Founder, Market Thinker

Mark Tinker

Founder

Market Thinker

Mark Tinker has over 35 years experience as an investor, market strategist and economist. Having spent more than 20 years as a sell side strategist and being top rated on numerous occasions and surveys he moved to investment management in 2006 to run global equity portfolios in London and subsequently moved to Hong Kong in 2013 to help establish an Investment Management business for a top 20 international asset manager. He first started writing investment weeklies for his employers in 1989, developing a style characterised under the title Market Thinking and has been a regular commentator and presenter on CNBC, Bloomberg and other business channels, where his approach of rationalising market behaviour rather than making short term predictions on high frequency market data provides a welcome balance to his client audience.

Making Sense of the Narrative

Macroeconomics

<ul><li>The ‘year-end’ book squaring ahead of Thanksgiving caused a mid-month wobble around the November options expiry, which in turn caused some panic among leveraged traders, albeit not of the April variety.</li><li>The FOMO trades of unprofitable tech and everything Crypto related were hit particularly hard and while the $ briefly moved back above 100 on the trade weighted index, the pain trade at the broader market level appeared to have gone by end month.</li><li>A Rip Van Winkle analysis of November would have concluded that nothing much happened, but a lot did.</li></ul>

The ‘year-end’ book squaring ahead of Thanksgiving caused a mid-month wobble around the November options expiry, which in turn caused some panic among leveraged traders, albeit not of the April variety.The FOMO trades of unprofitable tech and everything Crypto related were hit particularly hard and while the $ briefly moved back above 100 on the trade weighted index, the pain trade at the broader market level appeared to have gone by end month.A Rip Van Winkle analysis of November would have concluded that nothing much happened, but a lot did.

<ul><li>China is building a whole new operating system for its economy, just as Apple built iOS.</li><li>We need to judge China accordingly, as Steve Job’s Apple, not Jack Welch’s GE</li><li>A multi-polar world is now one of two operating systems. We need to make sure our investments can run on both.</li></ul>

China is building a whole new operating system for its economy, just as Apple built iOS.We need to judge China accordingly, as Steve Job’s Apple, not Jack Welch’s GEA multi-polar world is now one of two operating systems. We need to make sure our investments can run on both.

China is a growth stock, not a value stock

<ul><li>Traders, Quants and Passive Investors have steadily crowded out most earnings signals for long term investors.</li><li>Quarterly reports won't be missed, and ironically their ending may help restore the role of fundamental analysis.</li><li>However, narrative trading will simply go elsewhere and developments in AI, options and meme stocks are already creating a new asset class we might call ‘Equity as Crypto’.</li></ul>

Traders, Quants and Passive Investors have steadily crowded out most earnings signals for long term investors.Quarterly reports won't be missed, and ironically their ending may help restore the role of fundamental analysis.However, narrative trading will simply go elsewhere and developments in AI, options and meme stocks are already creating a new asset class we might call ‘Equity as Crypto’.

<ul><li>We often talk of people wanting things to be Black and White and being disconcerted when they realise that they are in fact always Grey, but we would extend that metaphor to the full colour spectrum.</li><li>We want things to be clear and bright and in vivid colour, but in fact everything is, well, basically a bit brown, the colour you get when all the other paints are mixed together and thus, to us at least, it represents the current and pervading sense of muddle and confusion.</li><li>Politically, we see Red socialists embracing Green issues as their central policy, while Greens are pursuing Red Marxism (the author James Delingpole wrote a great book about this called ‘Watermelons’ as in Green on the outside, Red on the inside. But we would just merge the two colours and get brown.)</li></ul>

We often talk of people wanting things to be Black and White and being disconcerted when they realise that they are in fact always Grey, but we would extend that metaphor to the full colour spectrum.We want things to be clear and bright and in vivid colour, but in fact everything is, well, basically a bit brown, the colour you get when all the other paints are mixed together and thus, to us at least, it represents the current and pervading sense of muddle and confusion.Politically, we see Red socialists embracing Green issues as their central policy, while Greens are pursuing Red Marxism (the author James Delingpole wrote a great book about this called ‘Watermelons’ as in Green on the outside, Red on the inside. But we would just merge the two colours and get brown.)

<ul><li>It had looked like the big story for June was going to be how Build Back Better, the Globalist Mantra used to cover for a huge increase in spending on the Green Industrial Complex, was being attacked by the proposed spending constraints under a different BBB, the Big Beautiful Bill that is now in the process of going through the Senate.</li><li>Until that is we got a third BBB, the Bunker Busting Bomb as the US bombed Iran.</li><li>As we discussed in the Ratchet and the Sausage Machine, the fall out over the BB Bill between Trump and Musk was less one of direction and more one of ideological purity; Musk despises the pork barrel nature of US political horse trading while Trump 2.0 recognises what is needed to get things done - in this case fulfil his pre election promises and prevent his previous tax cuts from being reversed.</li></ul>

It had looked like the big story for June was going to be how Build Back Better, the Globalist Mantra used to cover for a huge increase in spending on the Green Industrial Complex, was being attacked by the proposed spending constraints under a different BBB, the Big Beautiful Bill that is now in the process of going through the Senate.Until that is we got a third BBB, the Bunker Busting Bomb as the US bombed Iran.As we discussed in the Ratchet and the Sausage Machine, the fall out over the BB Bill between Trump and Musk was less one of direction and more one of ideological purity; Musk despises the pork barrel nature of US political horse trading while Trump 2.0 recognises what is needed to get things done - in this case fulfil his pre election promises and prevent his previous tax cuts from being reversed.

From Big Beautiful Bill to Bunker Busting Bombs

Mark Tinker
Founder
• Market Thinker

Un-Tethered from reality?

The ‘year-end’ book squaring ahead of Thanksgiving caused a mid-month wobble around the November options expiry, which in turn caused some panic...

Mark Tinker

China is a growth stock, not a value stock

China is building a whole new operating system for its economy, just as Apple built iOS. We need to judge China accordingly, as Steve Job’s Apple,...

Mark Tinker

Dialling down the Noise

Traders, Quants and Passive Investors have steadily crowded out most earnings signals for long term investors. Quarterly reports won't be missed,...

Mark Tinker

Everything is a bit Brown

We often talk of people wanting things to be Black and White and being disconcerted when they realise that they are in fact always Grey, but we...

Mark Tinker

From Big Beautiful Bill to Bunker Busting Bombs

As we discussed in the Ratchet and the Sausage Machine, the fall out over the BB Bill between Trump and Musk was less one of direction and more one...

Mark Tinker