All my life I have been a voracious reader. As a teen my mother encouraged me to read by leaving Time or Sports Illustrated on the dining room table. She would also buy me any book I asked for.

Constantly reading creates a condition of constantly having an opinion. If you read a wide variety of subjects that creates opinions on a wide realm of topics. Eventually this becomes tiring mentally.

In the past year I have started master’s program focusing on Energy Law to compliment my economics and geology undergraduate degrees. Quite simply all this extra work, in addition to being the wellsite geologist on a dozen plus wells, burned me out.

For the past two months I stopped reading and creating opinions. My mind needed to declutter. I started to meditate and think about the macro view points of macro issues.

But now I am back. I write this from Mexico and am fully recharged. In the coming weeks I will resume writing, completing the thematic reports I began to outline. The quarterly newsletter will be issued in the next two weeks. In addition I plan to review and update some previous posts. Also look forward to my thoughts about 2018. I think it should be an interesting year.

I learned a lot during the declutter about how thinking works and about my own views.

While in Mexico I read one of the best books I have ever come across, James Montier’s Behavioral Investing. It is a long read, about 700 pages, but he does a fantastic job of breaking chapters down into short lengths. Quoting James as he quotes Keynes, the chapters are like “pamphlets thrown to the wind”.

Thankfully, the decluttering did not affect my personal trading accounts with my YTD results of 77%.

Remember that we don’t publish doom porn here like most. There’s no cost and no scare tactics. No claims of big gains. We just focus on themes and macro trends.

I hope you have a great new years eve (for those on the Julian Calendar) and I hope you return to the site.

If you like ideas like this please sign up to the free quarterly economics newsletter here.