. DXY will touch 120.
• Gold will be volatile. Potentially on the upside, but I am not a buyer yet.
• No opinion on US government bonds. All the grown-ups think yields are going lower. It could get really amusing if they would not.
• Tanker rates will continue to be headed higher. Container rates will not. Shy away from VLGC because of the order book.
• China will attempt to stimulate throughout the year. But it will be hard to second guess.
• Ongoing conflict between the superpowers will not escalate visibly.

Real-Estate

• Real Estate will continue to be under pressure. More funds will be gating withdrawals.
• Real-Estate in China, Australia, Canada, Silicon Valley, you name it; these all have topped.
• Office Space and malls continue to see anemic foot fall.
• Private equity will enjoy the ability not to mark to market.

US Equities

• While in 2022 saw pretty orderly selling in public equities, we will have at least serious down day in 2023. Maybe even circuit breakers may hit.
• S&P will wander below the lows seen in 2022. I am looking at 3300 and below.
• Margins have to be down. If margins are not down in H2 2023, I will be very confused.
• WeWork and few others may file for protection.

Big tech

• You will be able to buy AAPL below $100, but I won’t be a buyer.
• AMZN will be cheaper too. Cloud spend growth will deteriorate significantly. Any small SaaS that is not cash flow positive and does not have funding may blow up.
• Venture funds in need to sell their maturing investments in 2023 will be given a leeway to postpone the transactions.
• PPC Clicks will be cheaper and less useful. Google’s revenue growth slows considerably.

Europe

• Nat gas (TTF futures) will run up in the summer again, then ease a bit, but will end the year higher.
• The ECB will continue raising rates until the BTP spreads blow up historically. ECB will then change its course, only after Italy’s government is replaced with EU friendly technocrats.

Labour

• Labour component of the production function will remain to be undersupplied until 2050.
• Labour share of income will continue to growth even though the layoffs.
• Many new unions are formed. Strikes become more common. Demands of a shorter work week start to gain traction.

Awesome Goat

• I will hit the magical number of 100 users on the platform. And I will happily spend sleepless nights fixing bugs for them.
• The accounts will probably continue to be free throughout the year.

More Serious Predictions

• People will continue to lose sense of humor. Top scientists will discuss banning jokes as these do not contribute to GDP and only confuse ChatGPT. The World Economic Forum will tacitly agree.
• The bots will finally be able to prove they are human to other bots (AI will get better in filing reCaptcha). As a result human’s will be forced to leave the web for the bots only.
• Chatter about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and JFK murder continue, but it will finally become top priority for fact checkers.
• Unrest in China calms down. And workers in the Iphone factory will be given a gym redesign.

Here are the finance related blogs that I like to follow.

I start my day here

• Harris Kupperman - AdventuresInCapitalism
• The LT3000 Blog
• Kevin Muir - The Macro Tourist
• The Felder Report
• Swen Lorenz
• Pitchfork Papers
• Philoinvestor
• The Blind Spot
• Michael Pettis
• Convex Strategies
• Crossing Wall Street

Related to Energy Commodities

• Doomberg
• Commentary - Segra Capital Management, LLC
• Bison Interests
• Commodity Context
• Jeff Combs on AtomPeace
• 808s Online

Stock ideas - bigger capitalization

• yhamilton - Analyzing Good Businesses
• Security Analysis
• Punch Card Investor
• Lionel Hutz
• Librarian Capital’s
• Charioteer Investing
• The Brooklyn Investor

Stock ideas - smaller capitalization

• Superfluous Value
• Gator Bites
• Clark Square Capital
• A Nomad’s Investment Diary
• Biz Almanac
• backoftheenvelopeinvesting
• Neto’s Notes
• Clark Street Value
• Exploring with Alluvial Capital (previously: OTC Adventures)

Analyzing Reports

• Behind The Balance Sheet
• The Transcript
• ARC University
• BedrockAI

United Kingdom

• Undervalued Shares
• UK Value Investor
• UK Dividend Stocks Blog
• Bruce Packard
• searching 4 value
• Phil Oakley’s Articles
• Maynard Paton

Europe

• Small Caps Europe
• Zephir DataBase
• Cubism Economics
• Emerging Value
• The European View on Seeking Alpha
• ValueInvestingBlog.net
• Value And Opportunity
• WertArt Capital
• Wexboy

Asia

• Undervalued Japan (previously: Value Investing Japan)
• Caveat Emptor Stocks

Bigger picture / Macro

• Rational Research
• The Overshoot
• The Macro Journal - vkmacro
• Enodo Economics
• ZeroSummation
• True Economics

Beautiful Charts

• Chartbook
• Concoda
• Avid Commentator

Deflationistas

(the smart ones)

• Jeffrey Snider
• The Last Bear Standing
• Hugh Hendry - The Acid Capitalist

Catastrophic 😍

• QTR’s Fringe Finance
• A Havenstein Moment
• Capitalist Exploits

Broader scope, multi-topical

Each blogger is unique.

