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Gavekal-IS
Power Is When You Have It
Didier Darcet
2 Oct 2025
In 2008, French senator Maurice Faure—signatory of the Treaty of Rome—was asked: what is power? His reply was disarmingly simple: “Power is when you have it.” No hedging, no abstractions. The same could be said of beauty, youth, strength—and of a nation or its currency. In this report, Didier explores the concept of ultimate power as expressed through financial asset pricing.
Gavekal-IS
Can Political Tensions Be Ignored?
Didier Darcet
18 Sep 2025
On a global basis, political tensions continue to swing from green to amber to bright red, and then back again. For fundamentally oriented investors, this raises the question of whether politics can ever truly be ignored. In this note, Didier shows how economics trumps politics most of the time, but not all of the time.
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Ecstatic Gold!
Every investor dreams the same dream: buy at the bottom, sell at the top. On that score, gold recently hit another all-time high, together with several equity markets. So are you tempted to cash in? Didier points to history and says, not so fast. After all, behavioral finance shows that market peaks bring a rush of euphoria, lasting weeks, sometimes a few months.
Abduction
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce argued that abduction—not deduction or induction—represents the primary mode of human reasoning. For Didier, abduction lies behind scientific discovery, as well as most economic, financial and political analysis. In this piece he applies this insight to current dilemmas for portfolio managers.
The Components Of Nominal Growth
The single number that keeps governments solvent is nominal economic growth, as it corresponds directly to their ability to fund themselves. For investors, however, the real question is the growth mix: how much of nominal growth comes from a real expansion, and how much from inflation? That split decides whether equities or gold are the better option. In this piece, Didier extends this basic insight into an investment strategy.
Lions And Financial Gazelles
Picture the financial markets as a vast savanna, where equities roam like lions and bonds graze as if they were gazelles, says Didier. In this piece, he considers the predator-prey dynamic between the two occupants of that land, which may offer more insight to investors than the steady-state assumptions of conventional finance theory.
TrackCoin: Managing Emotions In Crypto’s Wild West
At the end of 2022, Gavekal-IS launched a mobile app designed to help cryptocurrency investors navigate the emotional rollercoaster of this volatile asset class. In this report, Didier revisits the tool’s underlying logic and examines what its results reveal about speculative behavior.
Is It Time To Extend Duration?
Imagine that you are a fixed-income manager with no access to gold, says Didier. Should you start to look at long-term bonds, or is it better to stay in cash? And if duration risk is becoming more attractive, where in the world is that trend playing out? In this note, he aims to answer those questions.