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Insights
All our insights are available in our research portal or email ir@codapartners.no for more information
Something we are pondering | January 2025
For more than thirty years, short-term oriented financial markets and policy frameworks have shaped global capital allocation. The result is an economic system that looks virtuous and efficient on paper while quietly hollowing out the upstream, midstream and energetics that any real war effort requires.
We ponder if recent price action in commodities and the industrial complex is a sign that the pendulum is swinging back. Is there finally a realization that the US and Europe must redirect investments to become self-sufficient in raw materials and their ability to refine them into useable form?
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Something we are pondering | December 2025
Silver bullion has spent nearly half a century confined within a broad trading range. Such multi-decade ranges are not unusual in commodity markets. Copper, for example, broke out decisively in 2005–2007, while crude oil was capped near $20 per barrel for many years before its structural repricing. Silver has now pushed above its long-standing range, raising the central question: is this merely a blow-off top, or is silver finally entering a new price regime?
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Topic of the Month | November 2025
Cyclical industries are the market’s stress test. They are the parts of the economy where demand expands and contracts in plain sight, where profits swing from feast to famine, and where capital allocation mistakes are exposed quickly. Industries like autos, semiconductors, freight, homebuilding, basic materials, industrials, energy, and much of consumer discretionary don’t move along a smooth trendline. They lurch. That volatility is not a nuisance for us; it is our habitat. It creates room for differentiated views, forces the market into repeated forecasting errors, and produces price moves large enough to reward being right even if timing is imperfect.
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Something we are pondering | November 2025
For more than six decades, the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index has been one of the economy’s most faithful sentinels. Each time its year-over-year change slipped below –1%, a recession followed shortly after. There were no false alarms, no missed downturns, just a clean, almost mechanical linkage between a deteriorating LEI and an economy about to roll over.​
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Topic of the Month | October 2025
Back in November 2024, we wrote about the concept of Moneyball in investing—a core principle of our fund and how investors in the fund should think about their investment.
Our mission is simple: to improve investors’ total portfolios. In other words, risk-adjusted performance should be stronger with an allocation to our fund than without.
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To achieve this, we pursue three key objectives: ​
1. Outperform the broader equity market over a full market cycle
2. Deliver truly idiosyncratic, uncorrelated returns
3. Preserve / generate—positive returns during equity market drawdowns
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Topic of the Month | September 2025
In our December 2022 Portfolio Briefing, we made the case for investing in silver and silver miners, when the price of Silver bullion stood at USD 23.50/oz. We revisited the thesis in June 2024 at USD 29/oz. As we have already laid out the investment case in detail twice before, we will not repeat it here. However, with silver now having climbed another ~45% to USD 42/oz, we believe it is timely to provide an update on how we view the outlook for silver bullion and the miners from here.
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Topic of the Month | August 2025
When constructing a portfolio, the relationship between assets—their correlation—often matters as much as their individual returns. In the extreme case of perfect correlation (correlation = 1), portfolio performance is driven entirely by the ability to select the highest-returning asset. At the opposite end, with perfect negative correlation (correlation = –1), even an asset with a negative standalone return can increase the portfolio’s total return. Between these poles lies a collection of assets with zero correlation—true idiosyncratic return streams. In such a portfolio, outcomes rely less on correctly predicting the best performer (a difficult task) and more on the collective risk reduction that allows for higher allocations to high-return, higher-volatility assets.
The problem is that correlations across risky assets are rarely low, and they tend to surge during crises—precisely when diversification is needed most. This is why we propose an alternative framing: instead of hunting for traditional bull markets that depend on a confluence of systemic factors, we focus on constructing synthetic bull markets—engineered exposures designed to deliver idiosyncratic returns and to exhibit muted downside in periods of market stress. Unlike conventional bull markets, these can be created at any time, independent of macroeconomic tides.
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Topic of the Month | July 2025
This piece presents our short thesis on the US homebuilding ecosystem, which we believe is priced for peak-cycle conditions. A decade of ultra-low interest rates has fueled significant capital misallocation, and housing is likely a casualty as rates normalize, and affordability deteriorates.
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Consensus views around structural shortages and resilient demand overlook key risks: stretched valuations, weakening affordability, policy-driven immigration shifts, and mounting consumer credit stress. Market pricing implies sustained record profitability and growth—assumptions we see as unsustainable.
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Our scenario analysis suggests 46–67% downside across the sector. We view this $1.1 trillion ecosystem as a compelling shorting ground, not as a single trade, but as a concentrated opportunity set.
