Metagame

“Metagame” is the framing Dan McMurtrie advances in the Tyro Partners Q2 2021 Partner Letter: markets are now metagames, where beliefs function as useful constraints rather than as straightforward bets on fundamentals. It sits alongside the letter’s four-level memetic model (Content → Reference → Advocacy → Community) — the idea that a market position is propagated and sustained the way a meme is, through layers of memetic adoption rather than through fundamentals alone.

In Kyle’s notes this concept travels with McMurtrie’s adjacent “rivers and streams” idea — that every market has a “main river” plus many smaller, under-appreciated talent pools — which feeds the “contributors” framing in Open-Source Knowledge. The Tyro page records the same lineage: the “metagames,” memetic-player, and “rivers and streams” framings all trace to that one Partner Letter.

Context: “Metagame” originates in competitive gaming and game theory — the game about the game: strategies that target not the rules in isolation but other players’ expectations, conventions, and prevailing strategies. Applied to markets, it reframes investing as anticipating and positioning against the collective beliefs and narratives of other participants.

Where this appears

• Dan McMurtrie — author of the Tyro Partners Q2 2021 Partner Letter that lays out “markets as metagames” alongside the memetic model.
• Tyro Partners — the firm whose Partner Letter supplies the “metagames,” memetic-player, and “rivers and streams” framing Kyle draws on.