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On September 17, 2026, with the yen near 160 and hike bets rising, Collective members joined Vincent Deluard and Louis-Vincent Gave for the last hours before the Bank of Japan’s decision, hosted by Robert Mullin. We scheduled it in the evening so Louis could join from Hong Kong, where it was already Friday morning. The next day the BoJ raised its policy rate to a 31-year high and the yen fell on the decision. Vincent Deluard is director of global macro strategy at StoneX, where he is known for a quantitative, data-first read on markets and a widely followed weekly note. He recently came back from three weeks in Japan, which is part of why the timing was too good to pass up. Louis Gave co-founded Gavekal Research with his father Charles and Anatole Kaletsky, and runs it from Hong Kong; he reads markets through geopolitics and history as much as through price, writes at a pace few can match, and has been our go-to on Asia for over a decade. Our resident commodities expert Robert Mullin, CIO & Founder of Marathon Resource Advisors, hosted the conversation. Robert has decades of experience investing across natural resources and real assets, and he is the guy in the room who always shows up with thoughtful questions. This is the third of three conversations in Vol. 2 of the Collective Roundtable Sessions: live discussions that put people who joined Collective separately together around a single question. Enjoy the full conversation, and consider joining as a paid Insights subscriber so you can join calls like these live in the future. Not a paid subscriber yet? Paid subscribers get live access to The Roundtable Sessions, plus the On the Phone With briefings, the Collective Conversations filmed at our events, and the Common Thread. Join us to be in the room for the next one. What They Discussed A framework of three prices. Louis said most financial assets are driven by US bond yields, energy prices and the US dollar, and that getting the direction of those three right tells you where to be positioned. He noted that yields, energy and corporate spreads were all rising, conditions that would usually strengthen the dollar, and that the dollar had not strengthened. The currency signal. Louis pointed to the yen, Korean won and renminbi rising even as US yields and energy rose, which he said usually pressures those currencies rather than lifting them. He read it as the market repricing the US, and noted how cheap those currencies had become. The US fiscal picture. Louis said foreign capital is getting harder to attract, citing a proposal to send $5,000 checks weeks before an election and twin deficits near 10.5 to 11 percent of GDP. He called the US, in that context, an “unserious country,” and put the foreign funding the dollar needs at roughly three to three and a half trillion dollars a year. The yen call. Vincent said Japan’s primary surplus and rising tax collections meant the Bank of Japan could raise rates without the crisis many expected, describing it as a normal day rather than a debt apocalypse. The Bank raised its rate to a 31-year high the following morning. Louis added that the larger catalyst, in his view, would be a possible upgrade of Japanese debt in 2027 even as US debt is downgraded. The flows. Louis described roughly seven trillion US dollars sitting in Hong Kong and Chinese bank accounts, and Japanese assets abroad worth about 82 percent of Japan’s GDP. He asked who the marginal seller of the yen, renminbi or won would be if that capital began coming home, given how low foreign allocations to those markets are. The “compute dollar.” Louis traced a US pitch to the Gulf, that the petrodollar would become a “compute dollar” as access to American AI required dollars, and said China’s move to give AI away undercut that idea. He tied it to a broader shift in the security-for-financing arrangement between the US, the Gulf and North Asia. Positioning. Vincent said his energy, financials and healthcare allocation was, for the first time in five years, working all at once, which he did not read as a healthy sign, and flagged a “shadow VIX” masked by unusually low correlation over the summer. Asked what a deeper US slowdown would mean for the deficits, Louis said the numbers would be too large to fund except by the Fed, and that the dollar would fall in the next US recession. Notable Quotes “China has just put a bullet through the head of the idea of the compute dollar.” — Louis Gave “In the next US recession, the US dollar goes down. A lot.” — Louis Gave “My guess is that the Bank of Japan will raise rates, and it will not be the debt apocalypse the market has been pricing; It’ll just be a normal day and life will go on.” — Vincent Deluard, on the BOJ hike “Both McDonald’s and Home Depot are down by thirty percent and the S&P is at an all-time high. It’s never happened before.” — Vincent Deluard Takeaways * Both read the recent strength in the yen, won and renminbi, against rising US yields and energy, as a signal about the dollar rather than about Asia. * Vincent’s view that the Bank of Japan could raise rates without a crisis was borne out the next day; the structural case both make, a repatriation of Asian savings and a weaker dollar over time, is a longer story. * Louis & Vincent’s positioning leaned the same way: energy and financials, caution on the US, and attention to who funds US deficits as foreign appetite shifts. Resources & references * Vincent Deluard’s Global Macro research at StoneX, including his Japan reports and the short-euro / long-yen note referenced on the call. LINK * Louis Gave and Gavekal Research, including his note on US electoral risk. LINK * Robert Mullin, Marathon Resource Advisors. LINK The Full Roundtable Sessions, Vol. 2 Watch the full suite of Vol. 2 of the Roundtable Sessions Not a paid subscriber yet? Paid subscribers get live access to The Roundtable Sessions, plus the On the Phone With briefings, the Collective Conversations filmed at our events, and the Common Thread. Join us to be in the room for the next one. Remember, this post is for informational purposes only. For anything investment-related, you should consult a qualified financial advisor who can help assess your individual needs, risk tolerance, and goals. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

