Guess: 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.
Moving up the stack then, could Bloomberg be publishing changes off a queue? Maybe money stuff is deployed in the same pipeline with everything else Bloomberg produces.
He became more popular and holds more weight now at Bloomberg. He also had a kid last year and pretty much never writes on Friday's now. He took a long paternity leave with no stated return date as well.
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.
This 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Medallion has been closed for new investors since ... a long time ago. Nobody has an explanation how they can sustain such an absurd return, but there are a few theories floating around.
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.
I think that makes sense and it also shows that an algorithm can in practice reliably find market inefficiencies and solve them in some scenarios. In those cases a free market can exist but the robot will always beat it and eventually discourage all other market participants from participating, essentially creating a sort of communist economic system for that particular market.
Looks 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.
Matt 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.
Finance 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).
"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.
There's no shortage of content creators and real time news journalists churning out a dozen or more articles a day. The quantity part isn't the difficult bit.
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.
Some people just find writing natural to them others have to struggle. Asimov was a famous natural writer and cranked out 430 plus books ! Not all of them are sci-fi or fiction either.
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.
He said that he pretty much just typed what he thought at full speed. He emitted lots of typos. I don't remember if he mentioned, but maybe someone else handled the retyping.
There is always proofreading and editors involved for grammar and style anyway. Some authors also keep a typist /editor formally or sometimes informally :friends/family /spouse .
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.
Yep. Grew up in an era when mechanical typewriters were the standard "tech" of the day for writing. And yep, it's far more difficult. Finger strength, key jamming, and the regular use of white out fluid, or pen ink markup to correct first drafts. Listening for the margin warning bell and deciding on the fly if you should reach for the carriage return lever or push your luck. Centering titles by counting the letters, dividing by two and adjusting the carriage to suit. Oh yeah. Funsies. Don't miss those days. In speed tests for clerical positions, e.g. secretary in a law office, etc, backspacing to fix something meant the loss of a word in your speed rating.
Wow! That's some serious mental horsepower and creativity. I have an old physics book for layman by him. Seems like a guy who just liked to share the wonder of the world and the imagination. I like people like that.
Related: 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/
Presumably 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.
>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.
I 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.
