Neckar’s New Money

Some things don’t change.

Every generation struggles with the same questions: how can I get wealthy, what is the meaning of life, and why won’t my clueless neighbor shut up about the millions he made trading worthless paper.

This newsletter is my personal and exploration of the business of life and investing. I’m not smart enough to give you all the answers, but I am pretty good a curating teachers.

I explore stories and profiles you won’t find elsewhere looking for insights, inspiration, and cautionary tales.

Founding Members

My sincere gratitude to all of my subscribers: I appreciate your support (and do my best to answer emails and DMs). This is for the group of Founding Members who went above and beyond to support my work. Thank you!

James Basili
Joshua Collinsworth, Nomadic Value Partners
Norm Conley
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Jack Li
Matt Reustle
Nitesh Rohit
Marc Rubinstein
Tiger of Passage Investment
Josh Wolfe

About me

I grew up in village near Tübingen, a picturesque college town in Swabia (southwest Germany). After college I moved to New York for love. I spent more than a decade on Wall Street, working in banking, for two wealthy families, at a consulting/research firm, and at a hedge fund (before I got my butt kicked).

I’m fascinated by the players who build companies and confront the maelstrom of markets. I enjoy exploring their stories and ideas. Occasionally I share my own path, which so far has been a string of George Constanza-style episodes.

I have been sharing on Twitter for years, but writing is a new path for me. It is exciting (and a bit scary) to see if it can be more than a hobby. I look forward to walking this path together.

You can contact me via email or Twitter DM. I’m working to collect twitter threads (and hopefully more info like book recommendations) here.

What do I write about?

“There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills.” Jesse Livermore

“We’ve created a Star Wars civilization with stone age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” E.O. Wilson

Worse, the storytelling primates now use Bloomberg terminals to determine resource allocation!

I love this paradox. Financial markets are the highest abstraction of the global economy, that force which propels us forward with its beat of innovation, production, and transaction. We reduce it all to ticker symbols, rows of numbers, and squiggly lines.

Then we weave stories around those abstractions. We look for patterns and meaning. In those stories we find adventure, danger, and treasure. We see heroes and villains. We watch empires rise and castles crumble.

We can watch – and play – a global poker game. A game that mixes puzzles, math problems, heist schemes, and three-shell con games. We can ride the arrow of progress, up and down the pendulum of cycles. We can observe the human condition, trying to navigate a jungle of our own imagination. No wonder it’s highly addictive.

“[Investing is] intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll.” John Maynard Keynes

I think we will be stuck with this carnival until the lights go out or the singularity hits. And I for one find it highly entertaining, educational, inspiring even, to watch the players try to transact and scheme their way to a better lot in life.

“I think my analytical abilities are rather deficient, but I do have a very strong critical faculty. I am not a professional security analyst. I would rather call myself an insecurity analyst.” George Soros