2025 Annual Letter

If I had to pick one thing that makes humans most human, I would point to our tendency to find recurring patterns in everyday life and assign meaning to them. Earth orbits the sun on a roughly 365-day cycle, which means the end of one cycle is the beginning of a new one. This phenomenon, observed since the early days of the solar system, was divided into the standards BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) based on the birth of Jesus, and now we find ourselves in the year 2026 since his birth. Earth’s revolution itself has continued for hundreds of millions of years, but humanity, insignificant by comparison, chose a mere 2,000 years of history as the reference point for its cycles. It is, in every sense, a very human way of thinking.

AWARE began in 2021 with the goal of providing a newsletter for financial education, and over more than four years it has survived multiple shifts in direction to reach where it is today. I remember that period as a time when Morning Brew’s success in conveying economic concepts through everyday life was in the spotlight, and similar economic newsletters were springing up everywhere. After a major bubble and subsequent cooling-off period, the market eventually matured, and 2025 became a year in which we witnessed the growth of specialized newsletters that focused on specific areas or developed distinct specialties rather than covering general topics superficially. For example, the Pari Passu newsletter, which covers Restructuring & Distressed Debt, has evolved into a professional credit research firm and has become a stepping stone for talent seeking to join Wall Street credit investment firms such as Apollo and Ares.

In our case, we cover a relatively wide range of topics from finance to technology in greater depth, with a distinctive focus on the economic spillover effects (returns) and sustainability of every phenomenon. By analogy, you can think of us as borrowing Pari Passu’s level of specialization to study how a given phenomenon might influence the economic and behavioral outcomes of Morning Brew’s readership.

The structural problem with typical financial education businesses is that the people who truly need them either lack purchasing power or don’t recognize the need, while those with sufficient purchasing power already know most of what’s being taught and therefore don’t see the value. Just this morning I read a news article about a fraud ring that ran an "AI trading algorithm service" promising a 15% monthly return through a multi-level marketing structure and received heavy sentences on Ponzi scheme charges. Viewed objectively, the manipulated returns generated by Bernie Madoff’s investment firm—long cited as the textbook example of a Ponzi scheme—were in the mid-teens annually on a base of $65 billion in client assets. It’s a telling reminder that the real driving force behind investment fraud is not the fraudster, but the victim’s own greed.

For us, 2025 was a year of accepting people’s desires—and the markets shaped by those desires—as they are, and setting our business priorities accordingly. We concluded that, in whatever form, you ultimately have to become a participant in a market if you want to innovate it, and we are currently preparing to do just that.

To borrow the words of one of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut: