Walk through Bowling Green at the southern tip of Manhattan and you will find the Charging Bull — 3.5 tonnes of bronze installed in the dark of night in December 1989 by Sicilian sculptor Arturo Di Modica, without permission, as a personal gift to a city shaken by the 1987 crash. It was removed by police within hours and returned by public demand within days. It has stood there ever since on a temporary permit that has now lasted more than thirty years.
The bull and the bear are the two dominant symbols of capital markets. They describe direction: prices rising, prices falling. They are useful shorthand. But they are also incomplete, because what they do not capture is the underlying rhythm that connects them — the pattern beneath the price chart.
That pattern has an unlikely visual expression: a two-metre bronze statue of the Hindu deity Shiva, in his form as Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance, standing on the campus of CERN in Geneva. Gifted by the Indian government in 2004, it was placed there because CERN's physicists recognised in it a metaphor for what they study: the continuous creation, transformation, and destruction of matter at the subatomic level. The physicist Fritjof Capra first drew this parallel in 1972, and the plaque beside the statue quotes him directly.
In this episode, we explore what happens when you bring these three images together. The bull and the bear show you the visible motion of markets. The Nataraja shows you the deeper structure: a cycle without a final destination, in which creation and destruction are not opposites but the same dance. And understanding that rhythm — rather than projecting current conditions forward in a straight line — is arguably the most practical skill available to a long-term investor.
Topics covered include the story behind Di Modica's guerrilla installation, the iconography of the Nataraja and why it ended up at CERN, the cognitive error of linear thinking in markets, Howard Marks on cycles, and what composure actually looks like as an investment practice.
Alessandro BARONI
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