Daily Briefing — Sat 10 Oct 2026

Daniel Brooks

Good morning, Walter. It's Saturday, October 10th, and this is your daily briefing. Six new episodes in the queue. Finance first, then one self-help piece to close.

Daniel Brooks

First, Top Traders Unplugged, Systematic Investor four twenty-one, with Andrew Beer. About seventy-eight minutes. The title is Taking C T As Mainstream. Beer and Niels Kaastrup-Larsen ask how reliable sixty-forty still is when stocks and bonds fall together. Beer's frame is that classic strategic allocation told investors to diversify and not be tactical, which helped when equities recovered, but sixty-forty was partly a historical accident fueled by a twenty-year bond bubble when bonds were the Superman of diversifiers. He also notes the odd confidence of long-horizon forecasts when three-month forecasts feel impossible. For the managed-futures case he uses the Soc Gen C T A Index, which since January two thousand tracks the average daily returns of the twenty largest managers, names like Winton, Man A H L, and Lynx, and now has roughly twenty-seven years of daily data. He says that as of the September snapshot in the conversation the index was up about fifteen point seven year to date. Against that index he walks crisis alpha across the dot-com crash, the G F C, and twenty twenty-two, noting each crisis broke a different prior diversifier playbook while C T As rose again. Over those twenty-seven years he cites about three hundred thirty basis points of alpha, a max monthly drawdown around sixteen percent versus fifty-one for the S and P, seventeen for the Bloomberg U S Agg, forty-two for gold, and eighty-plus in places for Nasdaq and commodities, and a Sharpe around zero point three four versus equities near zero point four. The hard part for him is lumpy returns that make Sharpe look mediocre, manager selection difficulty, and an industry that burns airtime on trades that barely move portfolio results. He warns against betting everything on one manager, citing how the A Q R episode hurt the U S managed-futures narrative, and against timing the space so a good strategy looks bad. The growth pitch is explain the sleeve in allocator language, pair managers deliberately, and keep clients allocated through uneven years. Verdict: listen. Clear framing if you care about C T A sizing; it is allocation philosophy, not a single trade rule.

Daniel Brooks

Second, Slate Money, titled DiscoDance, about sixty-one minutes with Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck. The lead is the Ellison Paramount Skydance deal for Warner Brothers. Felix wanted the combined name DiscoDance from Discovery plus Skydance; the Ellisons kept Skydance. The panel frets about debt load, competition with Netflix, and whether David Ellison has an easy exit the way David Zaslav did after selling. Later they talk European A I protests, A I flooding mathematics with candidate proofs that still need human understanding, and a Wall Street Journal thread that A I is making students weaker thinkers. There is a Slate Plus bit on Trump accounts and individual stocks, plus a lighter close on Halloween candy prices up about seventy-one percent over five years and a Starbucks-Chipotle rumor joke. Verdict: optional. Entertaining media and culture chat; skip unless you want the Hollywood M and A color.

Daniel Brooks

Third, Masters in Business with Maria Vassalou, head of the Pictet Research Institute at a firm managing nearly a trillion dollars. About seventy-one minutes with Barry Ritholtz. Vassalou came from Goldman Sachs Asset Management as co-C I O and earlier S A C, plus academia and the European Finance Association. On conviction versus risk she describes portfolios built from many expressions of a view so no single trade dominates, with downside protection baked into construction, sharpened by S A C's risk culture after a more macro school at S A R S. Her well-known default-risk paper argued size and value effects concentrated in high default-risk corners using a Merton-style measure. On geopolitics she argues China may not yet match U S innovation quality despite patent counts, but controls many inputs needed to produce next-generation tech, which shapes rivalry. She calls U S and European long-run policy naive for outsourcing manufacturing. On U S debt she separates the financial-crisis jump from a more misguided C O V I D surge of fiscal plus monetary accommodation that fed inflation, while noting the U S has still managed about two percent real growth for decades, which helps the debt-to-G D P path relative to other developed economies. Verdict: worth a listen for the research-and-risk framing and China-debt discussion; not a trade sheet.

Daniel Brooks

Fourth, Money Stuff the Podcast with Jeremy Maletz, head of prediction markets at Susquehanna, about fifty-nine minutes with Matt Levine. The desk grew out of Susquehanna's macro and election work on venues like Betfair and PredictIt, then became a large business. Sports is still more than half the book and fluctuates with the football season, but Maletz says non-sports is growing faster from a smaller base. The colorful opener is the California goat-herder hedge, a roughly five-hundred-thousand notional print on a Cal C H I style contract that briefly traded down into the eighties and looked like adverse selection after Levine wrote it up, before resolving in their favor. Structurally they discuss when to use an exchange, a swap, or an insurance-like contract, binary event triggers that pay off on asset prices such as chips, compute, or power, how they fund large institutional hedges, and election-factor hedging where getting the election right can still lose money if you get the market impact wrong, the James Street style lesson. For liquid Senate-control style markets they will make two-sided markets in size; for hyper-specific bespoke risks they warehouse most of it, laying off closer to ten percent than ninety today, and expect more laying-off if those markets get far more liquid. They also cover sports-linked hedges for media rights and promotions, and a forward-looking thread on data-center and Open A I style credit risk that could be packaged through prediction-market and swap structures rather than Susquehanna warehousing hundreds of billions alone. Verdict: listen. Sharp market-structure conversation; no reproducible trading rule for your book.

Daniel Brooks

Fifth, Behind the Markets from WisdomTree. About forty-two minutes with Jeremy Schwartz, Jeremy Siegel, Sam Rines, and Chris Gennady. Title is The Alt man ernative Narratives. Siegel's near-term take in a thin data week is hold in October and keep November and December open unless C P I, P P I, or retail sales come in way off, with a note that Trump's no-bombing-before-midterms pledge could matter for Iran and the Straits. The Altman thread is Open A I's funding narrative: a reported seventy-billion annualized run-rate versus about fifty billion now, with management still pointing to seventy by year-end, while Anthropic is framed as the near-term public listing story. Siegel also uses Tesla as a case of narrative rotation from cars to full self-driving to Starlink and SpaceX supporting a huge valuation. The desk digs into S and P value quirks such as Apple as a top holding and expensive Mag Seven names sitting inside value baskets, plus resilient consumer card data. Verdict: optional macro chat. Useful color on the Open A I run-rate debate; skip if you already track that headline.

Daniel Brooks

Closing non-finance, Modern Wisdom with Spencer Greenberg, episode eleven sixty-one, about eighty-seven minutes. Greenberg and co-author boiled more than a hundred self-help books and over twenty therapy traditions into twelve underlying psychological levers for the book Twelve Levers. Core claim: there is no silver bullet; even good methods are contextual, and outlier success stories create false certainty. They discuss values conflicts, body-based methods like progressive muscle relaxation that calm the mind by calming the body, overthinking that sometimes needs non-thinking interventions, and replacing doom-scroll habits with glad-you-did activities you will still respect later. The blunt closer is that reading without practice is fake progress. Verdict: listen if you want a practical self-help framework; skip for markets.

Daniel Brooks

That's your briefing for Saturday. Have a great day, Walter.