Attack the Week (ATW)
Be more like Chuck Norris / Higher Oil = Recession? / Charts / Asset Allocation Update
Sunday Thoughts
Amidst all the Friday volatility, one headline flashing across my screen caught my eye. Chuck Norris is dead. May he rest in peace.
This got me thinking.
Chuck isn’t really a person on the internet anymore — he’s a symbol, a meme. A hard-lined man who doesn’t get beaten down by anything. A rock amidst anything you throw at him. And, strangely, also water: adaptable, calm, inevitable — the kind of thing Bruce Lee pointed at when he said to flow, not freeze.
The jokes are ridiculous, but they land because they point at a hunger people don’t say out loud:
“Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups. He pushes the Earth down.”
“Death once had a near-Chuck-Norris experience.”
“Chuck Norris can divide by zero.”
Under the meme is a simple message: don’t collapse when pressure rises.
What I take from the archetype isn’t invincibility. It’s composure.
Keep your base: sleep, food, movement, and a few honest people. When things get tough, that’s what most people abandon first — and then they wonder why they feel weak.
Breathe before you act. The smallest pause can stop you from making a hard situation worse.
Train when it’s easy. Resilience isn’t a quote — it’s repetition. The meme hides the work. Life doesn’t. In investing the same, sharpen your frameworks, especially around how you risk manage situations and yourself.
And “never give up” doesn’t mean headbutting the same wall forever. Sometimes it means changing tactics. Resting. Walking away from the wrong fight so you can win the right one.
Rock when you must.
Water when you can.
And when the next hit comes — because it will — ask yourself: what would it look like to take the punch without adding panic on top of it?
Lately, you can feel it everywhere.
With the war in the Middle East, people are jumpy — not just online, but in real rooms. Even well-hardened professionals I know, people who’ve stared down real pressure for years, are getting emotional. Shorter fuses.
Trump’s new 48-hour ultimatum will only add to that edge. I have no idea what will happen, but I’m prepared no matter the outcome. The beauty of deadlines is that they carry a sense of finality — and maybe, just maybe, that’s what allows things to de-escalate once they pass. As we move into spring here in Europe, I hope calmer heads prevail. Spring equinox has that in it.
In this Sunday edition, I cover a few more thoughts on the macro environment we are heading into. Oil is still north of 110 bucks. Hormuz is shut. The US administration is sending mixed signals, and the recession calls are getting louder by the day. But does every oil shock lead to recession? I walk through all six major oil price spikes since 1973, analyse the outcome across every G7 economy, and show why the relationship between crude and contraction is far more conditional than the consensus believes.
Plus — the new Chart Dashboard is live, and it's just the beginning. I think you should check it out, as more advanced things sit on top of my moodboard, and I like it.
After I analyse prior episodes, I give my man Macro D the floor to explore his thoughts and the Macro FX implications of the current environment. A quick scan of the weekly macro calendar finds its way to our newly established macro chart dashboard, where I am going to focus on a few interesting chart setups before we explore the output of the weekly asset allocation model, which quietly cut allocations to both bonds and equities last week - a timely move.
Let’s explore.
