Dan Marks

How we created our new brand hancockwhitney.com/insights/…

🚨 Everyone is watching the wrong bubble. And missing the greatest opportunity in 40 years because of it. While the crowd argues about AI and crypto, the real story is the asset sitting in every "safe" portfolio on earth. Bonds. The 1981 top printed 14% yields. The 2020 bottom printed 0%. That was 39 years of falling rates, and it ended in a single Covid panic. Covid was the turn. Rates hit zero, the system flooded itself with liquidity, and the 40-year bull in bonds quietly ended in the very moment everyone felt rescued. That's reflexivity in the Soros sense. For four decades, falling yields lifted every asset, which convinced everyone yields would keep falling, which lifted assets again. Belief and reality reinforced each other all the way down to zero. Then the loop turned. And here's the part almost no one has grasped: a turn this big isn't the end of the game. It's the start of a far better one. Here's why I'm genuinely excited. For 40 years, falling rates lifted everything together. Correlations converged. The tide carried every boat, so owning the whole ocean beat knowing which boat was seaworthy. Index beat judgment. Skill was a rounding error. That era is over, and what replaces it is the best environment for active investing in two generations. When the secular tide reverses, dispersion comes roaring back. Winners and losers split apart violently. Suddenly the things that were invisible for 40 years, valuation, balance-sheet quality, real cash flow, pricing power, decide everything. The gap between the great business and the mediocre one stops being a footnote and becomes the whole return. This is the world that made Buffett, Lynch, and Templeton. It's the world before 1981, where picking actually paid. It's coming back. And it arrives at the most lopsided starting line imaginable, which is exactly what makes the opportunity so rich. Concentration at a record. A handful of names carrying the entire index. Record IPOs listing at peak valuations and getting forced straight into peak index weights through mechanical, price-insensitive buying. The passive bid that everyone treats as ballast has become the marginal price-setter at the worst possible altitude. JPMorgan's own Guide to the Markets makes the setup clear. Map starting valuation against subsequent ten-year returns, and today's level points to roughly zero percent per year from the S&P over the coming decade. Sit with that. Zero from the broad index for ten years. Now flip it over. If the average is zero, the spread around that average is enormous. Some things compound beautifully. Others go nowhere or worse. A flat index for a decade isn't a dead market. It's the richest hunting ground for active investors in living memory, because the distance between right and wrong has never paid more. The whole architecture of modern investing was engineered for the era that just ended. - Buy stocks and chill. Built on a discount rate going one direction. Down. - The 60/40. Built on bonds rallying whenever equities fell. - Just buy the ETF. Built on a 40-year tailwind no one managing money today has ever seen reverse. That's the trap. And the mirror image of every trap is an opening for the people who see it first. Strauss and Howe gave this moment a name. The Fourth Turning. The last of the four cycles, the Crisis, when the institutions built for the old era meet the conditions of the new one. These turns feel like danger to everyone clinging to the last playbook. They are the launchpad for everyone holding the next one. The tide is turning. The old map is worthless. And the greatest opportunity of our generation is hiding in plain sight, inside the thing everyone still calls safe.

A major housing headwind is about to hit. And that's the Baby Boomer exodus from the U.S. Housing Market. In the next decade, the share of U.S. population above 75 will skyrocket. Meaning Baby Boomer owners who fueled the housing market over the last 20 years will turn into sellers they age out. And Gen X, the next generation in line to buy up those homes, won't be able to absorb it. As they are 20% smaller in population than the Baby Boomers. The result is that by 2037, there will be more 75+ aged Americans than 55-64 aged Americans. Which will be a first in modern U.S. History. This will lead to lower homebuyer demand, more supply, and lower prices in retirement destinations. Especially across Florida and Arizona. To see how this demographic data for your area, check reventure.app.

boarding was solved mathematically in 2008. no airline has used it once. why?

