👋 ASB Partners Nuggets 9.26.25

This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.

---

Interesting Links/Reads

Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)

1. After years of war, world’s oldest synagogue paintings are revealed as intact in Damascus Jewish sites and synagogues suffered lootings and bombardment over the course of the war, which followed the emigration of virtually all Syrian Jews.

The Dura Europos synagogue was painted around 244 CE but was filled with dirt just a decade later by the Roman garrison stationed in the town along the Euphrates to help fortify the city ahead of an invasion.

After the city was destroyed, the synagogue was lost to time until it was excavated in the 1930s, where archeologists discovered that the layers of earth had preserved its extensive wall paintings of biblical figures and scenes. The paintings were later moved to the National Museum in Damascus and are housed in a replica of the ancient synagogue where they were created.

2.What to read for travel by Tyler Cowen September 21, 2025 at 10:23 am in Travel Travels

When you land in a new destination, what should you read? It’s hard to find good material with search engines because the space is SEO’d so aggressively. A Wikipedia article is fine insofar as it goes, but inevitably misses much of the texture of a place. I think it’d be neat if there was some kind of service that collated great travel writing — especially pieces that capture something of the context of a place. (See the Davies post below.) To this end, I made guide.world.

From Patrick Collison, recommended, lots of great reading (and travel) there.

3.‘On Antisemitism’ Review: A Poisonous History The use of anti-Jewish bigotry for political ends has proved as persistent as it is deadly.

The word “antisemitism” is the most successful and destructive of all the political terms that, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, seek to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The sound and the appearance suffice: define political language, and you define the terms of political reality. The reality is that antisemitism is the most popular ideology of the age of mass politics.

4."Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found chimpanzees eating fermented fruit in their native habitats consume the equivalent of nearly two alcoholic drinks per day."

5.The Calculus of Value

Now we can start getting current and concrete. Where were we when 2025 began?

• The S&P 500 stock index is the most watched barometer of the U.S. stock market. Toward the end of last year, its forward-looking p/e ratio (the ratio of its price to its estimated earnings over the coming year) was around 23, significantly above its historical average.

• At the time, J.P. Morgan published a graph showing that if you bought the S&P 500 index at 23 times the coming year’s earnings per share in the period 1987-2014 (the only period for which there’s data on forward-looking p/e ratios and resulting ten-year returns), your average annual return over the subsequent ten years was between plus 2% and minus 2% every time. To the extent this p/e ratio history is relevant, it bodes pretty poorly for the S&P 500.

• I concluded in my January memo that this was troublesome but not threatening, again mostly because the temporary mania or “irrational exuberance” that I believe accompanies – or gives rise to – most bubbles wasn’t present.

What’s the bottom line of the calculus? Fundamentals appear to me to be less good overall than they were seven months ago, but at the same time, asset prices are high relative to earnings, higher than they were at the end of 2024, and at high valuations relative to history. Most bull markets are built through the addition of a “constellation of positives” on top of a well-functioning economy. Today I see elements that include the following:

• the positive psychology and “wealth effect” resulting from recent gains in markets, high-end real estate, and crypto,

• the belief that, for most investors, there really is no alternative to the U.S. markets, and

• the excitement surrounding today’s new, new thing: AI.

These are the kinds of things that have the ability to fire investor imaginations and contribute to bull markets, and they certainly seem to be doing so now.

I came across a great quote last year from John Stuart Mill (1859): “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” In other words, if you’re not conversant with the arguments of those who oppose your position, you really can’t assess its validity. Thus, I can’t responsibly advance my view without giving the other side of the issue.

---

I hope you enjoyed it.

Adam