Games of Infinite Leverage

Summer rants

I recently started reading The Price of Time. I’m barely ten pages in, but already I’ve been spiraling over the role of time in capital markets. Simple concepts like interest being the price of time start to feel like divine truths once you sit with them long enough. Time is infinite leverage. The entire game boils down to compounding capital and being present for the rallies that matter. And that's almost it. No hustle porn. No sprinting. Just time.

Of course, gurus sell you a different dream. Get rich quick. Flip your way to freedom. While the dreams sold aren't entirely impossible, the probabilities of them escaping the nether into reality are slim. the math is brutal: for every 2 ascendants, 100,000 are martyred. The probabilities simply betray the ambition.

Time, ironically, is one of the most abundant resources. Infinite in theory, but sparsely capitalized in practice. The future holds the highest premium on capital, and your job, if you’re playing this game with the intention of winning, is to convert that premium into leverage. What’s surprising is that this leverage doesn’t come from effort. It comes from inertia. From patience. From doing less.

Sit on your hands. Touch grass. Stare at charts until your retinas crisp. Hopefully you get to accumulate enough to afford a LASIK. That’s the strategy. The most optimal trade you’ll ever make in life is the one you didn’t force. Patience pays, but not in the moralistic, virtue-signaling way. It pays because the math demands it. Given enough time, exponentiality becomes an ally. Stay solvent long enough, and your portfolio catches the updraft. not because you’re a genius, but because you endured.

“Time in the market beats timing the market.” The phrase is worn thin, but it is directionally accurate. You survive. You compound. And one day, almost suddenly, you're surfing higher waves, not from skill, but from sitting still.

But patience isn’t passive. Not really. While your hands rest, your eyes stay open. You observe. You consume volatility. You study the rhythm. You begin to distinguish noise from signal. Scam waves from real ones. The longer you spend on the shoreline, the more attuned you become. One day you’ll recognize the break before it crests. That’s the second skill, right after stillness: perception.

Watch the tide. Submit to price. Price is the final arbiter of value. Not your ego, not your conviction. Price.

You don’t fight the wave. You ride it. You don’t fight the order book. You read it. And even with all the capital in the world, if you're on the wrong side, gravity wins. Always.