I Will Not Relent

A Foreword to the Third Edition of Intermarket Analysis and Investing

My father died two days before Thanksgiving in 2008.

There is no way to prepare for that sentence. There is no way to soften it. I have written it a hundred times in a hundred different places and it still stops me cold.

He was here and then he was not.

The world was ending that year. At least it felt that way. Lehman Brothers had collapsed. The stock market was in free fall. Retirement accounts were losing a third or more of their value — and for those concentrated in equities, the damage from peak to trough would ultimately approach fifty percent. Fear had replaced reason. And in the middle of all of it, the man who taught me to read markets, who taught me to think about the interplay of bonds and commodities and currencies and equities as a single living system, was gone.

My father came from nothing. He was born in Egypt and arrived in this country with little more than a belief that hard work would matter if you were smart enough to direct it somewhere useful. He became a senior market analyst at Merrill Lynch. He worked alongside Bob Farrell, one of the most respected minds Wall Street has ever produced. He wrote this book. And he did all of it without anyone handing him a thing.

I did not understand that when he was alive. Not really.

When you are young, you see your father’s flaws before you see his strength. You see the distance before you see the sacrifice that created it. You see what he got wrong before you appreciate the impossible math of what he was trying to get right. He was an immigrant raising a family in a country that was not his own, building a career in a field that punishes you for being wrong about anything, and trying to figure out how to be a father on top of all of it. He was doing the best he could with what he had. It took me years to see that clearly. It took me longer to forgive the things I once held against him.

As I have gotten older, I have learned that forgiveness is not something you do for the other person. It is something you do for yourself so that you can finally move forward without carrying weight that was never yours to carry. My father was trying to figure it all out. Just like I am. Just like every father is. He did not have a manual. None of us do.

All our fathers want is for us to be stronger than they were.

I think about that constantly. Not just in markets. In everything.

After he passed, I lost my footing. That is the honest way to say it. The professional version is that I transitioned through various roles in the investment management industry. The real version is that I was trying to survive. Grief does not care about your career plans. It does not care about your ambitions. It sits in the room with you and demands to be acknowledged, and if you refuse, it will find other ways to make itself known.

For me, it manifested in my health. I let myself go. I stopped paying attention to what I was eating, how I was moving, how I was sleeping. The stress compounded. The weight accumulated. I became obese. And I did not want to admit it because admitting it meant admitting that I was not handling things as well as I told everyone I was.

Markets will humble you. Life will humble you more.

The turning point was not dramatic. It was quiet. It was the realization that I wanted to be here longer. Not just professionally. Not just to publish another paper or manage another fund. I wanted to live longer. I wanted to be present for whatever comes next. I looked at my father’s story, cut short too soon, and I decided that the single most important trade I could make was not in any financial market. It was a bet on my own body. My own longevity. My own capacity to endure.

So I started. I got up earlier. I trained harder. I changed what I ate. I studied the science of longevity the same way I study yield curves and moving averages, with obsession and rigor and a refusal to accept easy answers. I went from obese to the best physical condition of my life. Not because I am special. Because I decided that quitting was not an option.

I did not relent. I am not relenting. I will not relent.

That phrase has become something of a mantra for me. People hear it and think it is about markets. It is about markets. But it is about much more than that. It is about getting up every single day and choosing to show up even when no one is watching and nothing is working and the pain is louder than the progress.

This book is my father’s work. I want to be clear about that. The analytical framework, the integration of economic, fundamental, and technical disciplines, the conviction that markets are not isolated systems but interconnected expressions of human behavior and economic reality, all of that is his. He saw it before most of his contemporaries did. He wrote it down so that others could see it too.

What this third edition does is something he would have done himself had he been given the years to do it. It updates his framework for a world he did not live to see. The 2008 financial crisis. The era of quantitative easing. The rise of exchange-traded funds and the passive investing revolution. The COVID shock. The inflation surge of 2022. The explosion of options trading and zero-day expiration contracts. The AI revolution. The meme stock phenomenon and the emergence of retail investors as a genuine market force. The cryptocurrency ecosystem. All of it. His framework absorbs it all because his framework was built on foundations that do not expire.

Relationships between asset classes change in their particulars but not in their nature. Bonds still talk to stocks. Commodities still talk to currencies. Utilities still whisper warnings when risk is building. The signals shift in their expression but not in their essence.

I have spent much of my career building on what my father started. My research on the Beta Rotation Strategy, which won the Charles H. Dow Award. My work on the Tactical Risk Rotation Strategy, on the Lumber-to-Gold ratio, on the relationship between the VIX and sector performance. All of it flows from the same intellectual headwaters. He planted the seed. I have tried to grow the tree.

This edition also reflects something I have come to believe deeply through my own journey: that the greatest risk in markets and in life is not volatility. It is rigidity. The inability to adapt. The refusal to see that the world has changed and that your models must change with it. My father understood this. He integrated three separate schools of analysis, economic, fundamental, and technical, at a time when most analysts picked one and dismissed the others. That was not just intellectual ambition. That was humility. It was an admission that no single lens is sufficient to understand something as complex as financial markets.

I have tried to bring that same humility to this edition. I have tried to honor his voice while acknowledging the decades of market behavior that have unfolded since he wrote the original words. I have incorporated behavioral finance, the limitations of the efficient market hypothesis, the impact of artificial intelligence on market structure and analysis, and the lessons of every major market dislocation since 1990. Not because these additions make the book longer. Because they make it truer.

I want to say something to my father that I could not say when he was alive.

I understand now. I understand the weight you carried. I understand the choices you made and the ones you could not make. I understand that you were building something for me even when I could not see it. I understand that the distance I felt was not indifference. It was the cost of trying to provide.

I forgive you for the things I did not understand when I was too young to understand them. And I thank you for the things I did not appreciate until I was old enough to struggle with them myself.

This book is your legacy. This edition is my promise to protect it.

I hope I can be stronger than you were. That is what you wanted. That is what every father wants.

I will not relent.

Michael A. Gayed, CFA
March 2026