The story behind Bear & Talon, why it exists, and the values that shape every brief we publish.
I started in medicine. Got my MD from Georgetown, fully intended to spend my career in surgery. I was good at it. The work demanded the same things markets demand — pattern recognition under pressure, high-stakes decisions with incomplete information, and the discipline not to act until the setup was right.
But the thing that actually kept me up at night wasn't the operating room. It was markets. I'd finish a shift and spend the next two hours reading macro research, building DCFs in my head, thinking about where rates were going and what that meant for credit spreads. I wasn't doing it for money. I was doing it because it was the most interesting problem I'd ever encountered.
Eventually I made a choice. I left medicine for finance, specifically for Arrowstreet Capital, where I spent years doing quantitative, macro-driven work that rewires the way you see information. You learn to look at the full board before anyone else spots the first move. You learn that most market noise is just that — noise — and that the signal is almost always hiding in the relationship between two things nobody's looking at simultaneously.
Now I'm retired. Not from curiosity — just from the obligation to sit at someone else's desk and run someone else's book. Every morning I still run the same process I always have: pull the data, build the macro picture, figure out what actually matters and what's noise.
The difference is now I have time to write it down. And when I started looking at what was available for people who wanted a real pre-market brief — one that assumed fluency, had an actual point of view, and didn't spend three paragraphs explaining what the Fed is — I couldn't find it.
So I built it. Bear & Talon is the brief I always wanted to read before the open.
"Markets move on information. We exist to make sure you're never the last one to have it."
The name is deliberate. The bear and the talon represent two dispositions every serious market participant needs — the discipline to wait, and the precision to act. Neither patience alone nor aggression alone wins. The brief is built in that spirit.
Trained in high-stakes decision-making under uncertainty. Developed the pattern recognition that would later transfer directly to macro analysis.
Years of quant-macro work across equities, rates, and cross-asset frameworks. Built the analytical discipline that underpins every Bear & Talon brief.
Stepped back from institutional finance. Still runs the same morning process every trading day — now shared publicly via Bear & Talon.
A daily pre-market brief that brings institutional-grade macro analysis to any reader who wants it — regardless of whether they're managing a fund or managing their own portfolio.
We don't explain what the Fed is, what a yield curve inversion means, or why the VIX matters. We tell you what the signal says today, and what it likely means for tomorrow.
You won't find "some analysts suggest" in Bear & Talon. We have a view. We state it. You can disagree — but you'll never be left wondering what we actually think.
Predictability is a feature. You should be able to open the brief, know exactly what to expect, and find exactly that. No ad hoc structure. No filler. No reruns.
The Signal section runs a historical pattern match every morning. When nothing fires, we print "No match." We'd rather say nothing than fabricate a pattern to fill space.
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