Beyond stocks and bonds
You know what the assets are.
The question is where to put the money.
Rational Compounder is written for investors who are past the definitions and stuck on the decisions: which macro regime you are actually positioned for, what the price already assumes, and which rules you will obey when it stops being comfortable.
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How the site is organised
Investor constitution
Nine articles written on a calm day so they can be obeyed on a bad one. Position sizing, falsifiers, and the discipline of doing nothing.
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Book summaries
The argument, the portfolio implication, and the part of the book you can skip. Written for readers who want the model, not the anecdotes.
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Strategies & research
Regime maps, factor decompositions and currency exposure work — with the assumptions stated and the falsifiers named.
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Investment tools
Hosted calculators for reverse DCFs, hedging carry, rebalancing policy and regime testing on your own allocation.
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Latest writing
All researchThe Currency Leg of Your Portfolio
The exposure most European investors never chose
A European investor holding a global equity index has made a large, unhedged dollar bet. This piece quantifies that exposure, shows when hedging has paid, and gives a decision rule based on rate differentials and portfolio duration.
When Genius Failed
Roger Lowenstein
Roger Lowenstein on leverage, correlation and humility
LTCM had the models, the Nobel laureates and the funding lines. What it did not have was a scenario where every uncorrelated trade became one trade. A permanent lesson on position sizing.
Quality at a Reasonable Multiple
Where the compounder trade still works, and where it is just duration
Quality has become a crowded factor with an embedded rate bet. We separate genuine reinvestment-driven compounding from multiple-driven returns and screen for businesses where the former dominates.
Expectations Investing
Alfred Rappaport & Michael Mauboussin
Rappaport & Mauboussin on reading the price backwards
Instead of forecasting a company and comparing to price, start from price and solve for the expectations it embeds. It turns valuation from a prediction exercise into a falsifiable question.
A Regime Map for Real Rates
Positioning across the four growth/inflation quadrants
Most allocation debates are really disagreements about which quadrant we are in. This piece builds an explicit map of growth and inflation surprises, shows historical asset behaviour in each, and derives a portfolio that does not require you to be right about the regime.
The Price of Time
Edward Chancellor
Edward Chancellor on what interest rates actually do
Interest is not a policy dial, it is the price that allocates capital across time. Chancellor traces what breaks when that price is suppressed: zombie firms, asset inflation, and a savings class quietly expropriated.