On September 10, 2026, Collective members joined Matt Zeigler, Kris Abdelmessih, Shaun Martinak and Izabella Kaminska for an hour on tokenization: what it actually is, what it changes about how markets work, and where it goes next. The thread started on a member call in May, when Kris said he felt behind on the topic; Shaun, who builds it at Coinbase, walked us through it on a later call, and it was worth putting the two of them in a room with Izabella, who follows where the money moves when market structure changes. Kris Abdelmessih is a longtime options and derivatives trader who once worked the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a specialist. He thinks in market structure and has a habit of explaining it through pop culture, and he writes the Moontower newsletter on options and probability. Shaun Martinak is head of tokenization at Coinbase, and brings an engineer’s read on how the plumbing actually fits together. Izabella Kaminska spent years at the Financial Times, where she edited FT Alphaville, and now writes The Blind Spot and The Peg; she follows the messy, human side of money that the technologists tend to skip past. Matt Zeigler is a master at hosting conversations with people who haven't met, but should. Matt is a managing director at Sunpointe Investments, editor at Panoptica, he hosts several podcasts, and creates a variety of stunning content at Cultish Creative, where he connects markets to art, music and the craft of thinking clearly. Between the three guests, we had the technology, the market plumbing and the money itself covered; which is what let the hour move from what tokenization is to what it actually changes. This is the second of three conversations in this rendition of The Roundtable Sessions: live discussions that put people who joined Collective separately together around a single question. Not a paid subscriber yet? Paid subscribers get live access to The Roundtable Sessions, plus the On the Phone With briefings, the Collective Conversations filmed at our events, and the Common Thread. Join us to be in the room for the next one. What They Discussed Why the interest now. Shaun described tokenization as a missing layer of the internet, the ability to own something and prove it is unique, which he said the internet has lacked. In his account the technology itself matured years ago; what changed recently is regulatory acceptance, which is what lets large institutions build on it. How far it goes. Shaun described adoption as gradual and partial: portfolios moving from no exposure to one percent, then more, but in his view never to a hundred percent, because legal and cross-jurisdictional complications keep some assets on the old rails. He put current adoption below one percent. What actually changes. Izabella said tokenization does not change the underlying instruments much; its main effect is cost, saving money on settlement and clearing by moving those functions onto a shared network. Kris agreed that the innovation sits under the hood while the end product looks the same, and, in competitive businesses, becomes cheaper for the customer. Who funds the rails. Izabella described a shift in who provides the working capital for the system: in the current model a bank’s balance sheet finances the plumbing, while in this one the speculators holding the underlying tokens do. She said that transfers power from bank balance sheets to speculators, and noted that how reliable that liquidity is under stress is not yet known, which is part of why regulators are cautious. Volatility, credit, and insurance. Kris connected the discussion of round-the-clock liquidity to options and insurance: because volatility is itself tradable, a firm worried about an intraday funding shock could buy the optionality to reshape its exposure, and someone would sell that protection. He described the endpoint as looking like a large insurance function. The ledger and ownership. Asked whether tokenization is more about the ledger or the asset, Shaun said the asset is the ledger and how that ledger is enforced. The practical test, in his framing, is whether you can be sure you own something and can access it, which he tied to a system that places trust in math rather than in a small set of intermediaries. Notable Quotes “Blockchains are a missing piece of the internet. We needed a property rights layer.” — Shaun Martinak "We’re moving towards a day where financial instruments can be treated as computer programs, executing actions without needing traditional intermediaries." — Shaun Martinak “It’s transferring power from bank balance sheets to speculators.” — Izabella Kaminska "The legal infrastructure behind society is a function of money itself. It’s a messy tapestry that we are still navigating." — Izabella Kaminska “All of this, at the limit, just starts to look more and more like insurance.” — Kris Abdelmessih “The asset is the ledger and then how that ledger is enforced.” — Shaun Martinak Takeaways A few threads carried across the hour: * The group’s read was that tokenization changes the plumbing, not the product: the same instruments, with cheaper settlement and clearing. * The funding model shifts from bank balance sheets to a “commons” of speculators holding the underlying tokens; how reliable that liquidity is under stress is the open question. * Several of the ideas raised (intraday pricing of liquidity, perpetual futures, volatility as something tradable) point toward markets that run continuously and price liquidity in real time. Resources & references * “Money Stuff,” Matt Levine (Bloomberg). Kris cited his column, including the piece on Robinhood tokenizing AMC stock. LINK * Russell Napier, on the post-1970s “non-system” that governed global trade and money. LINK * Izabella Kaminska: The Blind Spot and The Peg * Matt Zeigler: Cultish Creative, and Sunpointe Investments The Full Roster Check out the full suite of episodes of Vol. 2 of The Roundtable Sessions. * The Yen at 160: Robert Mullin hosts Vincent Deluard and Louis Gave, recorded in the final hours before the Bank of Japan moved. Coming September 25 Not a paid subscriber yet? Paid subscribers get live access to The Roundtable Sessions, plus the On the Phone With briefings, the Collective Conversations filmed at our events, and the Common Thread. Join us to be in the room for the next one. Remember, this post is for informational purposes only. For anything investment-related, you should consult a qualified financial advisor who can help assess your individual needs, risk tolerance, and goals. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