Here is my personal list of vacation markets that I think are going to see the highest Foreclosure rates over next 2-3 years: 1) Broken Bow, OK 2) Blue Ridge, GA 3) Elijay, GA 4) Maggie Valley, NC 5) Helen, GA 6) Beech Mtn, NC 7) Mineral Bluff/Cherry Log, GA 8) Eureka Springs, AR 9) McCall, ID 10) Sisters, OR 11) Sandpoint, ID 12) Payson/White Mtns, AZ 13) Whitefish, MT 14) Lake of Ozarks, MO 15) Leavenworth, WA Many of these were "Second home/family vacation cabin" markets before Covid. Then the lockdown caused a flood of AirBnB speculators in many small towns. That caused prices to skyrocket and a lot of FOMO buyers to jump on the "AirBnB is passive income" train from 2022 - 2025. I am already seeing quite a few foreclosures go all the way to fruition in some of the above towns (the process usually takes 1 - 2 years from the date of the last mortgage payment by the owner). I go into details of each of these towns in my Newsletter I'm releasing today. In the next hour, I'll be dropping it at Bowtiedbroke.substack.com where I break down a specific foreclosure in one of the above towns so you know how to spot them and how they progress along the path of: 1) Last Made Mortgage Payment 2) Short Sale Attempt 3) Foreclosure paperwork 4) Actual Default Foreclosure 5) Bank Asset Manager 6) Sale of Property by bank Today's write up will be wide open to everyone (because I feel this a very important topic to know/learn about in the next few years). If you've ever wondered what the Foreclosure process looks like and want to know more about what happened in the above towns, you will want to read it.

Christopher Nolan asked IMAX to build him a new camera. They did. Then he and Matt Damon spent four months filming The Odyssey on the open ocean, on the largest modern Viking longship in the world, with no green screens at all. The shoot ran 91 days, from late February to August 2025. Seven countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Western Sahara, and Malta. Aside from one indoor studio in Los Angeles, every shot was filmed on real ground. In Italy, the cast and crew climbed 900 feet up a mountain every morning. Imagine walking up a 60-story building before breakfast. In Iceland, they filmed the underworld scenes by lantern light while rain came at them sideways. The four months at sea actually happened at sea. Damon and the actors playing his crew sailed on a real ship called the Draken Harald Hårfagre, used here as a Greek warship. Nolan called the experience "primal." He said the cast and crew were exhausted in a way he had never seen before. The cameras were the other big problem. IMAX cameras have always been too loud to record clean dialogue, which is why directors mostly save them for big action scenes. Nolan asked IMAX to fix this. They engineered a new soundproof case for the camera, a kind of quiet jacket, that lets the lens get within a foot of an actor's face while they whisper and still pick up clean audio. The new cameras also came out lighter and about 30% quieter than the old ones. To prove it worked, the lead cameraman Hoyte van Hoytema filmed a tight close-up of a child reciting a David Bowie song, "Sound and Vision." Nolan watched the test and called it "electrifying." Damon went all-in on the role. He dropped to 167 pounds on a strict no-gluten diet. He grew a real beard for a full year because Nolan refused to allow a fake one. The crew built a full-scale wooden Trojan Horse and shot the attack scene at an ancient walled town in Morocco called Aït Benhaddou. Nolan himself climbed inside the horse with the cast and his cameraman to get the shot. Across the whole shoot they used 2 million feet of film. That comes out to around 380 miles of it, longer than the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. At about $1.50 a foot, they spent roughly $3 million just on the film itself. The full budget was $250 million, the biggest of Nolan's career. They wrapped nine days ahead of schedule. Tickets went on sale on July 17, 2025, exactly one year before the movie's release. That had never been done before in cinema history. Half of the 22 US theaters offering IMAX 70mm sold out within 12 hours, bringing in around $1.5 million in a single morning. Nolan called the shoot "an absolute nightmare to film, but in all the right ways." He did not destroy a single IMAX camera. He has wrecked several over his career.

Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is "part of normal business." The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with "high blast radius" caused by "Gen-AI assisted changes" for which "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking? The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an "extremely limited event" (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).

