Every explorer in history faced the same question: do you hug the shoreline where the maps are already drawn, or push out into blank seas where dragons supposedly live?
Markets work the same way. You can anchor your portfolio to the “Old World” — blue-chip stocks, S&P 500 ETFs, U.S. Treasuries. Safe. Charted. Predictable. Or you can set sail into uncharted waters: crypto protocols, frontier AI companies, climate tech startups that may either save the planet or sink with their prototypes.
I call this the search for Treasure Edge. It’s not about being reckless; it’s about recognizing that the greatest asymmetries live beyond the shoreline. Buying Nvidia before AI became mainstream was Treasure Edge. Betting on Ethereum when it was a niche developer tool? Same thing.
But here’s the dilemma: most maps lie. History is littered with explorers who mistook mirages for continents. Markets are no different — plenty of “next Amazons” turned out to be Pets.com. The art is in reading the winds without hallucinating land where there’s only fog.
🔗 For context, Investopedia’s primer on emerging markets is a good starting shoreline. And for the contrarians among you, I’d recommend looking at Howard Marks on second-level thinking — he’s basically the cartographer of contrarian investing.
And don’t forget the Riskquakes. When tectonic plates shift under new markets (like regulation suddenly arriving, or a liquidity drain nobody anticipated), the “edge” you thought you found might crack in two. You don’t avoid Treasure Edge because of risk — you price it in, like a sailor stocking food for storms.
So, what’s the takeaway? Draw your maps, but leave room for blank spaces. Hug the shoreline with some of your capital. But if you want to make history, allocate a sliver of your portfolio to Treasure Edge. Because the old maps will get you safely home. The new ones might just make you a legend.
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