[Week 1 of 2026] Fortunes, Flatlines, and Futures

Welcome back to Price and Prejudice with a few musings from Week 1 of 2026.

The Unaccountable Trillion

This WSJ article covers the rapid growth of family offices which oversee $5.5 trillion and growing, with Deloitte projecting that figure to exceed $9 trillion by 2030. The pitch is patient, unconstrained capital—no redemptions, no quarterly scorecards, no one yelling at you to de-risk at the bottom (a dream). But “unconstrained” mostly means the constraints are weirder: tax lock-in, emotional attachment to the source of the wealth, sibling politics, and the strong human tendency to double down quietly until something breaks. Opacity feels like freedom right up until it turns out to be leverage you forgot about (this has happened before).

The real issue isn’t whether family offices are smart; it’s that no one, including them, can tell. Without benchmarks, data, or external discipline, realized returns look great until you ask what the expected returns were, and whether the risk was priced at all. Trillions moving in the dark is not a temporary bug, and historically, that ends with a sudden educational moment for everyone involved.

Doing Nothing, But Professionally

2025 was a "loud" year with tariffs, AI, and general doubts about U.S. prospects. This article shows that the winning move was to sit still. Stocks went up, foreign stocks went up more, bonds worked, cash paid you for your patience, and basically every asset rewarded investors who resisted the urge to have a view.

The harder question is what, if anything, this tells us about 2026. It’s tempting to treat last year’s outcome as evidence that passivity is always correct, but that’s mostly hindsight talking. Expected returns evolve, risks migrate, and the fact that patience was rewarded once doesn’t mean it will be again—especially after prices have already moved. At best, 2025 is a reminder of how noisy signals can be, not a reliable template for what comes next.

Which brings up a structural gap in finance. We have an industry optimized to help investors react—to news, volatility, and their own emotions—but very little designed to help them not react when expected returns don’t justify activity. Private equity approximates this through illiquidity, but mostly by accident. The real missing product is enforced patience: locking capital away, lowering turnover, and acknowledging that the hardest part of investing is often getting out of your own way.

Biotech Bust

The article describes a sharp slowdown in Boston’s once-booming biotech sector. Venture funding has dried up, federal research grants have been cut back, lab space sits empty, and companies are laying off workers or leaving the region entirely. The result is a job market where newly minted Ph.D.s and science graduates are sending out hundreds of applications with little response and, increasingly, looking outside Boston—or even outside the U.S.—for work.

The interesting bit isn’t the cyclical downturn; it’s how people make human-capital decisions. Nobody gets a Ph.D. based on a careful forecast of 2025 venture funding—they do it based on prospects at the moment they commit, which in biotech looked permanently sunny for about a decade. Those decisions are long-dated, illiquid, and extremely levered to conditions at graduation, which is a polite way of saying timing matters a lot. When the prospects flip, the adjustment shows up not in prices but in people moving to China.

And this is why these busts linger. Capital can stop investing quickly; human capital can’t easily redeploy, especially when it’s specialized and geographically anchored. Boston will probably recover, because clusters usually do, but the cost of the downturn is being paid by the cohort that believed the story most deeply.