We employ Newton's First Law of Motion: What is in motion tends to stay in motion. And my 30-plus years of global macro experience have taught me the criticality of having a framework to make sense of the globe, advises Jay Pelosky, founder and principal at TPW Advisory.
Our TPW Advisory monthlies are big lifts intellectually as we aspire to absorb all that we’ve learned, bring our thinking up to speed, and develop our narrative. When the monthly represents the year-ahead outlook piece, it presents an even bigger challenge. The fact that this information management challenge is inherent in global macro investing doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.
I had the opportunity to both contemplate and discuss this ever-growing information challenge last week when I was invited to guest lecture at NYU’s Stern School of Business. An old friend and colleague invites me once a year to address his students. As always, I approached this talk as a chance to hone my message and present my current thinking.
I began by talking about global macro investing’s information challenge: How to cope with the never-ending and always-expanding amount of information, data, analysis, etc. available to one whose ambit encompasses the entire global cross-asset space. I discussed how one needs to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, to assemble a narrative, and to incorporate the narrative into the model portfolio construction.
Our TPW framework has been evolving since we first wrote about regional integration in the three main poles of Europe, Asia, and the Americas some 15 years ago. Weekly writing, our Friday Musings, has become our process - a process I learned as a sell side strategist decades ago at Morgan Stanley under Barton Biggs. It keeps us fresh, on the front end of the information tsunami, and allows us to develop and implement an evolving market narrative.
