The Hedge | Brutal Honesty Over Hype Since 2008
May’s California business series has been one of the most comprehensive analytical projects we’ve undertaken on The Hedge — 28 days, 56 posts, covering every significant dimension of California’s business environment with the depth and specificity that entrepreneurs actually need to make informed decisions. The feedback has been gratifying: founders who read the series are making better-informed decisions about where to operate, how to structure their businesses, and what California’s costs actually look like when you model them properly.
What June Brings
June’s content pivots to a different set of entrepreneur concerns that have been generating reader questions throughout the California series. We’ll spend the first two weeks on options trading strategies for entrepreneurs and investors — specifically the Protected Wheel and Protected Edge strategies that use options structures to generate income while limiting downside risk. These strategies are particularly relevant for entrepreneurs who have liquidity events — partial company sales, secondary transactions, IPO proceeds — and need frameworks for deploying capital without exposing it to catastrophic loss.
The second half of June covers real estate investment fundamentals for entrepreneurs who want to diversify beyond their operating businesses — specifically the analysis of land banking in high-growth corridors, the use of LLC structures for real estate asset protection, and the economics of storage facility development as a capital-efficient real estate strategy. All of these topics grow out of conversations with entrepreneurs who are, appropriately, thinking beyond their current businesses about how to build durable wealth.
The Hedge’s Ongoing Commitment
The Hedge has been publishing since 2008 — through the financial crisis, the recovery, the technology bubble, the pandemic disruption, and now the AI transformation of virtually every industry. Through all of it, the commitment has been the same: brutal honesty over hype, rigorous analysis over comfortable assumptions, and the kind of information that actually helps entrepreneurs and investors make better decisions.
California’s business environment is what it is. The numbers are what the numbers are. The entrepreneurs who understand both — who operate with clear eyes rather than optimistic assumptions — will build more durable, more profitable businesses than those who don’t. That’s been the point of this series, and it’s the point of The Hedge.
See you in June.
The Hedge has been cutting through financial and business noise since 2008. Brutal honesty over hype — always.
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