Welcome to The Long Arc

History is patient. We are not.

I spent nearly three decades in sovereign finance — eighteen years at ADIA, six as CEO of Invest AD, a tenure as Chief Investment Officer at one of the region’s largest banks. I did not leave with answers. I left with better questions.

The most important things I witnessed were never in the reports. They were in the silences before a decision was made, in the assumptions no one thought to question, in the ancient patterns that kept reasserting themselves long after we believed we had moved beyond them. One learns, after long enough, that markets are not moved by data alone. They are moved by belief. And that the forces shaping our world are far older than any balance sheet.

That tension — between the long arc of civilisations and the impatience of the moment — is what I write about.

This newsletter is for anyone who reads the morning papers and senses that the real story is the one not being told. How belief systems — political, economic, spiritual — drive the behaviour of nations and markets. Why some institutions think in generations while others can barely see past the quarter. Where strategy, conviction, and power meet. And what sovereign wealth funds see that conventional wisdom does not.

I write from where East meets West, where competing truths have long coexisted, and where the long game is not a metaphor but a way of life.

The world does not lack information. It lacks the patience to understand what the information means.

Welcome. Read slowly.

— Nazem Alkudsi, CFA