When I first began as a summer analyst in the world of sales and trading, it was immediately obvious that the level of discourse within the desk commentaries and research reports sent to clients was a level above anything published in the financial press.
This probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Desk commentaries and research reports are created by every bank to help their institutional clients and (hopefully!) prompt them to come do some trades with one of the bank’s desks.
On the other hand, the financial press caters toward a more general audience who doesn’t know or care about more esoteric things like treasury market volatility and the fact that recent moves by the BoE caused 1m10y OIS swaption NVOL to elevate to over double where it was a year ago, as Morgan Stanley wrote about in a recent report…
After leaving the sell-side one of the things I missed the most was combing through a wide-range of sell-side research. While I still had access to it in my new buy-side role, there was less of a need to read as broadly, or write down my own thoughts, like I did on the sell-side.
So the rationale behind the creation of the Market Making newsletter was really two-fold…
First, it gave me the opportunity to hopefully help those that are truly interested in the markets get a deeper understanding of them by showing how those on the sell- and buy-side are thinking about things right now (my aim is to try to strike a balance between the rigor of sell-side research and what’s in the financial press).
Second, it gave me the opportunity to continue writing about markets, which is something I’ve always loved doing and that people have seemed to reasonably enjoy reading.
Needless to say, the reason why more esoteric topics aren’t covered by the financial press is that they aren’t that directly applicable to the general public. What the general public cares about most are equities, since that’s what they have the ability to trade. What they most certainly don’t care about is treasury market volatility (until treasury market volatility begins to lead to equity market volatility, as we saw to a certain degree in the last week of Sept 2022).
Anyway, the intention of this newsletter isn’t really to be a practical resource for a member of the general public. Rather, it’s intended to cover what’s being talked about most on the sell-side and to try to translate that to a more general audience (including those looking to break into the industry, and those who are just interested in how institutional players are thinking through market developments and what they’re paying attention to).
I’ve thought quite a lot about how to structure the Market Making newsletter to make it valuable for you, and feasible for me (as you can imagine, there isn’t much free time in my schedule!).
In the end, I decided to do a “freemium” weekly newsletter - which will be sent directly to your e-mail inbox every Wednesday evening - that will be a (relatively!) brief overview of the most important themes impacting markets, how I’m trying to make sense of them, and a full listing of all the sell-side research, articles, etc. I’ve been thinking about through the past week.
Since putting together Market Making takes a significant chunk of time, I do charge a modest amount for access to the full newsletter and my weekly reading list. But, since this a little passion project of mine, the price is hopefully affordable for everyone ($12 per month, cancelable at any time online with a few clicks).
I struggled quite a bit with how low I could reasonably price this. Because the (regrettable) reality is that there aren’t that many people who are interested in markets at a more institutional level, so if I charge anything lower it’d be almost impossible hard to justify the amount of time I spend writing Market Making each week.
With that said, I’m committed to keeping the first part of the weekly Market Making newsletter completely free to read. So if you don’t want to become a paid subscriber right away, that’s no problem at all. Each Wednesday you’ll still receive the newsletter, but there will just be a paywall blocking the content after the first part (so, practically speaking, you’ll usually get around ~25% of the total newsletter content).
Writing early editions of the Market Making newsletter - before I brought it onto the Substack platform - has been a lot of fun, and hearing the kind words of subscribers really makes my day.
So hopefully you enjoy Market Making as much as others have and that it becomes part of your weekly routine.
Hi! How can I upgrade my subscription?