The Window Manifesto
A FIRE for the Acceleration Era
Let’s talk about the chart. Yes, the one you saw somewhere recently.
For decades, the story was simple: when markets grew, the economy created jobs. When markets cooled, hiring slowed. The two lines moved together, intrinsically bound - both being a proxy for the same thing: economic prosperity.
Then something broke.
Something happened on November 30, 2022. Since then, some of the Magnificent 7 stocks have almost tripled. Meanwhile, job openings are back to the 2019 levels.
Some people struggle to see through the volatility noise, so here’s the 3-month correlation that cuts through it. No, it’s not like before.
It’s a lagging indicator, but that’s precisely why it matters. Shorter timeframes show noise; this shows how unusual sustained negative correlation is.
On the first chart, one line represents capital - ownership of productive assets. The other represents human labor - your ability to sell your time and skills for money. For your entire life, they moved together. Now, the gap is widening.
The question you should be asking yourself:
Which line represents you better?
FIRE
In 1992, Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez published Your Money or Your Life, laying out a powerful idea:
if you can accumulate 25 times your annual expenses, you could safely withdraw 4% per year and never work again.
The concept simmered for years. Then in 2010, Jacob Lund Fisker published Early Retirement Extreme, and something clicked. By the mid-2010s, FIRE—Financial Independence, Retire Early—had become a movement, particularly among millennials watching their parents grind through decades of corporate life. Blogs proliferated. Subreddits formed. A software engineer making $150,000, living on $40,000, and retiring at 35 instead of 65—this “fired” people’s imagination.
Roommates in your thirties, used cars, cooking every meal, saying no to expensive hobbies—surely not for everybody. But for those who did it, the reward was time.
FIRE was aspirational. It was never about securing your retirement, but about lifestyle design, and living life on your own terms.
FIRE adherents, fundamentally, relied on the same assumptions as traditional financial advice—the ‘safe withdrawal rate’ of 4%, 7% returns and the need to accumulate 25x your annual expenses.
What happens when Bitcoin does 50% annually? Or when QQQ does 20%? Suddenly, the math of 25x becomes disconnected from reality—you may need only 10-15x, but FIRE fans often didn’t like too much risk in the portfolio and followed the classic portfolio compositions like the three fund portfolio or even 60/40.
That’s a good place to look at this classic playbook closer.
Work. Save. Retire.
The advice was everywhere, and for decades it worked:
Get a good job. Save 10-15% of your income. Max out your 401(k). Get the employer match. Be consistent.
Diversify with a 60/40 portfolio. 60% stocks, 40% bonds. When stocks fall, bonds rise. When stocks rise, bonds provide stability. Rebalance annually.
Buy and hold index funds. The S&P 500 returns about 7% real per year over the long term. Don’t try to time the market. Don’t pick individual stocks. Just own everything and let it compound for 30 years.
Get a 30-year mortgage, and buy a home. You’ll slowly climb the corporate ladder and pay it off. By 65, you’ll have enough to retire comfortably and free of debt.
This wasn’t bad advice. For people who started investing in 1980, 1990, or even 2000, it worked beautifully.
“It works until it doesn’t.”
Then, one by one, things started to break:
The 60/40 portfolio is dead. Stocks and bonds used to move in opposite directions - that was the entire point. When stocks crashed in 2008, bonds rallied, cushioning the blow. But since COVID, the correlation broke. In 2022, both stocks and bonds fell together. The hedging mechanism that justified holding 40% bonds disappeared.
The S&P 500 isn’t what you think it is. The “500” implies diversification, but the Magnificent Seven (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla) now represent over 35% of the entire index. In 2023, these seven stocks generated nearly all the gains. The other 493 companies? Barely keeping pace with inflation. The S&P 500 is no longer diversification—it’s 7 companies dragging 493 along. If you own VOO, you’re paying for dead weight.
Returns aren’t 7% anymore - they’re 15-20%. But only if you’re in the right assets. The S&P 500 is up 20%+ annually since late 2022. Bitcoin has beaten nearly every traditional asset class year after year, yet classic investment advice doesn’t even acknowledge it exists. Gold hit all-time highs. Even real estate in certain markets doubled, making homes not accessible anymore.
Everything is rising simultaneously. Stocks, crypto, gold, real estate - assets that used to move independently are now moving together. This isn’t normal diversification behavior. It’s a massive flight to assets, any assets, as people (consciously or not) sense that holding cash or bonds is a losing position.
And finally, the 30-40 year career—oh yes, that. Remember the chart? Job openings falling during a period of explosive economic growth and corporate profit expansion.
It looks like the growth is still happening - just not for everyone. Companies are finding ways to expand, to increase productivity, to generate returns for shareholders without adding headcount.
Luddites and The Loom Machine Moment
In 1811, skilled weavers in Nottingham could see the power looms coming. They’d spent years—sometimes decades—perfecting their craft. A master weaver earning 20-26 shillings a week could support a family comfortably. Their skills had value. Then the machines arrived.
They watched their wages collapse as the looms spread. Most just hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as it looked. Surely there would still be demand for quality handwork. Surely the machines couldn’t fully replace human skill. Surely the economy would adapt and create new opportunities for displaced craftsmen.
Sounds familiar?
Some smashed the machines in protest, raiding factories at night, becoming known as Luddites, after Ned Ludd (also called King Ludd or Captain Ludd), a likely mythical figure of a weaver who smashed two stocking frames in a fit of rage around 1779.
By 1820, hand-loom weavers were earning 5-8 shillings a week—a 70-80% collapse. Their skills were worthless. Many of their children became factory workers earning a fraction of that.