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Topic of the Month | June 2025
Oil has been lagging the broader commodity complex—and gold in particular. Investors remain underweight energy, and oil-related equities appear optically cheap. But do they represent genuine value, or are they a value trap?
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Topic of the Month | May 2025
The concept of Situational Awareness (SA) was first articulated by Oswald Boelke during World War I, who recognized that gaining a tactical edge required knowing the enemy before they knew you. Since then, the framework has evolved, most notably in aviation, where pilots learned that reliance on instrumentation could cause disconnection from the operational environment. This insight sparked a broader understanding: perception, comprehension, and projection must work in concert to avoid catastrophic blind spots.
We’ve adopted Mica Endsley’s widely cited definition of SA as our operating model and apply it in three structured layers:
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1. Observations – Our systematic and selective monitoring of market and macro signals.
2. Inference and Comprehension – A synthesis using market experience, behavioral models, and macro frameworks.
3. Scenarios and Extrapolation – Projecting plausible outcomes and tilting portfolios accordingly.
This three-tiered approach prevents us from overreacting to noise while still positioning proactively for meaningful shifts.
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Topic of the Month | April 2025
As absolute return equity investors, our investment approach is centered around generating positive real returns irrespective of broader market direction. Our performance hurdle is therefore not an index, but the return available from risk-free cash equivalents, plus a required premium for assuming equity market risk. We define risk not as volatility, but as the potential for a permanent capital shortfall relative to holding cash.
Given that we express our views through individual stock selection, it is a fair question to ask whether broader equity market dynamics are truly relevant. Why not simply identify and invest in high-quality companies and ignore the market?
In our experience, there are periods when a purely bottom-up, stock-specific approach is sufficient. However, there are also times—such as the current environment—when understanding macroeconomic conditions and sector-level dynamics is critical.
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Topic of the Month | March 2025
We believe that we are on the cusp of another commodity supercycle. As we will lay out in this essay, this is crucially important for all investors, whether they invest in commodities or not. The reason is that commodity supercycles tend to impact financial assets negatively, sometimes even more than they impact commodities positively. The difference between a normal commodity cycle and commodity supercycle (as we define it) is that a true supercycle normally requires a loss of confidence in the prevailing monetary system.
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Topic of the Month | February 2025
The capital cycle describes how investment flows into high-return industries, leading to overexpansion, declining returns, and eventual consolidation. This cyclical pattern, influenced by external factors and investor behavior, highlights the tendency of markets to overreact to prevailing conditions rather than efficiently discount the future. Despite growing access to information, investor decisions remain driven by confidence and emotion, as illustrated by Peter Atwater’s Confidence Map. The persistent inefficiency in pricing cyclical industries stems from investors fueling the cycle itself—providing excessive capital in booms and restricting it in busts. By focusing on industry supply dynamics rather than short-term demand fluctuations, we use capital cycle analysis to identify promising investment opportunities, positioning ourselves ahead of market shifts.
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Topic of the Month | January 2025
To better align with investor preferences, the Fund is strategically lowering its volatility from over 20% to a more manageable 10%-15%. By adjusting position sizes, diversifying effectively, and dynamically managing allocations, we aim to optimize risk and return. This approach not only mitigates downside risk but enhances the potential for consistent growth. Read on to discover how these changes will benefit your investment.
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Topic of the Month | November 2024
This month, we focus on how PGO enhances portfolio performance by leveraging principles akin to Moneyball in investing. Rather than relying solely on individual asset returns, PGO maximizes risk-adjusted returns by focusing on uncorrelated and negatively correlated assets, providing true diversification. With a proven track record of capital preservation during market downturns and strong long-term fundamentals in gold and uranium miners, PGO improves portfolio stability without sacrificing return potential. By optimizing risk management and maintaining high volatility, PGO offers a unique opportunity to boost both returns and diversification for investors seeking to enhance their overall portfolio performance.
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Topic of the Month | October 2024
Gold mining stocks are a powerful "anti asset" in an equity portfolio, particularly when combined with cyclical industries like oil and gas, base metals, and semiconductors. These stocks benefit from the inverse relationship between the price of gold and energy, performing better during economic contractions when gold prices rise and energy prices fall. By using the Composite Leading Indicator (CLI) to identify economic regimes, a strategy that holds gold miners during downturns (Winter) and cyclical stocks during expansions can significantly outperform the broader market. As the global economy shows signs of weakening, gold mining stocks are poised for strong performance, offering attractive returns due to their compelling fundamentals and valuation.
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