William Raynar, regular contributor to FOLIO, takes a deep-dive into the sea – from what causes swells to the benefits of avoiding overcrowded breaks
This summer, the French Atlantic coast seemed unusually full of Americans. Online holiday rental platforms have made the process almost frictionless: the booking is standardised, the calendar is open, and a week in France can be arranged in between meetings. Biarritz is far cheaper than the Hamptons even after taking a business class flight into account.
One of those visitors was my friend Paul. He had rented Sorro-Gaina, an old, well-known house on the coastline between Bidart and Guéthary. From its terrace, one looks directly towards Parlementia, the long Basque reef break that forms offshore and, on the right day, peels towards the coast. The place has watched the first generations of French surfers (Les Tontons Surfeurs) do the same.
I was there for lunch with Paul, his wife and their young daughter Athena. The swell was visible beyond the table. Athena watched the lines gather and asked her father: “What are waves? Where do they come from?” It was the kind of question that makes adults unexpectedly happy. Not because it is difficult to answer, but because it asks us to look again at something we had stopped seeing.
Paul looked at the water for a moment. In a younger life, he had studied fluid dynamics. “A wave,” he said, “is not quite what it looks like.” It seemed to Athena that the water was coming towards them from the horizon. “Mostly, it isn’t,” he said. “Do you know the Ola, when people in a stadium stand up and sit down, one after another?” She nodded positively.
“The movement travels around the stadium, but the people mostly stay where they are. The sea does something similar. Water rises, moves forward a little, falls, and slips back. What travels is the energy, passed from one small movement to the next.”
“So, the water stays still?” she asked. “Not still,” Paul said. “It dances.”
So, what exactly is a wave?
Wind begins the dance. A breeze creates ripples; a storm blowing long enough across open water makes a swell. Then the storm can pass. The sky can turn blue. But its work travels on, sometimes for days.
The sea remembers weather after the sky has forgotten it.
During their journey, waves meet. Some arrive together and become larger. Others meet out of step and lose their force. And what lies beneath matters as much as what happens above. Far offshore, at Cortes Bank, off California, waves can break with no land in sight because a submerged mountain rises beneath them.
Then there is Bremgarten, on the Reuss. Here the logic appears to reverse. In the ocean, the wave travels while most of the water merely doesn’t. On the river, the water charges downstream with all the force of the current, yet the wave stays in one place. A surfer can stand on it for minutes, neither advancing nor retreating, held above a movement that never stops. It is not the absence of energy that holds the wave there. It is energy meeting a boundary, again and again, in precisely the same place. The river does not pause. The wave does.
We tend to regard that white crest as the wave’s finest moment, the instant when it becomes fully itself. Physically, it is the opposite. It is the point at which the wave has become unstable. Its apparent triumph is also its collapse. Then the water runs up the sand, pauses, and returns. Another wave is already forming far away.
Over the course of a few minutes, the shore seems fixed and the waves seem restless. Over centuries, the relationship reverses. Waves shift beaches, wear down cliffs and redraw coastlines. The land looks permanent only because our lives are short. As Paul said the words, “Our lives are short,” he realised it was no longer an answer designed for his daughter. Thankfully, she seemed to have lost interest and moved on to something else.
What surfers know about timing
While Paul spoke, surfers below had begun to paddle towards Parlementia. Some went too early and spent their strength before the set had arrived. Others waited too long and found the wave breaking over them. A few had read it better: they were in the right place when effort and energy met. This is the kind of positioning that Swedish surfer Maria Allebring, who took up the sport aged 39 and is now hoping to represent her country at the ISA World Surfing Games later this year, knows all about (read her FOLIO interview here).
It occurred to me that markets reward something similar. Not clairvoyance, and certainly not constant motion, but position, patience and the ability to distinguish a passing ripple from a swell worth taking. Some investors exhaust themselves paddling for movements that never form. Others enter only when the wave has become obvious, and discover that the enjoyment will be short lived. The difficult work is to be ready without feeling obliged to stand up on every wave.
As I was watching the surfers down below, I witnessed the quiet surfer’ law in action: the one closest to the point where the wave begins to break has priority. It is not awarded to the strongest swimmer, the largest board, or the loudest voice. Everyone else pulls back. When too many people try to take the same wave, nobody has room to ride it well.
Markets have their own crowded breaks. The best ideas are often easy to recognise once enough people are waiting for them. That is when the wave can still look magnificent, but the space to move has narrowed and every turn matters more. The experienced surfer does not assume that the busiest peak offers the best ride. Sometimes he waits. Sometimes he paddles a little farther down the coast, towards a less fashionable break, where the waves are smaller perhaps, but the line is open.
That is why surfers still travel to places such as Liberia: not because every wave is better, but because a clean line without a crowd can be worth more than a famous break with twenty people competing for the same take-off. The wave is real; it can lift you or knock you over. But it is not to be mistaken with the sea.
William Raynar
Thematic Research Specialist