On September 8, 2026, Collective members joined Grant Williams, Dee Smith and Brent Johnson for an hour on one question: who can you actually trust, and what do you do once you accept that the honest answer is almost nobody. This trio and topic were inspired by three separate conversations we had last March: a call with Dee the week the Iran situation broke, a London pub dinner with Grant, and a four-hour roundtable in New York with Brent. Each conversation kept circling the same thing: trust. Dee Smith is the founder and CEO of Strategic Insight Group, which runs intelligence work for institutional investors, pension plans and private equity firms. Brent Johnson runs the macro fund Santiago Capital and is known for the dollar-milkshake thesis. Grant Williams, the author of Things That Make You Go Hmmm… and a beloved host and interviewer, guided the room. Dee and Brent had never met but their overlapping lenses inspired us to bring them together. This is the first of three conversations in Vol. 2 of the Collective Roundtable Sessions: live discussions that bring people who joined Collective separately together around a single question. The full recording is free to watch; paid Insights subscribers join Roundtable Sessions live with the opportunity to put their own questions to the room. Not a paid subscriber yet? Paid subscribers get live access to The Roundtable Sessions, and this is the best moment of the year to join. Our Summer 2026 offer takes 20% off Collective Insights, and it isn’t an intro rate; the discount is locked in for as long as you stay subscribed. Summer officially ends at 11:59pm on Tuesday September 22, and so does the offer. What They Discussed How Dee approaches information. Dee described the intelligence method his firm uses: gather many small pieces, most of which mean little on their own, look for patterns and anomalies, treat what surfaces as a hypothesis, and test it. He said falsification matters more than verification, and that the hard part is setting your own stake in the outcome aside, which is part of why institutions bring in an outside party. He also offered a tell: if you catch yourself thinking something “can’t be right,” take it as a sign you may not be judging the situation correctly. Brent on frameworks and what can still be trusted. Brent said the biggest risk to an investor is lying to yourself. His own practice is to take the opposite side of whatever he is told and work out whether it holds, and he cited a line from Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, “you carry the opinion of the last person you spoke to,” as the failure mode of not having your own framework. Even where broad trust has broken down, he said, some things stay reliable: that governments will act to stay in power, that countries will compete, and that investors will act in their own self-interest. Grant added Charlie Munger’s point that if you understand the incentives, you can usually anticipate the outcome. Investing versus doing the right thing. Brent described a distinction he weighs as a fiduciary: whether something is morally wrong is, in his framing, separate from whether it makes money, and a mandate to grow a portfolio is not the same as taking a moral stand. He said it is something he wrestles with. Dee added that what counts as “right” also shifts over time, noting that practices once accepted are later judged harshly, and that the reverse can be true as well. Broken promises and the debt underneath. Dee said people tend to experience the moment not as a broken social contract but as broken promises: a deal they kept that others did not. He described asking audiences whether they expect their children’s lives to be better than their own and rarely seeing hands go up, and tied it to roughly $350 trillion of global debt, which he framed as a bet on a future that is always better than the past. Where they saw hope. Asked where they found reasons for optimism, Brent pointed to a cultural pendulum he believes is swinging back toward the middle, and named AI as a net positive over time. Dee said most problems are solvable with tools that already exist, and that the current willingness to question everything is itself a kind of opening. What they would watch. Asked for the single most important investment implication of declining trust, neither pointed to the common answer of buying gold. Brent named the Office of Strategic Capital as the institution he expects to move markets most. Dee pointed to security, and to the way supply chains and resources can be used as leverage, citing US and China dynamics as the clearest example. Notable Quotes “The absolute worst thing you can do as an investor is lie to yourself.” — Brent Johnson “Wrong has absolutely nothing to do with it. It should. You may want it to, I may want it to, but it just doesn’t.” — Brent Johnson “Falsification is more important than verification.” — Dee Smith “Debt is borrowing from the future to pay for the present. It only works if the future’s always going to be better.” — Dee Smith What You Can Walk Away With * Both described a similar way of working with information: assume what you are handed may be wrong and test it, rather than searching for a source to simply trust. * Trust has narrowed more than it has vanished. The things that stay