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Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other
- maverickJ 6y agoLevine's articles are very educational and interesting at the same time. He uses a style that sometimes takes an obscure and bland topic to become very interesting; Thereby making the reader interested in the topic. That he has done this consistently over a period shows the mettle of the man. Reading through his early career background leaves clues to his current success. It reminds me of how Jamie Dimon went about his early career in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/early-career-tactics-to-accelerate https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/early-career-tactics... I can't wait to see what he writes about once he comes back from paternity leave.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThere’s a “how to draw an owl” meme at this part: > When Dimon finished from Harvard Business School in 1982, he placed a call to Sanford Weill, then chairman of the executive committee of American Express, to ask for advice.
- srckinase123 6y agoIs it worthwhile to read Matt Levine's newsletter, even if someone doesn't even have a rudimentary grasp on finance/economics? I've tried reading excerpts but they just went over my head. Would it be more useful to get a basic understanding of finance before reading his newsletter? There is so much terminology that is foreign to me.
- TehShrike 6y agoI have found it to be useful, in the sense that immersing myself in something that I can just barely grasp part of is a good way for me to work my way into a field.
- phreack 6y agoIt was actually my first contact with 'real' finance. I started reading Money Stuff and just accepting that I wouldn't get most of it at first yet enjoying what I did get, and suddenly after a while I was looking up stuff on Investopedia and at some point, I realized I had actually learned lots of the basics and understanding all of the articles. I'm even thinking of studying it formally after the pandemic.
- exolymph 6y agoYes, if you read it consistently you'll pick up a lot, even without preexisting knowledge. Google what you don't understand and the next issue will make more sense :)
- SonOfLilit 6y agoIt's my first recommendation to anyone who tells me they'd like to understand a bit of finance - subscribe to Matt's newsletter, you'll pick it up and enjoy the journey.
- davidw 6y agoI think there is a direct correlation between patio11 reading this guy, and the liberal use of 'material' in his writing :-)
- patio11 6y agoVery possibly true. I get a lot of my writing style from writers I enjoy.
- tempsy 6y agoThe irony is that technology journalists always seem very defensive when it comes to not having industry experience, yet Levine is a perfect example of a journalist who is good at what he does because he was in the finance industry.
- supernova87a 6y agoI especially liked his column about the college admissions scandal, and it wasn't that it was unfair, it was that it was theft. Theft from the colleges. Because you know, they already sell their admissions: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-have-to-pay-the-right-person https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha... Here is one thing that U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in announcing the charges: “There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, and I'll add that there will not be a separate criminal justice system either.” Level playing field! Here is another thing he said less than a minute later: “We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school’s more likely to take your son or your daughter. We’re talking about deception and fraud.” There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, except for the extremely well-known one where you donate a building in exchange for getting your kid in! “Lol just donate a building like a real rich person,” the U.S. Attorney almost said.
- xyzzyz 6y agoThis is a good example of what corruption in America looks like. America enjoys a reputation of being a rather non-corrupt country. To large degree, this is true: bribing scandals are rare, and most Americans would be completely aghast at the idea of passing an envelope under the table to the official who is responsible for issuing building permits. Instead, the corruption in the US operates through completely transparent and legal means. Instead of cash-filled envelopes, you see campaign contributions, board seats, consulting jobs for children, and, yes, donations to designated causes. All of this is just How Things Are Done, and people are so used to them that they no longer even consider it corruption.
- procrastinatus 6y agoWho is the Matt Levine of other fields (e.g. law, medicine, etc.)? I believe there was a thread on twitter about this, but can't find it anymore.
- OneLeggedCat 6y agoMy favorite finance/markets/money/derivatives/whatever writer. No one else is even close.