GOV: We have a housing crisis. Prices are too high. ME: I agree. Supply is too low. GOV: So we have a plan. We’re going to subsidize demand. ME: …What does that mean? GOV: We’re going to give people money to buy houses. ME: But there aren't enough houses. GOV: Right. So we’ll help them bid harder. ME: If you have 10 people fighting for 1 house, and you give them all cash... the price just goes up. GOV: Then we’ll give them more cash. ME: That’s not a solution. That’s inflation. GOV: It’s "First Time Homebuyer Assistance." ME: Okay, let’s back up. Why are houses so expensive in the first place? GOV: Because we made them the perfect investment vehicle. ME: How? GOV: First, the 30-year fixed mortgage. ME: That’s standard, right? GOV: Only in America. In other countries, rates float. Here, you can lock in a low rate for three decades. ME: Why would a bank take that risk? If inflation goes up, they lose money. GOV: Banks don’t take the risk. They sell the loan to us. ME: To the government? GOV: To Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We guarantee the liquidity. ME: So the taxpayer subsidizes the risk so I can have cheap leverage? GOV: Correct. ME: And then I get to deduct the interest? GOV: Only on the first $750,000 of debt. ME: That seems... high. GOV: It used to be a million. We trimmed it. ME: But wait. If I rent, can I deduct my rent? GOV: No. ME: If I buy a small business, can I deduct the interest on the loan? GOV: It’s complicated. ME: But if I buy a giant house, I definitely can? GOV: Absolutely. We wrote it into the tax code. ME: So you’re paying me to borrow money to buy a bigger house than I need. GOV: We’re "incentivizing ownership." ME: What happens when I sell? GOV: The Capital Gains Exclusion! ME: How does that work? GOV: If you sell a stock for a $500,000 profit, you pay taxes. ME: Roughly 20%. GOV: If you sell your house for a $500,000 profit? ME: What do I pay? GOV: Zero. ME: Zero tax? GOV: As long as you lived there for two years. ME: So housing is the only asset class where I get subsidized 30-year leverage and tax-free profits? GOV: Pretty sweet deal, right? ME: So you turned shelter into a speculative financial asset. GOV: We call it "Generational Wealth." ME: Okay, so demand is juiced to the moon. Can we at least build more supply to bring prices down? GOV: Oh, absolutely not. ME: Why? GOV: Zoning. ME: I own land. Can I build a duplex? GOV: Illegal. Single-family only. ME: Can I build a granny flat? GOV: Only if you provide two parking spots and pass a shadow study. ME: So you made it illegal to build cheaper housing? GOV: We protect "Neighborhood Character." ME: But you spend billions on roads and utilities for the suburbs. GOV: Infrastructure investment. ME: So you subsidize the expensive sprawl, but ban the cheap density? GOV: Now you’re getting it. ME: This system seems designed to keep prices high. GOV: It is. ME: But you started this conversation by saying we have an "Affordability Crisis." GOV: We do. Prices are too high! ME: So we should lower them? GOV: No! We can’t lower prices. ME: Why not? GOV: Because then the voters lose their "Generational Wealth." ME: So we need high prices for the voters... and low prices for the buyers? GOV: Exactly. ME: That’s a paradox. GOV: It’s politics. ME: So what is your actual plan? GOV: We’re going to give first-time buyers $25,000. ME: Okay. I’m a seller. I list my house for $400,000. GOV: Uh huh. ME: I know every buyer just got a free $25,000 from the government. GOV: Right. ME: What do I do? GOV: You... keep the price the same? ME: I raise the price to $425,000. GOV: You wouldn't. ME: I absolutely would. The buyer can afford it now. GOV: But that just transfers the subsidy from the poor buyer to the rich seller! ME: Econ 101. GOV: We don’t think that will happen. ME: Just like you didn’t think $7,500 EV credits would make Ford raise the price of the F-150 Lightning by exactly $7,500? GOV: That was a coincidence. ME: You are trapping us in a box. GOV: It’s not a box. ME: What is it? GOV: It’s a Single Family Home with a 2.5% mortgage rate that you can never afford to sell. ME: ... GOV: Welcome to the American Dream.

I am proud to announce that I have successfully completed the world’s first USA coast to coast fully autonomous drive! I left the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles 2 days & 20 hours ago, and now have ended in Myrtle Beach, SC (2,732.4 miles) This was accomplished with Tesla FSD V14.2 with absolutely 0 disengagements of any kind even for all parking including at Tesla Superchargers.