dependable are incentives: governments, countries and investors acting in their own interest. * As trust between states erodes, both watch where the state is directing capital (Brent’s Office of Strategic Capital) and securing resources (Dee’s supply-chain and security lens). Resources & references * Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis. The book Brent is rereading, source of the “you carry the opinion of the last person you spoke to” line. LINK * “Why Am I Reading This Now?”, Ben Hunt (Epsilon Theory). The framing Grant adapted into “why am I seeing this now.” LINK * Grant Williams: Things That Make You Go Hmmm…, The Grant Williams Podcast, and the About Time video series. LINK * The Office of Strategic Capital. Brent has written on it and offered to share his work; you can follow Brent on Twitter LINK * Dee Smith, Strategic Insight Group. LINK What’s Next Two more Roundtable recordings + briefings coming this week: * The New Rails: Matt Zeigler hosts Kris Abdelmessih, Shaun Martinak and Izabella Kaminska on what tokenization actually changes about markets. * The Yen at 160: Robert Mullin hosts Vincent Deluard and Louis Gave, recorded in the final hours before the Bank of Japan moved. Join Us Not a paid subscriber yet? Paid subscribers get live access to The Roundtable Sessions, and this is the best moment of the year to join. Our Summer 2026 offer takes 20% off Collective Insights, and it isn’t an intro rate; the discount is locked in for as long as you stay subscribed. Summer officially ends at 11:59pm on Tuesday September 22, and so does the offer. Remember, this post is for informational purposes only. For anything investment-related, you should consult a qualified financial advisor who can help assess your individual needs, risk tolerance, and goals. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit collectivemembership.substack.com Pippa Malmgren put a pointed question to Izabella Kaminska in Kraków: “Are we heading towards something on Ukraine? And if yes, what does it mean for Poland? And if no, what does it mean for Poland?” Izabella’s answer is that it barely matters: “Poland’s future is going to be aligned in defense either way.” From here, their conversation traces Poland’s improbable rise (an economy now on par with the UK, soon the largest standing army in Western Europe), the split inside the country over Trump and Europe, and the Three Seas buffer quietly taking shape. After a stretch only these two could have, Pippa and Izabella get to a question underneath all of it: if the war ends and Ukraine becomes the largest construction project since the Marshall Plan, how does anyone actually pay for it? Izabella’s answer runs through stablecoins, tokenization, and an international monetary system being rebuilt in real time. The full conversation is here for Insights subscribers. If you’re new to Collective, start with our Field Notes from Kraków for the full story of the trip that produced this conversation. Remember, this post is for informational purposes only. For anything investment-related, you should consult a qualified financial advisor who can help assess your individual needs, risk tolerance, and goals.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit collectivemembership.substack.com “Is it possible that we’re witnessing the beginning of a rebalancing of power, without the need for a global conflict?” Steven Wilkinson put this question to Pippa in Kraków, and her answer is optimistic (quite on brand for her), with Poland at the center of it. Together, they traced why the US, Russia, and China may be edging toward deals, why commerce and culture move before diplomacy does, and why Poland is being handed the pole position in what could be the largest reconstruction project since WWII. The full conversation is available to Insights subscribers on our Substack. If you’re new to Collective, start with our Field Notes from Kraków for the full story of the trip that produced this conversation. Remember, this post is for informational purposes only. For anything investment-related, you should consult a qualified financial advisor who can help assess your individual needs, risk tolerance, and goals.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit collectivemembership.substack.com It began with a question: “If you only had 5 minutes to prepare... what’s the 10-minute TED Talk you could stand up and give?” Rob Gray’s answer was so intriguing, we had to capture it on camera for you. Our good friend Sir Steven Wilkinson sat down with Rob on the private terrace off the Fireplace Room, our home for the day, up in the tower at Zinar Castle just outside Kraków. The whole conversation builds to one exchange: Steven: “Is the tantalum market ready for it?” Rob: “No.” Rob spends the next ten minutes on why: a 2,500-ton metal market about to get hit by AI, chips, and SpaceX all at once. Get the full download from Kraków The full conversation is here for Insights subscribers. If you’re new to Collective, start with our Field Notes from Kraków for the full story of the trip that produced this conversation. Remember, this post is for informational purposes only. For anything investment-related, you should consult a qualified financial advisor who can help assess your individual needs, risk tolerance, and goals.

