Prospect theory explains why people sitting on losses take more risk to break even. Trading data shows that cutting losses early protects both capital and decision-making.
24 · vii · 2026
In 1971, Herbert Simon warned that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Half a century later, humanity has built a trillion-dollar-a-year economy on exactly that scarcity - and paid for it with focus time collapsing from 150 seconds to 47, a median of 237 notifications a day for teenagers, and a word Oxford had to crown word of the year: brain rot. This piece dissects the attention-extraction machine at the economic, design, and psychological layers - and explains why AI is pouring fuel on the fire.
23 · vii · 2026
In 1985, Lee Kuan Yew told Margaret Thatcher: 'We have studiously avoided the practices of the welfare state. We saw how a great people reduced themselves to mediocrity by levelling down.' This piece traces his argument: Britain's 1945-1979 slide from superpower to 'sick man of Europe', Singapore's opposite bet that ended with the ex-colony out-earning its former ruler, and a Europe now paying for the question LKY posed half a century ago: does a society that is too safe trade away its competitive drive? Plus a deeper layer: why universal suffrage almost inevitably produces a welfare state - and why America is the exception.
23 · vii · 2026
If markets are efficient, why does arbitrage still exist? This piece runs through seven strategies - funding trade, basis trade, ETF arbitrage, FX carry, merger arbitrage, convertible arbitrage, volatility arbitrage - to prove a single theorem: arbitrage is the same risk priced differently in two places. And why this very act of 'correcting prices' occasionally lights the fuse for a crisis.
20 · vii · 2026
Don't measure Vietnam's fiscal room by public debt/GDP - without a deep local-currency government bond market, the limits that bind first sit in FX reserves, the exchange rate, and a savings pool funneled almost entirely through the banks. And in mid-2026, the banks themselves admitted they are “not flush with capital” for the coming investment cycle.
19 · vii · 2026
Global public debt is rising faster than forecast: the IMF puts it at 94% of GDP in 2025, set to top 100% by 2029 - the highest since the post-WW2 era. No major government is about to go bankrupt in any literal sense - but the more useful question is who's actually paying the price. This piece unpacks that mechanism, why the scariest outcome isn't a loud default but a decade-long quiet impoverishment, and why bond markets can stay patient for years and then lose faith in a matter of sessions.
13 · vii · 2026
A $5 dress made in Guangzhou flies halfway around the world with free shipping and a 90-day, often keep-the-item refund - and the company behind it still nets over $13 billion a year. This piece takes the machine apart layer by layer: the team-purchase and C2M model born in rural China, the Monday reverse auctions that squeeze factories, the de minimis tax subsidy Washington shut in 2025, what customers and regulators actually say, the competitive map from Hangzhou to Seattle - and the final puzzle: why does a company with 25% ROE and $74 billion in cash trade at 9x earnings?
11 · vii · 2026
The Soviet Union of the 1950s-60s grew faster than the US, launched Sputnik, and had 0% unemployment. China was the greatest economic miracle in human history for three straight decades. Both 'good times' were real - and both were bought with the same thing: subsidies that crushed price signals so that no cell would ever have to die. This post dissects how subsidies kill each price one by one - the price of capital, land, goods, labor - and what happens when the money feeding the illusion runs out: in Moscow 1986, in Beijing today, in Caracas and Colombo.
11 · vii · 2026
Open USD - a stablecoin run jointly by more than 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BlackRock - just launched, and sent Circle's stock down 16% in a single session. This piece explains the consensus mechanism behind Open USD, and why stablecoin settlement is dozens of times faster and cheaper than the correspondent-banking system the world currently runs on.
8 · vii · 2026
RWA (tokenized real-world assets) has topped $31B on-chain, led by stocks (+147% since the start of 2026) and gold ($90.7B in Q1/2026 volume). This piece explains the two tokenized-stock models, the allocated/unallocated mechanics behind tokenized gold, why both are reshaping capital-raising and investing, the capital-control bypass route for emerging economies, and the legal/custody risks few talk about - including for Vietnam.
8 · vii · 2026
Folio I of VIII