Appreciation thread I wrote late Thursday nite when I noticed sub count crossed 20k:
You people are sick. And I appreciate you for it.
Some history on this letter and joining Twitter…
I started lurking on Twitter in mid 2010s bc I was trying to learn about investing. Despite being a trader investing was foreign to me. Frankly I didn’t care about investing or business broadly. Trading was always just some kinda boardgame to me that you could make a living from.
But I had savings and figured I should think about money a bit more so I came to Twitter where there was lots of links to articles and podcasts (consuming everything from @awealthofcs @dollarsanddata @patrick_oshag @ShaneAParrish) learning about Munger or smart beta etc.
Maybe some of that sounds quaint today. It was fresh to me. I was pretty offline, but just knew I didn’t know much. So I came to learn.
I start sharing links with my friends in Whatsapp chats often with own opinion.
Wife tells me stop spamming the friend and family chats. She suggests, “Why don’t you ask your friends if they’d want one weekly email with your thoughts and links so they can opt in?” She’s smart, but more so she’s kind & aware. She’ll save you if you’re trapped in a convo at a party. She was saving my friends and family.
So I email 100 people or so and 40 opt in. I’m obviously huge D&C fan and the Moontower is a symbol of togetherness and dorm room kinda convo so I pick that for a title.
I send the email on Sundays.
In hindsight, I realize I was just arbing offline and online. Online people find mental model shit trite and offline people think it’s catnip because it’s interesting if you’re like you’re just living your damn life and not reading your phone all day.
Eventually, I started finding analogies to trading or just explaining things from my own lens. Often quite personally, for better or worse. In any cas,e that’s when it started to grow. Every now and then you get a RT from a big account. I was a reply guy once I was publishing because I was also now tweeting links to the letter into the void. @EconomPic was the first large account to boost me (I remember I was on vacation in Palm Springs when I crossed 100 followers because of him).
And so you get a little boost and some confidence and you keep going.
I met him pretty early, and he told me, “If you can publish 20 weeks in a row you will be 95th percentile.”
That seemed like a super low bar. And tbh it was, other than the time I take off a few weeks in summer and Xmas, I basically never stopped.
I’ve had many convos with people who said they were going to do it and started and got nowhere near 20, so it really is a great mile marker bc if you start out eager it’s really not intimidating, but if you hit it you did achieve a milestone. Just fyi if you wanna write.
It took me about 7-12 hours a week to publish those early letters (takes about 3-8 now). In 2020, I started writing long-form on the blog. The first big one was the “sacrifice to the delta gods” post which took about 40 hours to write over the course of a month. I hit send the day before the market felt its first tremor of 2020 (I can remember the trading environment from that pre-COVID period well. Things felt quite alive on the desk).
After that post I started, I started writing the educational option posts. So many hours over the years on those education posts. No plan. Just writing because I thought “I could explain this my way” and hopefully someone else who needs or wants to know it but is mathematically undereducated could get it with less trouble than it took me.
Anyway, it’s turned into a lot of words on the internet. It’s quite crazy to hear almost every day how those words helped someone get a job or see something in a way they never could before. I hear from pros all the time how they tell their juniors to read MT and that’s always been the most validating feedback.
The writing thing was a happy accident and I really feel like it never would have happened if I didn’t poke around on Twitter and if Yinh didn’t nudge me. The writer/reader relationship is win-win in ways that trading isn’t.
(Trading is a win-win too, but that aspect of it isn’t the primary feeling, whereas in writing that feeling is stronger because it’s personal… it scratches a different itch.)
Thanks for following along. So much more to do.