Sublime

Three reasons explain why Aldi’s return on sales is more than double the returns of a traditional supermarket: higher efficiency , lower costs, and capital management

Markets are driven by the actions of countless individuals, each reacting to his or her whims, the weather, and the news of the day. Remarkably, just as with army ants, out of all our individual actions emerges a higher order, a set of prices that allows us to buy and sell whatever we may desire.

“No one can make any money in our business. Every single company has too much capacity. Every time a project comes up for bid, someone needs it desperately and offers suicidal prices. Sometimes it’s us, sometimes it’s a competitor . Even though four suppliers make up 80 % of the global market in our business, no one makes any money.”

Second, those who hold return-seeking capital assets but who do not lever up are comparatively disadvantaged if their competitors do.

To date, it has been very difficult to conceptualize what value, exactly, has peacefully opted out of fiat and into bitcoin. Pricing only happens at the margin, and marginal fiat exchanged for bitcoin is just a bank liability that the bank relabels.

Hayek gives us the intuition of prices conveying only what market participants deem to be the most important information and actually destroying the rest, and Holland shows how this can be represented with the formalism of complex systems.