Ken has been offering his thoughts on global markets, events, and trends on a weekly basis since early 2006. His rational perspective, based on decades of experience in risk management and analytics, provides all readers with helpful insights, commentary, and context. Both informative and entertaining, the posts offer clarity and simplicity, often using inspiration from his favorite artists and musicians.

Ken also authored Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability through Risk Control (Wiley 2004), which challenged the traditional focus of risk management on loss avoidance. The book introduced a new risk management program that can help both money managers and individual traders evaluate which elements in a portfolio are working efficiently and which aren’t using an extremely simple set of statistical and arithmetic tools.

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• Heaven or Hell in a Bucket Monday, January 12, 2026

  You imagine me sippin’ champagne from your boot
  For a taste of your elegant pride
  I may be goin’ to hell in a bucket, babe
  But at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride

  Weir, Mydland and Barlow (all now dead)

  I am obliged, of course, to write a few words about Bobby. On balance, I wish to praise him, but I do so with some ambivalence. Yes, he was a driving force of a band that changed my life and arguably the world. He also, while by no means being among my pantheon of shredders, deeply influenced my guitar playing — mostly by making me aware of the barred C chord, which, if played correctly, rings so brightly up and down the fretboard.

  Now, before y’all get in my grill, let me acknowledge that this chart does not precisely depict a bar chord. It is the Cmaj shape slid up to the 7^th fret to form a Gmaj, with the flat tip of the index finger applied for the objective of modulation.

  Thanks to Bobby, I use this form too. But also lay, as taught by him, my entire index finger across the fretboard for an even richer sound.

  He wrote some excellent songs (for instance Sugar Magnolia, The Music Never Stopped, Weather Report Suite, Jack Straw, our title song), along with some annoying ones (as in Playing in the Band, One More Saturday Night, The Other One).

  But he was one of the luckiest sumbitches in the rock pantheon. He walked into a Palo Alto music store one New Year’s Eve and met with greatness – in the form of Jerry Garcia, and the rest is history. Weir, in my judgment, road Jerry’s coat tails to untold riches of fame and fortune. There was a lot of talk about the Dead being a Democracy, with balanced contributions across the ensemble. Yeah, right. Kinda like the Bulls of the 1990s were a collective of equally shared responsibility.

  To anyone paying attention. It was Jerry’s band. Full stop.

  And I have one final beef to register here, having to do with the decade long cash grab in which he, at minimum, participated. Beginning with the Fare Thee Well shows in Chicago in 2015, which, due to representations that these would be the last ever performances of the surviving ensemble, caused ticket prices to eclipse $100K in some cases, all the way through, by my count at least a half dozen tours and Sphere residencies tied to the same representations, by my estimation, Bobby and the boys made more in a single active month in the last few years than they did during their entire thirty year original run.

  I’m a capitalist and applaud them, genuinely, for cashing in. As was their right. But particularly with respect to that unending last show/Fare Thee Well spiel, they kind of killed the buzz. And what’s more, I don’t think Jerry would’ve approved.

  Meantime, I am absolutely gob smacked by the outpouring of tributes that have flooded the ionosphere since his demise this past weekend. Everybody has weighed in. And that’s something.

  Maybe a ticket to heaven. In a bucket. If so, I hope that he paid less than a few schlubs with more money than brains shelled out for those Soldier Field seats, 10 summers ago.

  One might also have expected us to have learned something from these experiences, but similar madness appears to abound in every quarter – particularly in the realms of government.

  Setting aside those magnificent Reagan years, the government seems to be poking its big fat nose into more places than its business justifiably takes it. Since the Grateful Dead formed in 1965, but particularly of late.

  This past fortnight has been a especially active, witnessing the take over of Venezuela and its oil fields, the threatened subsuming of other jurisdictions, the purchase of $200B of Mortgage Bonds and the proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10%.

  All share the common characteristic of manipulation of key markets for political purposes in an election year.

  The assault on interest rates, embedded in the credit card and mortgage moves, are particularly instructive – for both their wrong-headedness and their cynicism. If you can read the associated petulant, self-congratulatory announcements, published by the President on his own for-profit media outlet without retching, well, you’re a better person than me.

  With respect to the former, I will stop short of going into the tank for the credit card companies, who make obscene (> 50%) profit margins and probably do charge excessive vig on their plastic. But if the Federal Government caps interest rates, it will most certainly diminish the amount of credit that these enterprises will make available to the unwashed.

  Moreover, to propose a time frame of one year on this nonsense exposes the unmixed political motivations at play here, screaming, as it does, “vote for me. I cut your credit card rates in half”. And I must ask: do we really want to allocate scarce credit capacity based on manipulation of the electorate?

  The answer is no. And I believe that folks are beginning catch on. Most notably as manifested by a surge in the demand for Old School Gold. I probably don’t need to inform you that the shiny yellow metal is up by 2/3rds since Big Orange took over the controls (but I will):

  
  Bob, of course, knew how precious Gold was, as captured in his version of the Papa John Philips-written “Me and My Uncle”, which describes two subsequent thefts of gilded nuggets, the second of which involves the subsequent murder of the above-mentioned uncle:

  Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
  Love my uncle, God rest his soul
  Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
  Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
  And I left his dead ass there by the side of the road

  I read somewhere that Philips wrote the song in a tequila stupor and completely forgot having done so. But Suite Judy (Blue Eyes) Collins managed to capture it on tape and record it on an album. Papa John did not realize he was the composer until the royalty checks started coming in.

  It don’t know if this story is true. But if it’s not, it should be.

  It certainly evokes truisms reflecting the state of latter-day living, where we all must contend with the conflicting forces of faddish hipness, morality and crude self-interest – a battle we appear to be losing on every front.

  The story of Bob Weir and the Dead – in its various incarnations is a compelling object lesson for all the above. Across his astonishingly long career, he embodied each component – as the young hipsters’ flavor of the month, as a purveyor of rough but holy justice, and, finally, as an engaged economic agent, successfully monetizing, while contemporaneously maintaining his more ethereal brand.

  But his time came, any day, and we won’t worry about him.

  Because he asked us not to.

  I suspect he would advise us, instead, to worry about ourselves.

  We may be going to heaven or hell. With or without a bucket.

  And we may, or may not, enjoy the ride.

  TIMSHEL

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