Nineteenth-century German economists had a term — Schweinezyklus, the 'pig cycle' — for a pattern that repeats across commodity markets: high prices attract producers, oversupply follows, prices collapse, producers exit, scarcity returns. The tragedy isn't the cycle itself. It's that each generation of participants experiences it as a surprise. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey spent much of his career trying to explain why this happens across human institutions: lived experience — Erlebnis — is irreducibly first-person, which means each market participant is navigating with instruments calibrated only to what they themselves have felt. What someone else's decade of losses taught them cannot be imported into your nervous system by reading their memoir. This is why financial history is underused not because investors are lazy, but because history delivers information while markets demand experience. The practical implication is precise: when you read about a past cycle that resembles a current position, the question isn't 'do I believe this happened?' It's 'am I actually pricing in what it would have felt like to hold through it?' Belief and felt-probability are different instruments, and most portfolio sizing treats them as the same.

In the last month, when did you reduce or exit a position — and was the driver closer to analysis or to a feeling of discomfort you couldn't fully articulate afterward?

Drawing from Hermeneutics / Philosophy of Historical Experience (Dilthey) — Wilhelm Dilthey (Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883; The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, 1910)