- leroy_masochist 6y agoI was an intern at Goldman in the summer of 2010, right after we moved into the new building. One day about halfway through the internship, a VP told me to call him so that he could explain a couple of concepts relevant to a few pages we were putting together for a book (client presentation) due the next day. Matt spent about 20 minutes on the phone with me walking me through a few derivatives-related topics and it was the most interesting and fun part of the summer by far. That guy is smart and funny -- it's not an act for his column. He may have thought he was bad at his job but from my perspective he exemplified the good part about working at GS -- really smart people, often with a wicked sense of humor, who go out of their way to help each other out.
- blazespin 6y agoMatt levine is clickbait for people who know nothing about wall street. Anyone who actually knows anything about wallstreet ignores the guy
- retsibsi 6y agoCan you be more specific about what he gets wrong? I don't have much of a preconception here, I've found him interesting/fun at times and been put off by his glibness at other times. But I'd like to know if there are specific knocks on his credibility.
- throwawgler87 6y agoReally enjoyed this, hasn't heard of him before. Just subscribed to his newsletter. Thanks for posting!
- basseq 6y agoYou may have gotten this from other comments, but he is on leave right now, so you'll have to wait a little longer before you start getting those juicy daily musings.
- swyx 6y agofrom this profile, Matt is very probably underpaid vs his earning potential (probably at least an order of magnitude) and should leave to substack or his own operation. but I respect that money really isn't everything.
- carapace 6y agoHe's IMO a perfect example of the intractability of the "fake news" problem. It's not that there aren't high quality news sources out there, like Matt Levine, it's that the market (in the form of folks willing to pay for it) isn't there. (Maybe it's technology? Micropayments still aren't effectively a thing?)
- jdminhbg 6y agoThe market for Levine is certainly there. He could easily clear 7 figures on Substack.
- quickthrower2 6y agoWhy substack? Wouldn’t Wordpress / namecheap do the trick? Why would he need a discovery platform?
- jdminhbg 6y agoSubstack would serve as a billing/subscription management platform for him, not discovery.
- antasvara 6y agoPretty sure he has a Substack called Big that's about monopolies, but I don't think it's paid.
- pg_bot 6y agoThat's Matt Stoller, and I wouldn't want to confuse the two. Levine has a much stronger grip on reality.
- lkramer 6y agoI got to read his columns while working at Bloomberg, and it was really the only thing, besides a few friendships, I took with me when I left. Still subscribed and missing his take on things while he's on parental leave (but of course happy that he is taking so much time off for the sake of his family).
- bambax 6y agoHe's one of the very best writers out there, really. Witty, funny and to the point. (The whole WeWork affair was totally hilarious.) I hope he returns soon!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- w23j 6y agoSo this might be the place to ask this. The list of articles by Matt Levine on Bloomberg has button at the end that loads 20 older articles, when you click on it. Now since Matt is on parental leave I want to read some older articles, let's say from 2014. Am I correct, that to do that I need to click 6 (years) * 200 (work days) / 20 (articles per click) = 60 times and wait for the page load to do that?! Is there really no other way to access these articles? Aren't they effectively unaccessible for most users because of that? (I found a way to manipulate a JS variable to get to the older articles, but this is clearly not the inteded use.) The same seems to be the case for the youtube videos of a very active vlogger. You can easily access current videos or the first ones, but not like from 4 years in the past. I am asking this, because I always wonder if I am just to dumb to see the obvious easy way to use these sites or if there just is no way to do it?
- forgotmypw17 6y agoIt is a pattern, and even places like Twitter and Reddit are affected. Many of them, you can't even click 60 times, you're limited to X items and then that's it after that, even if it is your own writing! I think it is laziness and incompetence in systems design more than anything nefarious, although a lack of regard for the user can be considered a dark pattern in itself. HN and dilbert.com are shining example of how to do it RIGHT. They provide calendar archives, filtering by tag, predictable URLs. I keep this in mind when designing my systems. Because I think it is important for the user to own their data, my forum systems makes user profile downloadable by default, in the smallest possible format readable by both software and humans: text (with some tokens).
