Start Here
Who I am, what I do, and what to expect here at TMO.
Hey folks!
I’m Jack Bowman. If you’ve seen my bio, it usually reads something like…
Columnist, Investment Advisor, Top 5% on TipRanks, Economics Wonk,
Techno-Empiricist; Long Signal, Short Noise
And of course most of that is easily verifiable:
I write an (almost) daily column on Seeking Alpha.
My investment advisory practice is called Bowman Capital Management.
And I really am in the top 5% of TipRanks experts; you can go check.
This newsletter exists to showcase what’s not verifiable with a hyperlink: the skepticism sans doomerism, multidisciplinary pattern recognition, and the conviction to hold a view well before the market prices it in.
Less elegantly, but more accurately, TMO is where I go to think in public.
So without further ado…
Welcome to the starter edition of The Macro Obsession.
The best guide to the best round-up of current events and trends in finance, tech, and the real economy currently in your inbox!
Markets Do Not Move In Isolation
TMO is built on this simple belief.
Following and pulling multiple threads is necessary for investors to stay on top of the moving target that is the market zeitgeist. A multifaceted approach is necessary to find information alpha, the threads pulled until we get to the end.
Every Sunday at 6 AM Los Angeles time, TMO hits your inbox with a mix of:
Macro & Markets
I talk a lot about stocks, gold, underpriced and oversold market narratives, and the broader risk environment.Policy & Geopolitics
No hackery here, just calling balls and strikes as I see them and as it relates to helping us understand the effects on the other topics.Labor Market, Demographics, & Real Estate
Bundle this with credit, consumer habits, inflation, and the bizarre ways people are adapting to the 21st century. These forces are the real movers of the economy, and their data matter a lot.AI Skepticism Minus the Cheap Doom
I write a lot about AI in TMO because AI is salient in essentially all of these other topics. My self-description is “techno-empiricist” because I have taken a “show me the data” approach. The jury is still out on AI.1
Most newsletters treat all of these categories as different niches to be honed to death, and if you want to get deep into the technical weeds, they are. But for the operator and generalist who needs to deeply understand the big picture, TMO is for you.
But wait, there’s more!
Every month during the first week of the month, I release two specials:
The ETF Obsession
I research every ETF that launched in the previous month and release my notes. This comes as a nice spreadsheet, complete with my verdict on which are worth considering for your watchlist.The TMO Model Portfolio
For premium subscribers, I give my thoughts on portfolio positioning and discuss my model. Performance is available for all to see; positions are hidden behind the paywall so that making money is a two-way street, but so are my receipts.
Where to Start
All of these trends are always moving, so the best place to start is the latest TMO. You can find it under the “Recent Posts” tab on the homepage, which you can bookmark:
https://jackbowman.link/newsletter
Each weekly issue is free and stays open to view for free on the website for a month, and then goes into the archive, where it becomes available for premium subscribers.
Once you’ve read the most recent and whatever is still above the paywall, all that’s left is to wait for Sunday, and you’ll get your next hit of TMO.2
Last Words
TMO is a small publication run by me and edited by my lovely wife. I hope you enjoy it and get something out of it. If you do, consider becoming a premium subscriber. It helps me (and my lovely wife) get one step closer to doing this more than I write for other websites.
For those that have made it this far, I’m happy to offer 20% off with a code that never expires and automatically carries for the rest of your account’s subscription lifetime. Cheers!
If you have any questions, you can message me with this button. I’m always happy to chat with my readers.
Or you can email me at jbowman@bowmancm.com
If reading this made you think of a pal, send it to them and tell them why.
See you in the next TMO.
That is to say that I have become somewhat known for having a forceful stance around the retail use of generative AI, believing that freely and cheaply allowing individuals to use generative AI systems to produce near-infinite amounts of text, images, and video (RIP Sora) is a loser’s game. Frontier AI labs that cannot run LLMs as a loss leader will all eventually go under or be sold for parts—they are likely worth more dead than alive anyway.
Slop is not and cannot be made profitably, basically by definition.
I have a maxim for most of my core beliefs, and the one for this theory is:
This will go down as the greatest act of willful capital destruction in history.
For the most up-to-date list of topics I’ve covered, I update this spreadsheet every week with all the stories of the previous week’s TMO along with links to each subtopic. This is just my personal sheet, so it’s very low-frills, but I’m offering it in case you’d prefer to index TMO that way.