So Soho House went public this week. It is now trading on the NYSE under the ticker $MCG. It renamed itself the Membership Collective Group Inc. for the IPO given the myriad of brands that the company now operates. The company went public at $14 a share and with a $2.8 billion valuation. It raised $420 million through the offering.

My first reaction when I heard the news was that going public is maybe at odds with being a cool, urban, and exclusive membership club. We're all about creatives; also, buy our stock. But maybe I'm wrong. This is just the company maturing. At 26 years old, the company now has some 119,000 members and has 30 Soho Houses around the world in 12 different countries.

Full disclosure: I am a member and a big fan of Soho House.

But now that the company is public, we also know that it has never turned a profit. And it hopes to do that by next year, as well as open some five to seven new Soho Houses each year while trying to remain "asset light". As the company does this and pushes toward profitability, there is, of course, a very natural question about what that does to the experience and the overall brand.

Does it get diluted at all?

I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case. But of course the company will end up evolving. On a related note, if anyone from Soho House / MCG is reading this post (unlikely), I would love to connect about an opportunity here in the Toronto area. I think it has the potential to become something truly remarkable -- not to mention, much needed. I can be reached, here.

Levered assets, such as real estate, tend to have prices that are correlated with interest rates. Lower rates usually translate into higher asset prices. We are living through this kind of environment right now. And so it is generally valuable to have a view on where rates might go next.

To do that, it can be helpful to look back at history. And a lot of the time, that look goes as far back as the second half of the 20th century. I wasn't buying real estate in the 1970s and 1980s, but I am often reminded -- by people older than me -- that this was a period of high inflation and high interest rates.

But what about an even longer period of time?

Paul Schmelzing (visiting researcher at the Bank of England) has a pioneering working paper that was published last year which looks at global interest rates over a 707 year time horizon. His research spans the period of 1311 to 2018 and uses archives and many other sources to try and reconstruct annual rates across the world's advanced economies.

Below are two charts from the paper that I found interesting. The first represents the data that was used to weight long-term debt yields across the various advanced economies. My how things change when you take a long enough view. It also shows the share of advanced economy real GDP that is captured by the study (it's about ~80% -- the red line below).

So Soho House went public this week. It is now trading on the NYSE under the ticker $MCG. It renamed itself the Membership Collective Group Inc. for the IPO given the myriad of brands that the company now operates. The company went public at $14 a share and with a $2.8 billion valuation. It raised $420 million through the offering.

My first reaction when I heard the news was that going public is maybe at odds with being a cool, urban, and exclusive membership club. We're all about creatives; also, buy our stock. But maybe I'm wrong. This is just the company maturing. At 26 years old, the company now has some 119,000 members and has 30 Soho Houses around the world in 12 different countries.

Full disclosure: I am a member and a big fan of Soho House.

But now that the company is public, we also know that it has never turned a profit. And it hopes to do that by next year, as well as open some five to seven new Soho Houses each year while trying to remain "asset light". As the company does this and pushes toward profitability, there is, of course, a very natural question about what that does to the experience and the overall brand.

Does it get diluted at all?

I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case. But of course the company will end up evolving. On a related note, if anyone from Soho House / MCG is reading this post (unlikely), I would love to connect about an opportunity here in the Toronto area. I think it has the potential to become something truly remarkable -- not to mention, much needed. I can be reached, here.

Levered assets, such as real estate, tend to have prices that are correlated with interest rates. Lower rates usually translate into higher asset prices. We are living through this kind of environment right now. And so it is generally valuable to have a view on where rates might go next.

To do that, it can be helpful to look back at history. And a lot of the time, that look goes as far back as the second half of the 20th century. I wasn't buying real estate in the 1970s and 1980s, but I am often reminded -- by people older than me -- that this was a period of high inflation and high interest rates.

But what about an even longer period of time?

Paul Schmelzing (visiting researcher at the Bank of England) has a pioneering working paper that was published last year which looks at global interest rates over a 707 year time horizon. His research spans the period of 1311 to 2018 and uses archives and many other sources to try and reconstruct annual rates across the world's advanced economies.

Below are two charts from the paper that I found interesting. The first represents the data that was used to weight long-term debt yields across the various advanced economies. My how things change when you take a long enough view. It also shows the share of advanced economy real GDP that is captured by the study (it's about ~80% -- the red line below).