This is the quarterly. The annual comes out in February.
Our boilerplate introduction to Ruffer:
One of the sharpest people in investment management.
First a reprise of December 2020's "Izabella Kaminska: "2020: The year bitcoin went institutional"":
Bitcoin is on a tear. And this time, the hyper valuations might stick.
On December 11, a prominent but very private financial newsletter author noted to clients that while he had never previously written about bitcoin, it was correct to say that institutional capital had now started to arrive in scale and that it would be churlish to pick a fight with it. Demand for bitcoin would now outstrip supply.
Bitcoin, he observed, would become an excellent metaphor for risk appetite in 2021 as a result.
Less than a week later, Coindesk confirmed that UK-based asset manager Ruffer had accumulated some £550m of bitcoin since November, representing some 2.7 per cent of the firm’s AUM. Ruffer’s move is now being widely interpreted as the beginning of a major portfolio diversification trend into bitcoin. It seems institutional money can no longer afford to ignore it. And bitcoiners are understandably overjoyed....
....MUCH MORE
On the day that was posted, December 18, bitcoin traded at $23,138.89 (4pm Eastern)
(it had begun the month of November 2020 at $13,803.69)And our outro from her piece:
Jonathan Ruffer is justifiably famous for some high kurtosis (fat tail/black swan) VIX trades that ZeroHedge was tracking.
I like Ruffer's quarterly Investment Review but I have a serious problem when I read it.
I start to sing. This song:
"I like… fat… tails and I cannot lie, You vol sellers can’t deny..."
From Jonathan Ruffer, April 4, 2022:
Events in Ukraine are to be seen, first, through the lens of humanity. Through the lens of finance, Russia’s invasion is having the same effect as covid: it is accelerating trends which are already in place. And those trends are inflationary.
Everybody has a view on the war, and I don’t claim extra-sensory insight, but it seems clear that the West has been galvanised out of its lethargy into a visceral rejection of the Russian impulse. Western society is now turning the cancel culture on those whose robust realpolitik includes a colonial approach to other nations. Russia’s strength is military, not economic. But real power lies with economic strength and only in commodities does Russia hold strategic power. This creates an inflationary dynamic. The really notable development is that the German political classes can no longer hold their noses and continue to accept Russian gas – popular outrage forbids it. Wherever one looks, the popular outrage at Russia is forcing disengagement with that empire – much more comprehensively than by formal sanction.
This dynamic will spread to China. Popular opinion in Britain demands that statues of yesteryear be removed – how long will it be before the plight of the Uyghurs today puts a searchlight on those who have prospered from Chinese state beneficence? At a narrow level, China may now be less likely to play the Kyiv card on Taiwan; it is now more likely that there will be a de facto boycott of trade alliances which have grown up – as marriages of convenience – between the West and China. The high watermark of world trade peaked before the covid pandemic; to repeat, I see the war in Ukraine acting as an accelerant, including in patterns of trade.
There is another trend which has accelerated as a result of Russia’s invasion. The evisceration of Russia is the story of extreme pressure on a cadre of individuals – oligarchs, for the want of an English word – whose money and assets are being put into purdah. The yachts are like Archdukes in 1917: easily spotted, and efficiently despatched. The shadier assets in the leafy streets of London are camouflaged in ownership – and the professional classes who painted the zigzags on the title deeds are themselves coming into scrutiny. Russian involvement will continue to wreak localised havoc in unlikely places – like a rising sea level, you spot the submersion of the low-lying places first, but then mysterious inland lakes appear, seemingly randomly, which are no less connected to that primary dynamic. The Russians have been attracted to London because the robust legal system in the UK, married to practitioners prepared to give it expression, provided a cordon sanitaire around their assets....
....MUCH MORE