We catch up with Helen Thomas, CEO of BlondeMoney, for a speed round update of what she's watching on the global landscape, what she's preparing for and what she's looking forward to. They Like to Watch: podcast with Sara Barron & Geoff Lloyd https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Global Discord by Paul Tucker https://www.amazon.com/Global-Discord... Learn more about Collective at https://www.the-membership.com Learn more about Helen at https://blondemoney.co.uk This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

Jared Dillian, Editor of The Daily Dirtnap and Peter Atwater, author of ‘The Confidence Map’ get together for a chat about sentiment, confidence, and how to best track and consider the actions of the Fed.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

President of Bianco Research, Jim Bianco and MI2 Partners Advisor Harry Melandri discuss all things macro in this conversation filmed at the MI2 Partners Global Macro Summit in Vail on September 28, 2023. Jim highlights the importance of the labor market in a post-2020 world and all the knock-on effects of the end of the traditional 5-day work day world. "'Let's remember what the major problem is, it's a cycle shift in preferences and in the way that we view things that's really driving this, not that everything was fine and we just piled on interest rates." “Rebalance” is a code word for going back to normalizing AKA back to the 2019 cycle of regular 5-day office workday world, a neutral interest rate world. If we’re not, and 2020 marked a cycle change and work from home accelerated things.” Learn more about Collective at https://www.the-membership.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

Seasoned global macro strategists Julian Brigden, President of Macro Intelligence 2 Partners, and Roger Hirst, Co-Founder of Vision Creative Labs, chat through the current macroeconomic climate, what it's like to trade in the current cycle, and what is happening with monetary policies a global scale. Filmed in Vail, CO on September 26, 2023. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

Renowned economist and former US Presidential Advisor Dr. Pippa Malmgren and emerging technologies expert Timothy Papandreou discuss the latest in AI (including a deep dive into what it is, and what is isn't), exciting developments in space exploration & technologies, and the importance of being optimistic about the future. Filmed on July 1, 2023 in Le Mans, France. Learn more about the Collective at https://www.the-membership.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

Mutiny Fund CIO Jason Buck hosts volatility trader and Editor of Moontower Kris Abdelmessih for a conversation that spans discretionary edge, confidence intervals, life optionality and more. This episode was filmed at the Edgewood Resort on the shores of stunning Lake Tahoe at the Collective Summer Retreat. Learn more about the Collective at https://www.the-membership.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

Renowned economist and former US Presidential Advisor Dr. Pippa Malmgren and seasoned tech executive and entrepreneur Patrick Walker sit down for a chat about the latest in geopolitics (notably in the arctic), the upcoming US Presidential race, and why psychedelics should be taken seriously. Filmed on July 1, 2023 in Le Mans, France. Mentioned in the episode: The Beauty of the Flower Richard Feynman How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe

Mutiny Fund CIO Jason Buck sits down with Robert Mullin of Marathon Resource Advisors at Edgewood Resort in Lake Tahoe for a conversation on life, investing, resources, and the economics of renewable energy systems. Filmed on June 3, 2023. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit collectivemembership.substack.com/subscribe