Before society eventually ‘won’ affordable clothing, the immediate economic winners weren’t the skilled craftsmen. They were the people who’d owned capital—factory owners, investors, landholders—or those who’d accumulated it early enough to ride the wave up instead of getting crushed by it.
The Window
Now, hear me out: there was a window.
In the 1770s, setting up a small cotton mill cost £3,000-£5,000—significant, but achievable for someone with savings or a partnership. By the 1790s, that figure had tripled to £15,000 as mills grew larger and steam power became standard. By 1811, when the Luddites were smashing looms, the window had closed. The scale had shifted beyond what working craftsmen could afford.
The weavers never had a chance to buy shares in the textile mills.
We’re ready to get back to the chart.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT.
This is your loom machine moment.
The window is open.
New Rules
What if I told you that FIRE is no longer a lifestyle choice, but the only certain defensive strategy against what is coming?
The Industrial Revolution took decades to unfold. The fundamental difference between AI and the power loom isn’t what it disrupts—it’s how fast it accelerates.
ChatGPT went from zero to 100 million users in two months. Within a year, AI was writing code, designing graphics, handling customer service, generating legal documents, and analyzing data. Within 18 months, companies were reporting 30-50% productivity gains in knowledge work.
But here’s what makes this truly different:
AI accelerates its own development. Every improvement in AI makes the next improvement faster. More capable AI helps researchers build even more capable AI.
This is a feedback loop, not a linear progression. The old playbook doesn’t work for the accelerating future. You can’t “save 10% annually for 30 years” when you don’t know if traditional employment will exist in 10.
The Flight to Ownership
Have you wondered why the Magnificent Seven now represent over 35% of the S&P 500? Part of it is earnings and productivity—these companies are genuinely generating massive profits from products and services everybody you know uses. The second part of the story: everyone wants to own the piece of the damn loom machine.
Investors, consciously or not, understand what’s happening. They’re moving capital toward the owners of the technology, not toward businesses that depend on it as well as on the human labor.
It’s not the only reason why assets are growing—many point to the failure of monetary policy—but it’s a system based solely on human worker headcount that is in danger. Fertility rates are falling, pension systems are becoming less efficient, and the most popular jobs, like truck driver, may soon disappear.
Capital is flooding into anything scarce—stocks, crypto, gold, real estate. Grab what you can before it’s too late.
Two Winners
Investors in any of those asset classes had a chance for their “I told you so moment” in the last few years, but two stand out:
Tech stocks - Companies building and deploying AI—the Magnificent Seven—the loom machine makers.
Bitcoin - The digital gold, land and index in one. More scarce than apartments in Manhattan, more divisible and transferable than gold, moving with the market like the S&P 500, but on steroids.
These two forces—productive capital (tech stocks) and hard money (Bitcoin)—are sucking up the global dollar milkshake.
The Math Has Changed
The old investment advice assumed 7% returns and 30 years to accumulate, but things have changed:
You don’t know how much time you have. What if the number is 5?
The market grows 10-20% a year, not 7.
Broad market diversification thesis doesn’t hold well.
Bitcoin crushes everything else year by year.
Real estate prices go up fast, but demographic changes add question marks.
Bonds are not negatively correlated with stocks anymore.
What’s The Plan?
There is no plan. Your house is on fire. Run.
If you’re a worker, invest whatever you can in the hardest assets you can access. Continue until you don’t have to rely on your work anymore.
That’s it. That’s the new strategy.
The Window Portfolio
Forget broad market diversification. Forget the three-fund portfolio. Forget bonds. Forget cash beyond what you need for 12 months of expenses. It’s simple:
1. Buy Bitcoin.
Not “I’ll buy some when it drops.” You must have Bitcoin. Not an ETF. The actual thing. Start dollar-cost averaging today and continue until you don’t have to anymore.
Bitcoin stored privately on your hardware wallet, is money that will likely continue outgrowing other asset classes for a decade to come. Importantly, in the politically unstable future, it cannot be seized during crises when governments look for assets to “redistribute.” Accelerationists also say that it’s a preferred currency for AI and robots in a future dominated by them. Get some.
2. Sell S&P 500. Buy Nasdaq 100.
The S&P 500 is 493 companies barely keeping up with inflation, dragging down the 7 that actually make the returns, but the index still gives you many benefits: you don’t have to monitor changes, you don’t pay capital gain taxes from rebalancing, and you need less money to diversify properly.
What is your second best option? Replace 500 companies from the NYSE with the 100 tech stocks from NASDAQ. You’ll get less of the drag, and closer to what matters. If you buy VOO or SPY, buy QQQ instead.
QQQ and Bitcoin are the new “60/40”—a simple, asymmetric portfolio for the acceleration era. It also aligns with Jeff Park’s Radical Portfolio Theory, and in fact is a minimalist “radical portfolio.”
This is where the Window Portfolio starts. Make your own, but recognize that the market is now driven by new forces, and simply buying a lot of different assets is not diversification.
Is it real?
There are many people right now saying: “this chart doesn’t say what you think” pointing at other reasons for the job market declining. Unsurprisingly they usually have their own businesses or products. Often heavily leveraging AI. If you’re not in that position, you may ask yourself: how long are you willing to wait if it’s happening?
We haven’t even seen humanoid robots yet, but you’re likely already watched synthetic content, or even talk with a bot without realizing that. What I propose is not a lifestyle choice—it’s the only defensive strategy about the technological acceleration:
Own as much of it as you can.
It’s real.
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This is not financial advice. This is a manifesto.
The skeptics will tell you it’s irresponsible. They’ll say you need bonds for safety, that “crypto” is speculation, that you should enjoy your life now. They’re still following the old playbook, hoping for the best like the craftsmen in 1790.
That old “work, save, retire” world is gone.
The Luddites smashing the looms didn’t have options.
You still do.