Confessions Of A Newsletter Writing Market “Permabear”

There are also plenty of genuinely thoughtful people doing good work, often without much fanfare. The difficulty is that all of them occupy roughly the same space, competing for the same limited supply of attention.

If I wanted to bitch and moan, I could probably spend an entire article complaining about people who subscribe to Fringe Finance and then mysteriously discover a sudden interest in writing about the same ideas, or people who accuse me of “stealing” their ideas when I’ve never read anything they’ve ever written. But, really…who gives a sh*t? We’re all borrowing ideas from somewhere. Nobody develops their understanding of the world in a vacuum, and the notion that any one investor or writer has some completely proprietary window into reality strikes me as a little absurd.

I read other people’s work constantly. I listen to podcasts, read filings, follow people I agree with and people I think are completely out of their minds. Sometimes an idea comes from a conversation, sometimes from a headline, sometimes from a financial statement, and sometimes from something somebody says that irritates me enough to spend three hours trying to figure out why I think they’re wrong.

The entire financial information universe is one enormous, messy, ongoing conversation. Substack, X, Seeking Alpha, podcasts, paid newsletters, free newsletters, institutional research, mainstream financial media, and whatever some cracked out lunatic crypto scammer is posting at three in the morning are all contributing to the same enormous pool of ideas. Some of it is brilliant, some of it is nonsense, and some of it is just the same handful of observations being recycled in different packaging.

The value, somewhere inside of all of this financial detritus, appears to be in learning how to sort through the noise, recognize something worth thinking about, and occasionally stumble across an idea that changes the way you see things. Maybe that leads to an investment or leads you to avoid one. Maybe it simply makes you a little more curious about something you hadn’t previously considered. And sometimes there’s value in reading something simply because it’s interesting or entertaining, without feeling compelled to do anything with it afterward.

That’s more or less where I hope my work fits in.

I always think of that Tony Robbins movie I Am Not Your Guru from a while back. I don’t want to be anybody’s guru. And I certainly don’t want people blindly buying things because I mention them. I’d much rather be one of the many voices somebody considers while trying to develop their own understanding of markets. If something I write sends a reader down a research rabbit hole, causes them to question a popular narrative, or gives them a different way of thinking about risk, I consider that worthwhile. If they just enjoy reading it over coffee and get a laugh out of it, that’s fine with me too.

There’s a certain freedom for me in approaching writing this way. Not every observation needs to become a bull case on a stock. Not every interesting company needs to be bought. Not every macroeconomic concern needs to be expressed through some elaborate options trade that requires the world to end by the third Friday of next month. Sometimes an idea can simply exist as an idea, to be revisited later or discarded as circumstances change. I’ve found that this is a much more enjoyable way to engage with markets than constantly feeling obligated to act on everything I think.

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None of this is to suggest that I don’t take finance seriously. I do. I have plenty of opinions and plenty of convictions about where things may be heading. But I’ve become more comfortable separating the act of thinking about markets from the act of trying to make money from every thought.

There’s also the simple fact that I enjoy having a record of what I thought and when I thought it. Some of that record makes me look reasonably intelligent. Other parts make me wonder if I shouldn’t be leaving the house at all without wearing a prescription safety helmet. But that’s the nature of trying to understand something as complicated as markets in real time. You’re going to be wrong, sometimes embarrassingly so, and the only alternative is to avoid saying anything meaningful in the first place. I’ve never found that alternative particularly appealing.

I don’t think writing about investing and being good at investing are necessarily the same profession. They overlap, obviously, but they draw on different skills, different temperaments, and different motivations. There are extraordinary investors who couldn’t write an interesting paragraph to save their lives, and there are excellent financial writers whose greatest contribution may be helping other people think more clearly rather than generating spectacular returns themselves. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with either arrangement, provided everyone is reasonably candid about what they’re offering.

For me, this publication is a combination of things. It’s a business, certainly, but it’s also an outlet, a place to organize my thoughts, an excuse to keep learning, and a way to participate in a conversation I’ve been fascinated by for most of my adult life. It gives me a reason to get up every morning and try to understand something a little better than I did the day before. And every so often, if I’m lucky, I might write something that helps somebody else do the same. Sometimes I get comments from subscribers that angrily proclaim something like “I’m here for the analysis, not a diatribe about whatever is on your mind at any given second!”

And all I can think is boy, are you in the wrong f**king place…

I don’t know that there’s a more complicated explanation than that, and I’m not sure there needs to be.

So, returning to the question that started all of this, why don’t I just keep my investment ideas to myself and make a fortune trading them?

Partly because I’ve tried that, and the results have left something to be desired. Partly because I genuinely enjoy the process of writing. Partly because I think there’s room for independent commentary that doesn’t bullshit people into making them think I know exactly what happens next. And partly because I’ve come to appreciate that an idea doesn’t have to make somebody rich to have been worth thinking about.

I think there’s a place for that in a world increasingly obsessed with gambling on literally everything, immediate results, instant opinions, and turning every passing thought into a transaction.

At the end of the day, I’m just trying to make a living doing something I enjoy, share a few ideas I find interesting, and hopefully offer something useful along the way. Some days that means finding a potential opportunity. And some days it means writing a couple thousand words about a question nobody ever asked me…like today.

Thanks, as always, for reading.