- tuna-piano 6y agoSimilarly- Is there a way to get a list of all his longform pieces (not the daily newsletters)?
- yowlingcat 6y agoThere isn't an easier way. Every time I see any variant of the infinite scroll pattern which has come into vogue over the last decade, I feel the same complaints inside my head. True pagination was really nice. I miss when it was the default.
- encyclopedia 6y agoRelated 'Price Bumps: Tactics for Stocks that can be Used for Cryptos' https://medium.com/@gaetanconsulting/price-bumps-tactics-for-stocks-that-can-be-used-for-cryptos-25048e792c8b https://medium.com/@gaetanconsulting/price-bumps-tactics-for...
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoHow exactly is this related? It's a puff piece for vectorspace.
- rwmurrayVT 6y agoMy favorite columnist even when he wrote about me. He always takes the time to return my emails. His voice and wit always bring a bit of happiness to my day. I can't wait for him to return to writing and I hope he's enjoying his new kid. I actually met his wife when I was going through the SDNY. I was hoping to meet him, but the attorney did not recommend I talk to the "media".
- joshcain 6y agoBeen reading Matt's work since the Dealbreaker days and agree 100%. It's rare to see someone pull off being genuinely funny when (knowledgeably!) writing about financial and legal mechanics. Matt once wrote about something I was working on. His analysis was way more on-point and technically accurate than that of any other article I read about it. I wanted to email him at the time but like you wasn't exactly in a position to talk to a journalist.
- tuna-piano 6y agoMind sharing (or linking to) the story of why he wrote ahout you?
- bko 6y agoNot OP, but Matt Levine "wrote about me" [0]. I made a Matt Levine insider trading game [1]. It was inspired by a Matt Levine article [2] where he mentioned how some professional traders had access to early earnings but even with that data, they were still highly inconsistent in their trade performance. The point was stock prices are notoriously difficult to predict even with early earnings. So I made this app where you get early earnings and a graph of prior stock prices and you try to guess one of two paths (they were inverse of each other). Even with all of those myself (and Matt Levine) were correct about 50% of the time. I emailed him and he actually told me he was worse than 50% , which seems like a good thing because then you could just do opposite of your initial guess and have a profitable strategy. He was very nice in his correspondence, although he didn't give me a heads up saying he was going to blast it out. It's a static site [3] so it wasn't a problem, nor do I really care too much. But it gave me the ultimate flex when another super-fan at work spotted it and spammed it out. From the article. > Elsewhere here is “Matt Levine’s Insider Trading Game,” though I actually have nothing to do with it. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-16/we-kept-almost-making-money https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-16/we-kep... [1] https://insider-trading-game.netlify.app/ https://insider-trading-game.netlify.app/ [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/knowing-the-future-isn-t-that-helpful https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/knowin... [3] https://github.com/breeko/stox https://github.com/breeko/stox
- redmalang 6y agoI really enjoy his writing, which is why I really want to know what this might be: "Asked about the Etruscans, Mr. Levine said he thought Mr. Mystal might be referring to one of his favorite anecdotes from Herodotus. It was actually about the Persians, he said. He fetched his copy of “The Histories” and read it to me.)"
- fluster 6y agoFrom a section on Persian customs, somewhere in 130-135 of book one (which is as precise as my copy gets): “If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
- redmalang 6y agoThank you :)
- Ericson2314 6y agoThe interview should have done an homage footnote with this. Can't believe they missed the opportunity.
- Tomte 6y agoAccording to his Twitter account, it's Herodot, The Histories, 1.133. http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=GreekFeb2011&getid=1&query=Hdt.%201.133 http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname...
- redmalang 6y agoThank you :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- person_of_color 6y agoHe’s good because he’s not a normie at his core.
- kilbuz 6y agoTrue, but no one is.
