Shows
BacktestThe 80s on Wall Street: Fred Carr Bankrolls the Boom (Part 4)In the first three parts of this series, we covered Michael Milken building the high-yield bond market, Ross Johnson triggering the RJR Nabisco bidding war, and KKR winning the biggest LBO in history. But there is a missing piece to the puzzle: where did all the money come from?The answer leads us to Fred Carr, a largely forgotten figure who may be the most important person in 1980s finance that almost nobody has heard of. A scrappy outsider from Watts, Los Angeles, he first rose to fame as the hottest mutual fund manager in America during...
2026-02-261h 12
BacktestThe 80s on Wall Street: KKR and The RJR Nabisco Battle (Part 3)We pick up where we left off in Part 2. Ross Johnson, CEO of RJR Nabisco, presents a management buyout bid for $75-per-share—a number he’s certain will get the deal done without competition.Instead, as soon as the board issues the customary press release announcing the buyout bid, RJR Nabisco is in play as the most prized buyout target on Wall Street.Ross Johnson alienates not one, but two major players on Wall Street: Henry Kravis from buyout specialist firm KKR and Jeff “Mad Dog” Beck from junk bond specialist Drexel Burnham Lambert. It turns ou...
2026-02-1349 min
BacktestThe 80s on Wall Street: Road to RJR Nabisco’s LBO (Part 2)In 1987, America is riding one of the greatest bull markets in history—until it all comes to an abrupt end on Black Monday, October 19th 1987. Portfolio insurance, a fragile strategy built on unrealistic market assumptions, helps turn a selloff into the single worst day in stock market history.Ross Johnson, the CEO of RJR Nabisco, watches as his stock price gets cut in half in a day… even though the business and the economy are fine.Over the next year, he tries everything from asset sales to share buybacks to convince the market there’s a lot...
2026-02-041h 07
BacktestThe 80s on Wall Street: Michael Milken Makes a Market (Part 1)The 1980s were an iconic decade on Wall Street. Michael Milken and his team at Drexel were key players in sparking the wave of buyouts that were emblematic of the era.Before all that, in the early 1970s, a young Michael Milken joined Drexel to focus on low-grade bonds. He had discovered the research of W. Braddock Hickman, which concluded low-grade bonds could generate attractive investment returns, and he became obsessed. He was ambitious, smart, and an outsider when he got to Wall Street. Within a decade, he would be at the center of it....
2026-01-221h 14
BacktestThe Shale Revolution: EOG, OPEC, and Profits from Shale Oil (Part 3)In Part 1, George Mitchell unlocked shale gas. In Part 2, Aubrey McClendon fueled the boom with a capital and land machine at Chesapeake. In Part 3, we tell the story of one of the operators who makes shale production stick. EOG Resources led by CEO Mark Papa cultivates a unique (and uniquely secretive) culture of rigorous capital allocation and constant technical experimentation.We follow Papa and his lieutenants Bill Thomas and Gary Thomas as they see what others miss: shale’s success in natural gas will eventually create a glut that will crash prices. EOG must pivot to oil or...
2025-12-231h 12
BacktestThe Shale Revolution: Aubrey McClendon & the Natural Gas Boom (Part 2)At the end of Part 1, Devon had just bought Mitchell Energy for $3.5B and locked in the technological innovation behind the shale revolution. But the real boom in drilling, debt, and production doesn’t kick off until a worldclass landman and dealmaker from Oklahoma City—Aubrey McClendon—decides to bet his career and wealth on natural gas being the defining fuel of the 21st century.In this episode, we tell Aubrey’s story: from deep family roots in oil & gas to hustling as an independent landman in the brutal 1980s bust, to co-founding Chesapeake, taking it public in 1993...
2025-12-1059 min
BacktestThe Shale Revolution: George Mitchell’s Natural Gas Moonshot (Part 1)George Mitchell and his team—people like Nick Steinsberger—through relentless experimentation and financial pressure targeted natural gas in the Barnett Shale and unlocked generations of US energy supply. The question was less, “is the gas there?” and more “can it be produced economically?”By answering that question they changed the US natural gas market, global geopolitics, and the daily life of everyday Americans.In this episode we tell the story of George Mitchell, the son of Greek immigrants who clawed his way from financial hardship in Galveston to build a multi-billion dollar energy business—first by using...
2025-11-251h 11
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk Walk into the Fire and Create PayPal (Part 4)Imagine starting a company to change the world of finance right before an epic stock market crash.Elon Musk famously said that PayPal wasn’t a hard company to create. It was a hard company to keep alive.In 1999, three future titans of technology—Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk—charge straight into the blaze to bring payments and finance into the internet age. This is the story of how a handful of brilliant founders and their team navigate from crisis to crisis, face constant near-failure, and create the first successful internet payments solution. From t...
2025-10-3058 min
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: Bezos Sees the Wave, Rides the Crest, Survives the Crash (Part 3)Technology waves are easy to see in hindsight, but often hard to see before they arrive. It’s even harder to build enough conviction to take a risk, ride the wave, and build something great.Jeff Bezos did just that. And while the Amazon story has been told many times, it’s fascinating to think about what he saw that gave him the confidence to leave his comfortable Wall Street job to start Amazon.How did he see the wave before most people, and what gave him the conviction to go for it? We cover his...
