“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die of euphoria.” — Sir John Templeton Business confidence and consumer confidence have never felt further apart. US real GDP contracted by 1.4% in Q1 of 2022 (annualized). Recessionary risk went from being inevitable to imminent. Meanwhile…

Welcome to The Enduring Investor. A weekly letter focused on investing, finance and economics. We discuss capital markets and also share lessons from investing and operating private companies. In today’s letter, we explore Twitter’s options and whether it makes sense to do a deal with Elon Musk? …

“Inflation is taxation without legislation.” — Milton Friedman Inflation, by definition, is too much money chasing too few goods. You’re feeling the pain at gas stations, grocery stores, and restaurant bills. Everything is feeling expensive. How did we get here? The Fed has two jobs: to achieve price stability and…

“In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine. — Benjamin Graham We’re settling into a new world; a transition from “free money” to “cheap money.” But cheap is feeling expensive. The Fed announced a rate hike of 0.25% two…

“Most of us spend too much time on the last 24-hours and too little on the last 6,000 years.” — Will Durant In February, inflation clocked in at a 40-year high. Last week, capital markets made a U-turn and gained some upward momentum. Few reasons why this happened: The Fed…

The world breaks ever decade or so. Morgan Housel recently wrote about a “shock cycle” for all big news events: Assume good news is permanent. Oblivious to bad news. Ignore bad news. Deny bad news. Panic at bad news. Accept bad news. Assume bad news is permanent. Ignore good news. …

We’re living in a time where investors across every asset class are worried about the same thing: monetary policy and its impact on markets. From REIT fund managers to VCs investing in tech to PE folks investing in mid-market companies; all the way to retail investors. There are two types…

Many holding companies are being formed to roll-up DTC microbrands. It’s sort of like a micro-PE model. Large PE shops normally like to do deals at $500M+ levels. Mid-market PE shops like to do deals between $100M-500M. Smaller PE shops like to do deals between $25M-100M levels. Historically, anything below…

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands functionally go through 4 key revenue milestones and stages. $0–1 million $1–5 million $5–25 million $25+ million We’ll focus primarily on the first 3 stages in this essay. In the end, I’ll share some common denominators of high growth consumer brands. $0–1 million revenue stage The first stage ($0–1M) is the…