- yowlingcat 6y agoI think perhaps what the two of you may be getting at is that some repress it less than others? At least to me, that comes through in the writing.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoI have no idea what this means.
- alea_iacta_est 6y agoThe rule is if you don't know what's a normie, you're probably one :)
- QuesnayJr 6y agoDude, I know what a normie is. Everyone (or at least everyone on HN) knows what a normie is. I don't know what evidence there is that Matt Levine not a normie at his core, or how it show up in his writing.
- phasetransition 6y agoI'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn. To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/arbitrage-discovered https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...
- tuna-piano 6y agoIf you clicked to the comments and are debating reading more... here's a passage from the above link: "So that leaves the option of Aviva settling with him. How much should he take in a settlement? Well, how much is his claim worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite amount of money."
- JDEW 6y agoAnd if you need _even more_ motivation after reading the above: > Insurers were offering a product that paid you, when you died, the greater of (1) the amount you put in and (2) the return on some risky investment. So he'd buy two of those -- one long the risky investment, one short the risky investment -- and be guaranteed a big profit. The catch is you have to die, but he solved this by enlisting dying patients in AIDS hospices to put their names on the contracts. This column truly is a classic.
- polote 6y agoonly 150k? that's seems like huge for something which is almost a niche. How many people subscribe to newsletters? on these people how many are interested about the opinion of one guy on the details of market finance?
- Nimitz14 6y agoDude matt levine is a legend. I think that despite having no connection with the finance industry.
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- tuna-piano 6y agoThoughts: -I love reading Matt's stuff. The praise of his writing is totally deserving. -In my daily life there's rarely a topic I come across that I'm unable to understand. In an otherwise boring day full of mundane work tasks, his column gives me intellectual challenges that I really appreciate. -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there? -He was valedictorian at Harvard and became a public high school teacher after!? -Apparently MoneyStuff has 150,000 subscribers, the total income+power of which is gigantic (multiple billionaire readers along with presumably many thousands of high 6-7 figure readers). But yet they don't seem to do much at all of monetizing it (there's an easily bypassed Bloomberg paywall and a tiny ad in the text of the email newsletter). -I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I don't think we'll ever get that.
- whatok 6y ago> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there? Intelligence is 100% absolutely not a prerequisite but anyone who rises above a certain level in finance has to be talented at something. At a bank that's likely to be either sales or politics.
- heartbreak 6y agoHis level of intellect is pretty common at Wachtell. Those people are sharp. Levine worked there as an associate out of law school.
- airstrike 6y ago> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there? Investment banker here.. "Wall Street" is a pretty big concept, not unlike "Silicon Valley". So in the best banks and the best groups, yes – I'd say he's among the very best, but there are plenty of similarly smart people around. Having said that, I obviously have no insight into whether he was actually good at all the other things that make a great "banker". To stick to the same analogy, one can be a prolific coder but be absolutely terrible about writing docs and tests, keeping a sane git workflow, prioritizing, communicating, being a team player, etc.
- relate 6y agoFYI Here is an overview of all of his columns: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
- monadic2 6y agoMan I love it when the NyTimes covers such brave and useful topics as.... new york financial reporting.
- eine_zwei 6y agoAgree with all the praise. However, reading him long enough, I started to get annoyed with the blase approach to the Wall Street(tm) transgressions. I do not think it is a case of pandering to your audience. The following quote (about his time in Dealbreaker) captures it perfectly: >Part of the problem was that he couldn’t really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. He was of the place, and he found its workings genuinely interesting. I am in the industry. It's a missed opportunity, IMHO. It is easy to dismiss some uniformed politician criticizing your industry norms. Much harder when it's coming from someone who clearly understand what is going on.
- gregdale 6y agoIt's a very finance culture approach, though, where the bounds of what's in and out are tested constantly by what (knowledgeable, ideally) participants, compliance departments, and regulators are willing to tolerate. Many banks were highly criticized after the financial crisis for selling "knowingly toxic" CDO/CLOs but on the other side of the trade were highly sophisticated buyers who wanted those securities.
