Positioning Judgment Is One of the Last Scarce Resources Knowledge is getting cheaper. Judgment isn't. I'm a capital allocator. Every day, I scan the full universe of investable assets, rates, FX, credit, public equities, real estate, lower middle market businesses, watching for where the macro backdrop is shifting and where that shift is mispriced. That scan is constant. Where I commit capital is not. I underwrite everything against one standard, the best risk-adjusted return I can find, and once I commit, I hold. I don't have a home asset class. I have a hurdle rate, and a daily discipline for finding where it's being met. That wasn't a viable way to operate until recently. I worked at Citi Global Markets from 2010 to 2017. During that period, I visited a client at BlackRock and walked onto a trading floor where a senior portfolio manager's team sat, overseeing a huge stretch of the investable universe. What I saw was rows of desks, each one a person or a team monitoring a slice of global markets around the clock. That image stuck with me. Covering the full investable universe required an institution, because it took that many people watching that many screens at once. A rates desk, a credit desk, an FX desk, an equity research team, each staffed by specialists who spent their careers on one slice of the market. No individual, however sharp, could cover that much ground alone. The need for that infrastructure is disintegrating before our eyes, and not for the reason people assume. In the pre-AI world, it paid to specialize. One desk, one asset class, one skill sharpened over a career, that was the only way to get good enough to matter. AI changes the calculation, but not by replacing the specialists. AI specializes extremely well; it can already out-analyze most humans within a narrow domain. What it struggles with is orchestration: coordinating across domains, weighing one read against another, deciding which signal matters most right now and which is noise. So the value is migrating, from the specialist who can only execute within one lane to the generalist who can coordinate across all of them. I'm building Sovyrn Advisory on that premise. I covered global macro hedge funds and traded everything from rates, FX, commodities, and equity indices to the options on each, through the tail end of the declining rate cycle that ended in 2020, so I understand how those markets actually move, not just how they're described in the financial press. I loved trading global markets, but I hated how most of the industry measures itself. Most macro traders are judged on their ability to capture the next ten basis points on a rates trade, or the next fifty pips on a currency pair, and god forbid you have a drawdown, on some desks a two percent drawdown gets you pulled from the book. That's a fast-twitch game played by people sitting on trading desks and automated systems co-located next to exchange servers to shave microseconds off message transmission times, and it's not one I have an edge in or care to play. My timeframe is longer, for two reasons: it's a time horizon fewer people are competing in today, and it depends on something uniquely human, our ability to tell and understand stories. I acquired my first business on January 3, 2020, fifty-eight days before COVID shut the country down: a general contracting company in Las Vegas focused on federal contracts. The premise was simple. The low-rate cycle was ending, automation and robotics and AI were going to upend the economy, and a business built on organizing scarce physical labor, high-risk and project-based as it is, would thrive as that labor commanded higher wages and generated larger margin, in absolute dollars, for whoever organized it. I partnered with construction professionals, and we built the company through near-insolvency on a personal guarantee. That cycle, the one that rewarded financial engineers who could structure and lever their way to returns while rates sat near zero, is over. The next cycle belongs to operators. I underwrite a view, not a trade. That distinction matters more now than it did a decade ago, for a specific reason. Quantitative and systematic strategies won the short-horizon game long ago; they process data and react faster than any human can, which is why old-style "story" macro, built on a human narrative about how the future unfolds, mostly died out. Speed decides short-horizon bets, and machines will always be faster than I am. But judgment decides long-horizon bets, weighing incomplete evidence and constructing a coherent, probabilistic view of a future that hasn't happened yet, and that's a different skill entirely, one machines still can't do well. Speed got automated. Judgment didn't. That's scarce now precisely because everything else got automated. I use AI to cover more ground, faster, across more asset classes and specialties than one person used to be able to track, then I do the part AI can't: decide what the story is and what to do about it. That's the edge. I apply that framework outside public markets too, not just inside them. In 2024, I launched Emerald Tea Supply Company, a cannabis dispensary and delivery business in northern New Jersey, on the premise that it's a growing category in a market with the population density and disposable income to support it, and on my view that demographic and generational shifts underway in politics through 2035 will keep expanding the category as attitudes toward cannabis continue to normalize. I now do this as an independent sponsor, backing acquisitions with capital partners. Neither business is a side project or brand color. They're proof the framework isn't theoretical, that I can source, underwrite, and actually operate a deal, not just talk about one. The name Sovyrn is a deliberate choice, inspired by The Sovereign Individual, a book that shaped how I think about where this is all headed more than anything else I've read. The authors open with a line from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia: “The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia That's the door I think is open right now. Its argument, stripped down, is that as the cost of coordination and information collapses, power moves from institutions to capable individuals who no longer need the institution's infrastructure to compete. That's not a thesis I hold about the world in the abstract. It's the thesis I'm underwriting my own career on. The rates desk, the credit desk, the research team, that was infrastructure built for a world where the individual couldn't cover enough ground alone. I believe that world is fading slowly, then all at once. I believe this is where the industry is headed, not because it's a convenient story, but because I'm underwriting my own career on it. I'm not hedging into a safer label. If you're an operator with a business that fits this framework, I want to see it. If you're an allocator looking for a partner who thinks in cycles, not calendar quarters, I want to talk. If you're someone who wants to build something real instead of managing someone else's book, I want you on the team. Sovyrn, in the way the name suggests: not tied to one institution, one asset class, or one label. I built it because I believe in it. Jason Leisey — Sovyrn Advisory