Growing with no sound: the seeds of change

Key Markets report for Thursday, 10 April 2025

​In a simple but profoundly thought-provoking observation, Confucius (551 – cca 479 BC) said that “A seed grows with no sound. But a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise but creation is quiet…” This thought has very important implications, especially at a time when the world is experiencing a tectonic shift from realities we all grew up with, to new realities we can’t yet fully recognize as their outlines are not even defined yet.

During his confirmation hearings for the position of State Secretary on 15 January of this year, Marco Rubio said that the post-World War II global order is today more than obsolete and that it is currently being used as a weapon against the United States. He probably didn’t come up with that statement himself: he was unveiling the new administration’s policy position. That implies that the world we’ve known for the last 70+ years will be left behind. Old, obsolete structures of society will be abandoned to ruin or will have to change.

Like a tree that falls with huge noise, the scenes of destruction can overwhelm our senses and fill us with fear. When something that took a long time to grow and which seemed permanent to us suddenly collapses, that can cause us anxiety. Perhaps that thing helped define the way we understood our world. Perhaps we arranged our living around its presence. Once it’s gone, things won’t be the same.

What will replace it and how will we be able to navigate the new realities? The worry might even make us blind to the new possibilities that are emerging, like those seeds that grow with no sound. They may be all around us, but they could be invisible to our senses unless we shift our attention away from the hypnotic scenes of destruction and pay attention to the new things emerging.

Saving a family farm in Georgia

In 2019, Claire Avery and her husband left their jobs in finance and moved back to Georgia to try and save Claire’s family farm from foreclosure. They invested their savings toward paying the mortgage for a year and fund the needed improvements to the farm’s operations, only to discover that in spite of their best efforts and all the hard work, “The farm couldn’t survive as a traditional cow-calf operation…” They were about to give up, but before capitulating, they decided to change their farm’s business model: rather than continuing the “traditional” approach of selling their calves at auctions, where they couldn’t even break even, they decided to do their own meat packing and sell directly to consumers. They invested the last of their savings into building a website, and by August 2022 started shipping their boxes directly to consumers. Their family farm’s fortunes quickly turned around, from the verge of bankruptcy to bringing in revenues totaling “well over seven figures.”

Claire Avery’s inspiring story isn’t an isolated case - it may be one of the seeds that are, in fact everywhere. I can’t resist sharing another two examples here, as they exemplify both the old, obsolete structures and the new growth that’s emerging.

Replacing dry weeds with tea

If you are like me, you might enjoy a hot cup of tea from time to time. For some reason, humans acquired the taste for tea centuries ago. However, if you buy your tea in supermarkets from brands like Lipton, Twinnings of PGTips, you may wonder why that is… If the crap we get in supermarkets is it, then why is drinking tea even a thing? Sure, with enough milk and sugar added, you might justify the habit but still, can that be it? The big corporate brands started masking the taste of dry weeds by adding all sorts of scents and flavors but if you try to buy ordinary black tea, you’ll discover that it’s close to worthless.

Well, someone noticed and built a direct-to-consumer tea business straight from India. One day as I was browsing around social media a short video advertisement appeared in my feed addressing this exact frustration. It was compelling enough that a few clicks later I ordered a box of tea straight from India. Lo and behold, a few days later I received the tea, and by now I realized that this was already a well developed business operation. The teas aren’t exactly cheap, but by virtue of selling teas to consumers everywhere around the world, these entrepreneurs made themselves quite prosperous. They also created hundreds, if not thousands of well-paying jobs in many tea-growing communities in India. It is not my purpose to advertise their business in this newsletter, but I may as well mention that the company I’m talking about is TeaBox.com, founded by Kaushall Dugarr.

Seeds of disintermediation

What the Averys have done with beef and Mr. Dugarr with tea is what social media and citizen journalism has done with our narratives and the newsflow. They all are the seeds, growing in silence all around us as the old structures crumble. Without a doubt, they are growing in their hundreds of thousands, if not in millions, and that should be very encouraging.

The thing with seeds is that they do not reveal the fully evolved structures which they are capable of growing into. What we do know, however - or we should know - is that almost without exception, seeds in nature grow into something meaningful. They may grow into something very useful and nourishing; they might grow into something healing, or something beautiful and captivating. We also know that seeds hold enormous power, perhaps best conveyed by the following image:

We are witnesses to fearsome events around the world, but this should not cause us to succumb to anxiety or defeatism. Times of great changes are also times of great opportunities when we can plant and cultivate our own seeds for the world of tomorrow. That realization alone should be enough to give us faith that whatever will grow up to replace the collapsing order could be as good, if not better than what has fallen.

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Trading signals for Key Markets, 10 April 2025

With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes: