JP Private Banking: Can someone actually create or identify repeatable moves?
Watching the 2010 correspondence between Epstein and his private banker is a clean window into what private banking often sells: not certainty, not repeatability—ideas. One theme comes through immediately.
It’s momentum-chasing from one narrative to the next: a pitch, a theme, a “smart” trade, then another.
And that’s the tell: the system is designed to keep producing ideas because it cannot reliably produce outcomes.
So you see the second theme: hedging everywhere. Hedge the hedge.
Offset the exposure.
Layer structures.
Reduce regret.
A client gets the comfort of activity, the banker gets the comfort of fees, and the portfolio gets the comfort of never truly being wrong—because it never fully commits to being right. But the cost is real: hedging turns “maybe” into “mild.” It dampens upside, preserves mediocrity, and keeps the client in a permanent state of outsourcing conviction.
This is the part markets like to deny: can someone actually create or identify repeatable moves?
They don’t even have to be huge.
Just repeatable.
Call it a setup.
A pattern.
A structural recurrence.
Something you can execute on command.
If you can do that, the entire private-banking model starts to look backwards. You don’t need Nordic currencies.
You don’t need niche dispersion trades. Y
ou don’t need to continuously scour for the next “story” to justify activity. And you definitely don’t need to hedge your way into a portfolio that can never meaningfully express an edge.
Because once you include all the hedging, what’s documented becomes unsurprising: performance that’s—at best—mild.
Occasionally you’ll get a one-off that looks brilliant in hindsight. But it isn’t systematic. It isn’t durable. It’s not repeatable.
It’s a banker pitching what they can sell, when they can sell it—because that’s the business model.
A real edge is different.
It’s simple.
It’s durable.
It’s repeatable.
And most importantly: it doesn’t need to be hedged to death to feel legitimate.