One morning in Mauritius last week, a message arrived from work that yanked me firmly out of my jovial holiday mood.
“Your Kalashnikov arrived in the mail” read the WhatsApp message. It was from my good friend and colleague Nick Hubble.
He thought he was joking.
I thought he wasn’t.
I’ve attended more investment presentations and conferences than I can count. And while there’s always something to learn from such events, the content is often dry and full of academic jargon.
I make sure to scribble down notes when I attend them, because most of the time the presentations are so dull they’re forgettable.
One of the reasons I wanted to work here at Southbank Investment Research in the first place was because the research I’d been reading from the likes of Tim Price and Eoin Treacy stepped well aside from all that, cutting through the noise and providing direct, actionable and memorable research to their readership.
So when Nick O’Connor asked me to give a presentation at The Southbank Investors’ Exhibition, I wasn’t going to let the side down.
As you will know already if you’ve been reading Capital & Conflict for a while, it’s my belief that we are at the dawn of a second Cold War that will be just as extreme as the first one.
History may not repeat, but it rhymes. And at the very beginning of the first Cold War, a weapon was created that would go on to change the world in ways that nobody at the time could have imagined: the AK-47, or Kalashnikov.
Now we’re at the beginning of Cold War II, I believe a new weapon has been created with striking similarities to the AK that will go on to change conflict once more, again in more ways than we can imagine today. This proliferation of the Kalashnikov’s spiritual successor is a trend that will become ever more noticeable, and it’s one you can prepare your portfolio for.
To drive the point home, and to make the presentation one to remember, I thought I’d get a hold of an AK, to emphasise its unique properties that made it so successful. The very same properties that I believe will make the Kalashnikov of Cold War II just as destabilising and disruptive as its ancestor.
So I went out and bought one – legally of course. The Kalashnikov I got, which had been brought to the UK from Afghanistan, has been deactivated to meet EU requirements with a certificate to prove it. Totally inert, it is completely legal to own one in the UK.
It arrived while I was on holiday, and I hadn’t told anybody of my plans to use such a prop. Nick Hubble was just joking when he messaged me, taking a wild guess at what could be in the large box that had turned up at the office. You should have seen the look on his face when I showed him what was inside, and he realised his joke was actually true.
I gave my presentation to the office yesterday. Thankfully, nobody was alarmed, and I’m happy to say it caused quite a stir. In fact, my colleague Connor Whitlock even told me he’d “never felt such a deadly combination of fear and excitement in an investment presentation”.
The only question now is… how do I get this thing home?
All the best,
Boaz Shoshan
Editor, Capital & Conflict
Category: Market updates