Daily Briefing — Thu 15 Oct 2026

Daniel Brooks

Good morning, Walter. It's Thursday, October fifteenth, twenty twenty-six, here in Costa Rica. Fifteen new episodes hit your queue overnight, seven of them finance. We'll go deep on the strongest and keep the rest to a line.

Daniel Brooks

First, Chat With Traders. Andrew Perry, founder of MacroPillars, spent five years as a portfolio manager at Tudor under Paul Tudor Jones, and later ran money at Nomura, after building an internal bank hedge fund at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The interview is less about a single trade and more about how institutional macro actually works. His MacroPillars frame has five parts: government policy and geopolitics, traditional and non-traditional liquidity, technicals and price response, and execution, which he calls the big one. The point is not to form an economic opinion and stop. It is to see how those forces move through the system, then decide what to trade, when, how much, and what would prove you wrong. Timeframe has to match the idea. Looking for a multi-month move with day-trading instincts is how you get chopped up.

Daniel Brooks

The Tudor color is the strongest part. On hiring, Tudor gave Perry's team about fifty million with a ten percent drawdown limit and a two-year contract. One teammate later managed over one point five billion after earning the right. When they hire, they look at your worst day and how you behave after it. Going into a shell after a drawdown is a red flag. Jones also watched life stress hard. If a P M was going through a separation or divorce, he would take the capital off them for three months. Perry points listeners to Jones's Perfect Failure talk. Most successful traders, he says, win only about fifty-seven percent of the time. Small edges, not certainty. He flags November first, twenty twenty-three, when Treasury shifted issuance duration shorter and nothing went lower that day, a reminder that liquidity plumbing can move everything. About eighty minutes. Worth the full listen if you care how Tudor-style risk culture actually felt from the inside.

Daniel Brooks

Second, The Acquirers Podcast, Value After Hours. Tobias Carlisle and Jake Taylor talk with Ryan Albert of Turton Capital about Korea's governance reform cycle and a live activism case around Golfzon Holdings. Albert's thesis is that the Korea discount is basically the price of being a minority partner to family-controlled companies. Controllers keep cash inside via cross-shareholdings, treasury shares that are not retired, and real estate, partly because inheritance tax can run up to about sixty percent off the share price. A low price helps the next generation keep control. He says reforms have moved much faster in roughly a year and a half under the new president than Japan's multi-decade path, and he runs a morning screener for new governance bills. At a market level he cites Korea around zero point six five times book versus Japan around zero point eight eight, about eight times earnings versus twelve, and free cash flow yield around eleven point three percent versus six point six. Operating R O E on some F M C G names can look mid-to-high teens once you strip non-core cash and stakes.

Daniel Brooks

The case study is Golfzon Holdings. Its most valuable piece is a minority stake in Golfzon County, Korea's largest golf-course operator, whose sixty-eight percent partner is Korea's largest private equity fund and was reported as being sold. Albert says the public holdco was appraising around zero point one five to zero point two times book, then controllers launched a tender at a fifty-something percent premium that still landed around zero point three five times book. He published open letters arguing process and disclosure fell short of Ministry of Justice guidelines on controller conflicts in mergers, spinoffs, and related deals. About sixty-two minutes. Worth it if you follow Japan-style governance unlocks and want a concrete Korean template.

Daniel Brooks

Third, Odd Lots. Joe and Tracy sit down with Jeff Yan, co-founder and C E O of Hyperliquid Labs. Yan's pitch is blunt. Hyperliquid is a protocol whose aspirational goal is housing all of finance, a neutral on-chain layer he frames as a step-function over fragmented electronic markets, the way electronic trading was over pits. He walks through validators agreeing on balances and prices, deployers listing markets, and on-chain clearing where liquidation thresholds are a property of the system rather than a discretionary call. Bitcoin perps are a core product. Liquidity is a standard collateralized order book. U S users are blocked from derivatives on the main interface by terms of service, but he says the C F T C and the current administration are talking about bringing the protocol onto U S rails instead of only restricting it. About sixty-one minutes. Worth it if you want the founder case for on-chain order books as financial infrastructure, not a coin pitch.

Daniel Brooks

Fourth, Trillions with Eric Balchunas. The guests are Lee Tailforth and Jody Gunzburg of Future Sports, the index shop behind a wave of filings for team-linked sports E T Fs, including leveraged versions, for names like the Flyers and Mets. The E T Fs are not live yet. The indexes turn league stats into a continuous performance number, not a binary win-lose bet. Hockey uses about fifty-three stats, baseball about seventy, with published point values. A single is worth two point five, a home run six, a strikeout minus one. Indexes start at seventy-five hundred. Best teams historically land around eleven to fourteen thousand, worst around two to five thousand, roughly thematic-E T F-like dispersion. Official close is nine A M Central. The founders say the first customer was institutional hedging for media rights, stadiums, and sponsors, not retail betting, and Robinhood is on the cap table. About thirty-seven minutes. Worth a listen if you track novel E T F wrappers.

Daniel Brooks

Quick finance pass on three others. On Standard Deviations, Peter Lazaroff talks The Perfect Portfolio with Daniel Crosby. The punchline is there is no universal perfect allocation, only one you can stick with given behavior and circumstance. Skip unless you want the book tour. Money Maze has twenty-four-year-old Cyril Gorlla of C T G T on A I interpretability and guardrails for finance and healthcare after model liability leaves the lab. Product story, not a trade. And The Indicator's eight-minute opener on campaign spending notes midterms could be the most expensive ever, with money not guaranteeing wins, as Harris outspent Trump and still lost. Easy yes if you have eight minutes.

Daniel Brooks

Non-finance next. This Week in A I interviews the Ollama team. Claimed stats to note aloud as theirs. Over nine million monthly developers, cloud usage up over two hundred times since year-start, and over eighty-five percent of the Fortune five hundred have deployed Ollama in their networks. The driver they cite is token-bill shock on closed models plus wanting weights you can run privately and fine-tune. About forty-nine minutes. Worth it if you care how enterprises are quietly shifting inference spend.

Daniel Brooks

Huberman Lab Essentials with Neuralink neurosurgeon Matt MacDougall. Near-term mission is reducing suffering with a neural implant for severe medical problems. The robot places electrodes; a surgeon still opens skin and skull. Augmentation with embedded A I is on the roadmap but framed as far down the road. About thirty-four minutes. Solid if you want the clinical version without the hype spiral.

Daniel Brooks

Quick closers. No Priors has OpenAI president Greg Brockman on A I for science and a claim that cyber spend should vastly outstrip software spend while we are still in a defender's window. Greger covers diet and depression, including mixed vegetarian findings and small trials on things like vinegar and wild blueberry powder. Infinite Loops is Ed William on writing a biography that reads like fiction. Diary of a C E O has attention scientist Sahar Yousef on reclaiming an hour a day from phone addiction. I had no full transcript, so treat that as title-level. Modern Wisdom is Shaan Puri on nine harsh truths about ambition and fulfillment. And American Alchemy runs a long whistleblower conversation claiming A I is alien technology. Spectacle, not diligence.

Daniel Brooks

That's your briefing for Thursday. If you only have time for one, make it Andrew Perry on Chat With Traders. Have a great day, Walter.