Money Stuff is Linear-ish
danielstone.substack.com
danielstone.substack.com
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.
Subjectively the one that appeals most to me, is that the fund has an investment strategy built around their ability to identify and capture very specific types of opportunities - and that there are only so many of them globally in any given year. This puts an upper bound to how much the fund even can invest, because their strategy works for scenarios that are limited both in size and frequency.
He wrote about his writing process and he waits until the morning and its always a bit of a mad dash to get stuff out. Because if there is a story that's blowing up in the morning he'll want to comment on it
In his latest column he mentions the post and says "I'm trying my best".
It's pretty obvious he has it pretty cushy and just gets his papers out later.
In his latest column he links to this post about OP’s statistical analysis, but I thought you meant it linked to his writing method
To me, the man is a marvel of knowledge and industriousness.
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.
That is basically averaging 10 books a year for 43 years to get to that kind numbers . He probably wrote more during his peak years
He had to do it all of it on a typewriter, it takes more effort both physically and also mentally as there is no backspace you have think more carefully or you would have lot of corrections and retyping pages.
However all that apart typing without backspace is very different. Try it sometime , you have think ahead a bit form your sentence /block fully , it is harder , I think it will always be slower but maybe for someone used to that it is different.
It's an incredibly rare skill to be able to inform and entertain both professionals and lay audiences with the same piece in a field as technical as Levine's in as much depth as he goes into though, and it takes a certain amount of flair and skill to be opinionated on contested stuff without alienating much of your potential audience too.
Well said.
- 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
I’m looking forward to Matt’s response.
Has anyone asked the Money Stuff author?
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.
- 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.