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Money Stuff is Linear-ish
- jimbokun 5y agoAny theories to explain this linear increase in publication times? Has anyone asked the Money Stuff author?
- maxfurman 5y agoI haven't, but I look forward to reading his response in Monday's column!
- dcminter 5y agoHe cited it at the end of Thursday's column, commenting "I'm doing my best!"
- hans1729 5y ago>Any theories to explain this linear increase in publication times? The linked post shows that the articles are getting longer. Money stuff becomes more and more relevant and publishes longer and longer articles, requiring linearly more time to read-through pre-publishing. Assuming that the authors workload scales linearly with the length of his publications, you can derive the respective posting-times scaling along.
- whatshisface 5y agoThe publishing times jump around a lot less than the lengths.
- hannofcart 5y agoSince the data used the emails as source, could it be caused by the increasing size of subscribers in the mailing list?
- WillisWayde 5y agoIf you read the section at the bottom about how the data was assembled, you'll see that the timestamps come from the Bloomberg website and not emails.
- dan-robertson 5y agoI don’t think there’s a great explanation for it being linear. But if you ask him I expect you’d get some combination of: - writing it in a mad frantic rush[1] every day and just getting slower over time - it being harder to write novel things, or there being more to read in the morning - family life, eg he has a toddler and would work in the early morning so maybe helping with the morning rush or going to bed later as the kid gets a bit older. - covid breaking the usual schedule of ‘work frantically in the morning then come to the office to chat to colleagues - linear increase in time spent reading fan mail in the morning [1] I think he’d definitely say something like this.
- andreareina 5y ago- Linearly more previous episodes of Money Stuff he might have to refer back to
- indeed30 5y agoGuess: The emails are sent slowly, in small batches. The email addresses are selected in alphabetical order, and this recipient appears towards the end of the list. Therefore as subscriber count increases, they get the email later and later each day.
- NoboruWataya 5y agoThis would assume a linear growth in users I guess? I'd be interested to know if this is the case. I have followed Levine for a few years but I feel like he kind of exploded in popularity at some stage over the last couple of years.
- giraffe_lady 5y agoI think 2018 maybe? There was that wave of deranged crypto hype with like every single company announcing a "pivot to blockchain" or ICO or whatever. He consistently handled that very well; a lot of humor but he did also evaluate them as serious financial products and got to nerd out about and compare them to highly technical traditional finance instruments. Which honestly that is when he's at his best anyway. There weren't a lot of sources back then that were informed enough, accessible enough, and took those announcements as seriously as they deserved but no more. Anyway I was working in tech but nowhere near crypto at that time and started seeing his newsletter shared around a lot among coworkers and my peer groups around then. Not surprising if he picked up a lot of long term readers from it.
- akozak 5y agoI revisit his "Are Index Funds Communist?" piece from 2016 often, definitely what got me hooked. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are-index-funds-communist https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are-in...
- JacKTrocinskI 5y agoThe socialist calculation problem has arguably been solved, check out the Medallion fund by Renaissance Technologies. It has had an average return rate of 74% since 1994. Carl Icahn, Buffet, no one comes close. They have a "robot" that can essentially predict the market, good luck getting them to take your money though.
- flerchin 5y agoLooks like Levine scheduled everything written after 2019 to autopublish at noon, unless he finished after noon, and then it would publish later in the day.
- kkfx 5y ago
- mardifoufs 5y agoThis is about a newsletter called "Money Stuff". I get not always reading the article but man..
- Mindless2112 5y agoSome people come to HN for the articles. Some just to read the comments. And some just to write the comments.
- sleightofmind 5y agoMatt Levine amazes me. I cannot imagine writing so much content on a daily basis. Let alone if that content is required to be entertaining, informative, deep on industry knowledge, and useful to neophyte and seasoned investor alike. To me, the man is a marvel of knowledge and industriousness.
- skippyboxedhero 5y agoFinance is like this. Nothing happens most of the time but lots of people are writing about it furiously. Email lots of people, hope they read your email at a time they are going to do a trade, and then you make money? It is all quite pointless (but Levine's stuff is good because I don't think it pretends to have a purpose...UK brokers sometimes have research people like this, they don't really produce anything valuable but people read it because it is a bit of a laugh...dying breed unf).
- sleightofmind 5y ago"but Levine's stuff is good because I don't think it pretends to have a purpose..." Yep. Agreed. He's there to drive visits to Bloomberg, but I know what you mean, and that is indeed part of what makes him good. As a layman and small-time investor, I like his stuff simply because he makes me aware of things I would almost certainly never encounter were it not for him. He seems to like explaining things just to be explaining them, and I like reading or listening to folks who share their fascination and insight into how their field works. I have an almost physical revulsion for dismissive people who seem never to be intrigued or surprised by anything -- those folks to whom everything wonderful is simply to be dismissed with a halfhearted wave of the hand accompanied by a yawn, sneer, or a subtle roll of the eyes. Levine's content seems so different from the usual slop about how the economy is going to do this or that, and consequently, why you should buy this or that.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y agoA small respite: sometimes he writes on the same topic for consecutive days.
- 5y ago
- arkades 5y agoThis precise link is being submitted for the third time by the same user. When does it just become spam?
- zelias 5y agoIf it's advertised as a pre-market opening newsletter, but doesn't actually come out until the afternoon, then is that securities fraud?
- robocat 5y agoPresumably there is an editorial check/audit by Bloomberg. Potentially the delays are not due to his publishing time, but due to internal Bloomberg processes? Although the decline in Friday emails is likely entirely due to Matt. I’m looking forward to Matt’s response.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoLove all the various explanation - if it was me, it would probably be a case of: - Prepare the post the day before and release it in the morning - I don't have time the day before, wake up in a frenzy and write something - Wake up later and later until it's ok to receive something at 2pm
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vghaisas 5y agoRelated: A few months ago, I wrote some code to analyze the distribution of topics in Money Stuff over time and found the results interesting: https://blog.vghaisas.com/matt-levine-topics/ https://blog.vghaisas.com/matt-levine-topics/