2025-10-1759 min
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: A Tale of Two Telecoms (Part 2)In the late 1990s, the internet grew exponentially to become an enormous engine for technological progress and economic disruption.The existing telecommunications infrastructure was designed to carry voice and television signals—not data packets. The system needed billions of dollars in fiber and copper to support the tidal wave. Telecom entrepreneurs, incumbent executives and capital markets were eager to invest capital and ride the boom.In this episode, we tell the parallel rise (and unraveling) of two giants who tried to wire the future from opposite ends of the network.On one side: Jo...
2025-10-071h 01
BacktestThe Dot Com Boom: Netscape Lights the Fuse (Part 1)DescriptionGold-rush energy meets browser wars.In mid-1994 Silicon Graphics legend Jim Clark sits down with a 22-year-old programmer Marc Andreessen in the heart of Silicon Valley. Clark, a rebellious hardware icon trying to reinvent himself, and Andreessen, fresh off building the first web browser, bet that the browser will be the operating system to the open web.Their new company races from zero to market share dominance, forcing Microsoft’s “tidal wave” pivot. They turn their IPO into a marketing weapon on August 5, 1995 when Netscape goes public without profits—and the stock soars—se...
2025-09-2658 min
BacktestThe Nixon Shock: Connally’s Bold Move (Part 3)A run on the dollar, stagflation, and an election on the line—Part 3 wraps up the series with President Nixon’s shocking announcement to shut the gold window… a move that changed the monetary system forever and signaled the beginning of the end for the perception of gold as money. We meet John Connally, the swaggering Democratic governor of Texas who rode in the car with JFK when he was shot, and later became Nixon’s Treasury Secretary. He was the political closer tasked with averting a global monetary crisis and more importantly, securing Nixon’s re-election in 1972.In the s...
2025-08-2157 min
BacktestThe Nixon Shock: Martin’s Fed vs. The World (Part 2)On the journey towards President Nixon’s fateful decision on August 15th, 1971 to suspend dollar-gold convertibility—a decision that would forever change the global economy—we meet William McChesney Martin Jr, the longest-serving Fed chairman in history and arguably the most consequential economic US policy maker since Alexander Hamilton.After negotiating Fed independence as an Assistant Treasury Secretary with the 1951 Fed-Treasury Accord, President Truman appointed Martin as chairman of the Fed. For two decades, Martin fought to establish Fed independence while pursuing the long-term interests of the US—fighting inflation, defending the dollar, and facing off against five pre...
2025-08-1459 min
BacktestThe Nixon Shock: The Golden Rule at Bretton Woods (Part 1)Gold, power, war, and spies—this series has it all. On August 15th 1971, President Nixon announced that he was suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold. This announcement upended the Bretton Woods monetary system and set the world on a course towards floating exchange rates with the US dollar as a fiat reserve currency for world trade—a system that is under significant pressure today.In the first episode of the series, we tell the story of how an ambitious, little-known American technocrat—Harry Dexter White—went toe-to-toe with the world-famous John Maynard Keynes to rewrite the rules of g...
2025-08-0757 min
BacktestPILOT - The Global Financial Crisis: The Banking Crisis (Part 2)In Part 2: The Banking Crisis, we pick up where Part 1: The Housing Bubble leaves off—with financial institutions all over the world holding mortgage-backed securities as housing prices start to collapse at the end of 2006.In this episode, we tell the story of a financial system that became addicted to mortgage products and complacent about their risk.We cover the basics of banking—how short-term funding and long-term lending creates fragility in normal times, and outright panic in a crisis. We explore how credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and the repo market works—and how th...
2025-05-311h 40
BacktestPILOT - The Global Financial Crisis: The Housing Bubble (Part 1)In this episode, we tell the story of the modern mortgage market, how Wall Street financialized it, and how easy credit inflated one of the biggest bubbles in American history. A bubble that, when it finally popped, nearly brought down the entire global financial system.The housing bubble left scars, changed institutions, and shaped the economy we live in today. It’s impossible to understand the social and economic forces in the 2010s and 2020s without first studying the Global Financial Crisis. At the root of the crisis was a nation-wide housing bubble.In Part 1 of...
2025-05-191h 40
BacktestARCHIVE: Backtest Pilot—The Dot-Com Bubble (see new dot-com series starting with Episode 6: Netscape Lights the Fuse)Quick heads-up: this was our very first episode. We’ve gotten much better since publishing this. If you’re new or looking for the best way to learn about the Dot-Com market cycle, start with The Dot Com Boom: Netscape Lights the Fuse (Part 1). If you’re just exploring our origin story, by all means listen here.—In the 1990s, the personal computer and the internet combined to transform the global economy. The dot-com boom built on the promise of the World Wide Web led to one of the longest economic expansions on record. From the Nets...
2025-03-272h 04