Thursday Night Links

• Murray and Bregman and their fellow partners started the firm with ideas rather than money. They had none to manage and not even the $100,000 they needed to pay the rent and an employee or two. To bring in cash and build a reputation, they opened a subscription research service. They called it “Horizon,” as in what they strove to see over. (“Kinetics” arrived in an acquisition later on.) The first report they produced was a bullish analysis of Texas Pacific Land Corp., which, giving effect to subsequent splits, was a penny stock. Whether or not the authors persuaded the subscribers, they surely persuaded themselves. Texas Pacific today, quoted today at $438 a share, is the firm’s largest single holding, in at least one HK mutual fund accounting for more than 50% of AUM. [Murray Stahl] 
• As this audience knows better than any, options are a growing business. The dynamic nature of the options marketplace was readily apparent from the staff presentation at the roundtable. For example, between 2012 and 2025, the number of unique underliers grew by 144%, and the number of unique options series increased by 719%. In December 2025, the median OPRA message count was 131 billon – which is 3,275 times the daily average in 2000. Option activity on expiry, or “0DTEs,” has grown from nearly 20% of volume at the start of 2022 to 28% in 2025. On the other hand, the number of options market makers has dropped from 98 in 2012 to 51 in 2025. [Jamie Selway]
• I mean, look, the concern that we have, that you should have, I think, that everyone should have is, are there signals here that this asset has lost the investment characteristics that attracted us to it in the first place? Has it, is the future going to be materially worse than the past? You know, this asset's been operating for over 60 years, and is the next 50 gonna be materially worse than the last 60? Are we unrealistically clinging to bright memories of the past, allowing ourselves to be misled into making more investments into the future that shouldn't be made? We're trying to be very careful that we don't fall into that trap. [Natural Resource Partners L.P.]
• The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as well as to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage, and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter. [Bernard Knox]
• JQA’s ambition began with his parents’ ambitions for him. His mother, the formidable Abigail Adams, told him early on that he was destined to be a “guardian of his country’s laws and liberties.” He accepted that destiny. His father wrote him, when the 26-year-old was wavering a bit about his future: “You come into life with Advantages which will disgrace you if your success is médiocre.—And if you do not rise to the head of…your Country, it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenlinessand Obstinacy” (emphasis in the original). [Claremont Review of Books]
• Even though the American Right might like to occasionally proclaim Anglo-Saxonness, it’s moving away from the traits that defined this identity. Historically, Anglo-Saxon identity was tied to Protestantism, individualism, rationalism, capitalism, constitutionalism, and British heritage. Elements of the New Right seem eager to move beyond all this. Traditional Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are favored over Protestantism. Individualism is denounced as a weakness, as is capitalism. Rationalism is discarded in favor of village-crone irrationalism that resembles schizophrenia. The Constitution is seen as a suicide pact and the cause of American decline. Anglophobia is more popular than Anglophilia. One can see that with arguments that Spanish colonialism was superior to British colonialism. Other European ethnicities are favored and their respective histories are adopted as “our past.” Some parts of the New Right would like to return to Anglo-Saxonism and the “Heritage American” concept is popular among all elements of the New Right. But now the Heritage American is imagined as a Russian Orthodox man who despised British traditions and norms. It’s an ahistorical image. [Scott Greer]
• Whether because of his innate political skill, affable personality, or a compelling business pitch that promised hundreds of new jobs and significant local tax revenue, Symington eventually won over the government and citizens of Snowflake. In August 2016, a town council decision went his way by one vote, and the city granted a special-use permit to Copperstate Farms. Notably, not until 2018 did the Latter-day Saints Church formally allow its members to use medicinal cannabis, thanks to a deal brokered between Utah’s lawmakers, law-enforcement agencies, medical organizations, and LDS representatives. Copperstate Farms now produces about 120,000 dry pounds of cannabis every year under 1.7 million square feet of canopy. The facility is one of the largest cannabis greenhouse operations in North America. [Fife Symington IV]