10 YEARS IN REVIEW

My first real introduction to markets and carrying any sort of going risk was about 1 month post the DAO hack. A German software team called Slock.it had developed an app they called a “decentralized autonomous organization.” In essence it was a pooled supply of ether where people had voting rights to what the ether should be used for in proportion to their DAO token holdings. Things went immediately wrong after what’s called a reentrancy attack occurred and a criminal siphoned off a substantial portion of the pooled ether.

After this caught my attention, my focus surrounded what was occurring around Ethereum as well as this odd manic bubble which surrounded cryptocurrency being produced by blockchains.

There were two primary things occurring at the time. An obnoxious number of incredibly serious conversations about using blockchains for solving all kinds of unrelated problems and an expansion of cryptocurrency markets. Cryptocurrency was this new, freely traded, mostly unregulated, 24/7 global market that emerged solely out of bitcoin. At the time “Blockchain, not bitcoin” was a common phrase. But hearing what had happened with Ethereum after the DAO got me interested in ether because people were simultaneously trying to do something with Ethereum which required ether to use, and ether had a price that it was trading for. Because it was trading people were also simultaneously holding it in hopes that it would appreciate in value. Which it did and by a lot. Following 2016-2017 I’ve never had a better period in terms of relative performance, and I never really expect that type of year ever again. 2016-2017 was a year highlighted by a bubble of extraordinarily peculiar events.

Ten years later and I think I’ve changed quite a bit in terms of a process. I no longer seek out places where I think bubbles will form, although this is probably quite a good strategy. This year’s results (and max drawdown) have mostly been driven from Uniqure. The process for getting there was through looking into the surgical processes involved several years ago. To be specific- examining investigational uses of minimally invasive stereotactic neurosurgery with an intra-operative MRI to guide local infusions. On a go forward basis, gene therapy looks like it’s finding a bit of a well fit niche here as normal immunogenicity issues of systemic gene therapies are being avoided by localized infusions.

This year I’ve done almost no research into anything. For the vast majority of the year, I’ve mostly just been hanging out with my dog. September/October were the first months I’ve done much of anything in terms of looking at the market for new ideas. I’m encouraged by what I see with Delcath in isolating the liver in order to bathe the liver in a high dose of melphalan for the treatment of liver metastases. If the outcomes for different types of cancer beyond metastatic uveal melanoma liver cancer are equally good as they are for mUM, the Hepzato kit will probably be an enormously successful commercial offering. I continue to believe live monitoring has a substantial future role to play in managing insurance premiums and am excited about what autonomous vision systems will let us do for all kinds of things. Zedcor has been 2025’s 3rd leading contributor. The exact same product they have today with the Z-Box is fully capable performing something like flood monitoring. Because it’s cheap to do and will continue to get cheaper it’s quite possible we’re unknowingly approaching a point in time where almost every developed piece of land has a live monitoring product attached to it.

Primary issues that have come into play over the last 10 years in terms of portfolio management fall under “sequence of returns risk” errors. These fall into years 2021 & 2024 respectively. The causes were completely different in both circumstances, but the outcome is ultimately the same. Hanging out with the dog has been most of what’s helped with the whole victim of fraud thing.