I love Lou Mannheim, the old sage in Wall Street who tries—patiently, unsuccessfully—to steer Bud Fox away from Gordon Gekko’s orbit.
Lou dealt in fundamentals. “You can’t get a little pregnant.” “Man looks into the abyss.” It wasn’t just advice about markets—it was advice about limits, about the point at which participation becomes complicity.
Bud learned a different lesson. The money wasn’t in analysis—it was in information. Not what a company was worth, but what someone knew, and when they knew it.
At the time, it felt like a cautionary tale.
Now it feels almost quaint.
Today, the most consequential “information” isn’t about earnings. It’s about governments—war, policy, posture. A statement, a leak, a decision not yet implemented can move billions in minutes. Markets respond not to what is, but to what might be said by someone with the authority to change the rules mid-sentence.
We used to worry about insider trading.
Now the “inside” can look a lot like proximity to power.
It raises an uncomfortable question.
Have we spent so much time scrutinizing private actors that we’ve underweighted the most powerful market participant of all?
Bud’s edge on Blue Star Airlines now reads like innocence. Compared to a world in which capital flows pivot on government posture, it feels almost harmless.
And yet the underlying concern is unchanged.
Markets are supposed to aggregate information. But when the most important inputs are discretionary decisions by concentrated power, aggregation begins to look less like discovery and more like anticipation.
There are winners, certainly.
But there are also counterparties—and they are not abstractions. They are pensions, portfolios, and participants who discover, a moment too late, that the game has shifted.
In the short run, someone is always on the wrong side of an “insight.”
In the long run, the question is whether the system itself absorbs the cost—or merely redistributes it.
It is, undeniably, a fascinating time to be an investor.
It is also a slightly unsettling one.
Because when the line between information and influence begins to blur, the old advice sounds less like nostalgia and more like warning.
And somewhere, you imagine Lou Mannheim—quietly, patiently—asking whether we’ve mistaken proximity to power for insight.
Or whether we have decided, in the end, that the distinction is no longer worth insisting on.