• Lyn Alden
• Rational Reflections
• YWR: Your Weekend Reading
• Value Situations
• Asian Century Stocks
• Enlightened Capital
• Roiss’s Conclusions
• David Stevenson’s Adventurous Investor Newsletter
• The BondEconomics Newsletter
• Streetwise Professor
• Bismark Brief
• The Market NZZ
• Semis: Fabricated Knowledge
• Mine Safety Disclosures
• The Fat Pitch
• The Psy-Fi blog
• Intrinsic Value by Roger Lowenstein
• Capital Flows and Asset Markets by Russell Clark
• Net Interest
• Behavioural Investment
• Value Stock Geek
• BIG by Matt Stoller
• DeepThroatIPO
• Travis Wiedower
• Neckar’s Insecurity Analysis

Legends; Kinda must follow

• Felix Zulauf
• Aitken Advisors
• Muddy Waters Research
• Bronte Capital
• Gnostic Capital Management
• Marathon Asset Management
• Vltava Fund: Letters to Shareholders
• Vltava Fund: Analysis
• Praetorian Capital
• Edelweiss Holdings, Edelweiss Journal
• Horos Asset Management
• Value Investors Club: Ideas

From the bottom of my heart I would like to thank all content producers.

How I am able to read that much?

Firstly, it is not that much. Most blogs won’t publish every week or even every month.

Secondly, this is only a subset of my daily information diet. In fact, I am trying to continuously improve my reading process; and the website you are on, The Awesome Goat, is a natural conclusion of me reading too much.

Awesome Goat allows me to subscribe to all of the blogs above, but also any other web page. Awesome Goat, periodically ingests web pages for me and creates a timeline of unique text fragments as they appear online over the time. In the interface, there is the ability to mark items as seen, so I can keep track of what needs my attention and what does not. Yesterday, I added the ability to share the timeline between the friends or the team.

I am trying to build something useful here, so I am interested to hear your feedback. (Please reach out through the support ticket inside the platform or on twitter 🙏).

Thank You and enjoy the reading!

Today I would like to briefly discuss technologies powering the Awesome Goat server.

My Guiding Principles

There are plenty of design decisions one has to make building stuff from scratch. I found that I intuitively adhere to this single one: The Longevity. I understand that many side projects die before the dream of the founders materializes. And therefore Survival and longevity should be the most important consideration for all the decisions made. One example is architecture. It is just a really simple LAMP-like stack running on a single virtual machine hosted in a public cloud. It is a proven solution, and at least 30 years old design.

The second principle is to have The most Fun. That’s why I have chosen Ruby on Rails as my stack. Every day I can tinker with ruby in my emacs is the day worth living. And this fun I may ultimately help the project survive longer.

Minimalism is the last principle I shall discuss. I no longer operate on the premise that I need to address all the eventualities up front. No, it is good enough to resolve one issue at the time. This also leads to having only a single javascript library in the stack. Minimalism also helps performance and simplifies the user interface a lot.

Components & Credits

From the bottom of my heart I would like to thank the following projects.

Operating System
HTTP/S Server
Database
Programming Language
Application Server
CSS Framework
JavaScript Framework
Blog content management
Backend Queue	GoodJob
Frontend pipeline	none / Rails Assets
In memory cache	none
Configuration management	none / bunch of reproducible home grown scripts
Deployment management	none / a script

My dream is to support development of these opensource projects financially, when Awesome Goat turns profitable. In the meantime, I have over 10.000 commits in various open source projects.

Hello, 👋

The Blog ✍️

I am starting my blog in 2022! 🎊 It is never too late, I guess. 🤷

I will be writing about the following three topics:

• #capital-markets: that’s been focus of mine since about 2011,
• #product: that’s documentation of the AwesomeGoat offering
• and #building-in-public: ups and downs of an independent programmer building online business from scratch

We are living in an era of short attention span, so my number #1 goal is to write short blogs; Micro blogs that you read faster than you can even close the window.

My aspiration is to write original content. But that means you may be surprised and shocked from time to time. But my number one goal is to honestly explore the reality we are sharing on this planet.

Who am I? 👯

An Introvert (my partner calls me asperger).

A reader; conscious of my above average curiosity. As if I have been primarily motivated by understanding the world around us.

A technologist, I have contributed code to hundreds of open source projects. Snippets of my code can be found mainly in datacenters, but also at the International Space Station.

An investor. Public markets are feedback devices for testing my theories. The most precious structure for me. Here is how it works: I make a bet. And if I lose money, I know I have misunderstood the world around us. if I make money, I am less sure and I repeat the exercise.

A fan of bad jokes, but I will try to censor that.

A goat, but looking for a human.

My ideal day 🌞

My ideal day is spent in a cottage in the middle of the forest. I would grind and brew my coffee. Kiss my partner, release the kids to the garden. And then disappear to the attic with a huge monitor and read and read and read. Then perhaps in the afternoon, I would light up a hookah and create a little bit of ambiguity for someone to get the conversation going.