Bonus Quote of the Day: How to manage when "the world goes mad"

Just started Michael Lewis's bestseller Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.

In a chapter on the great debacle of 1998 which was the famous (now infamous) hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (an event that should be required study for all asset managers), the following hit home in terms of present circumstances and how we're managing them here at PWA:

"The world has changed, and the solution is greater complexity. "It's like there are two businesses here, Eric Rosenfeld says, "the old business, which works fine under normal conditions, and this standby business when the world goes mad. And for that, you either need to buy insurance or have a pool of standby capital to take advantage of these opportunities.""

We're uber-sensitive to what we view as the madness of the day, and with our put hedge and increased cash allocation (relative to pre-December 2019) -- not to mention what the put hedge would deliver by way of liquidity (standby capital) in a market meltdown -- we're covering both the "insurance" and the "pool of standby capital."