Why It Matters
This collection of essays from Marathon Asset Management explores how capital flows shape industries, profits, and market cycles.
It’s not a forecasting book — it’s a framework for understanding the supply side of capitalism.
When too much capital chases an idea, returns collapse. When it flees, opportunity is born again.
Core Ideas
- The capital cycle explains how investment booms sow the seeds of busts.
- Competitive advantage often comes from scarcity, not abundance.
- Investor psychology and corporate behavior are tightly linked — optimism funds overcapacity, pessimism starves recovery.
Investor Lens
Chancellor and Marathon teach a simple discipline: follow the money going into an industry, not the talk around it.
High returns attract capital until they don’t; low returns repel it until they can’t.
The art is in timing the turn — recognizing when capital exhaustion becomes the prelude to profit.
It’s one of the few books that shows how capitalism heals itself, and how patient investors can ride that healing to real compounding.