- pydry 6y agoThey hacked the ratings system. There were pension funds who saw AAA rated garbage with apparently high returns and thought "woohoo!" Theres a really book called traders, guns and money that goes into the details on this. When the government started going after the ratings companies they downgraded US bonds (as if the US would ever default...)
- yborg 6y agoI actually find his approach illustrative - even those in the business not inclined to completely disregard the intent behind any rules think of the whole enterprise as a great game divided into competitors and civilians, who are mostly just collateral damage in these contests. There is also a general acceptance of the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory - if someone gets around the rules to do something others outside the game might consider unethical, then that is the fault of the rulemakers for not being clever enough to write the rules well enough, and in fact it is incumbent upon the players to expose such loopholes. Because leaving money on the table is really the only sin on Wall Street. As a civilian it's important to understand this mindset when dealing with the financial industry at any level because if you don't, you're going to be on the short end of the things Matt writes about.
- misiti3780 6y agoI like his newsletter but I think Matt Taibbi was much better at explaining complex finance transactions
- curiousgal 6y agoAny recommended readings by him?
- misiti3780 6y agoThis is probably his most famous: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-195229/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-grea...
- whimsicalism 6y agoIs this really that compelling? I find it with lots of rhetorical flourish, but lacking the analysis of how the rich really do enrich themselves. > They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational What does this mean? Why wouldn't the other banks short the post-IPO tech companies if they knew the "real prices" and make off with a killing. And what even is a bubble? If you had invested in a tech ETF at the peak of the 2000s bubble, you would have still outperformed the market by 2020. So were the 2003 prices that far off?
- keeganpoppen 6y agoyeah wow the idea that matt taibi is well informed on these topics... he's not even a good writer either... other than that, he's a great Matt Levine comp haha.
- misiti3780 6y agoso matt taibbi is isn't well informed because he didnt work in investment banking previously ?
- pratik661 6y agoOne of the perks of working at Bloomberg is being able to read his (and Noah Smith’s) columns for free :D.
- h1srf 6y agoOne of the perks of my employer paying ~$3k a month for my Bloomberg subscription as well. That and the other few times a month I need to check some data.
- matthewmcg 6y agoThe newsletters are free by e-mail too. You can take those and run them through an e-mail to RSS service and pop that feed in your RSS reader.
- alelos 6y agoI use this feed with my reader: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine.rss https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe... It was working up until he went on his parental leave, I expect it to get updates when he is back.
- anonu 6y agoHe's been on paternity leave for a few months - hope he gets back soon to writing his newsletters! They're excellent
- preem_palver 6y agoHe deserves the mark twain prize for his series on we work. I mean , that was art!!!!
- saltmeister 6y agoposted on Toilet Paper Record and "makes sense of Wall Street"? My ass
- kokey 6y agoThis is weird. This morning I was thinking about how much I miss his newsletter, but we also have a new young baby in the house so I totally understand. I even considered writing him an email to tell him this. Now I can at least read an article about him.
- mjd 6y agoI also recommend Matt Levine, he's just great. Here's a blog post I wrote a couple of months ago to talk about him: https://blog.plover.com/ref/money-stuff.html https://blog.plover.com/ref/money-stuff.html I said "Almost every issue teaches me something interesting I didn't know, and almost every issue makes me laugh" and I showed four examples. If you're looking for a quick intro to what he's like, maybe check it out. He's still on paternity leave but I hope he'll return soon.
- curiousgal 6y agoDoes anyone know of an equivalent newsletter that covers European markets?
- blindwatchmaker 6y agoI have missed Matt's columns since he went on parental leave. Does anyone have recommendations for anything similar to scratch that itch?
- exolymph 6y agoByrne Hobart, who writes about tech but also finance: https://diff.substack.com/ https://diff.substack.com/