The best financial newsletters in the world (and the work behind them)
ChatGPT ranked Opening Bell Daily alongside The Wall Street Journal and Morning Brew.
I read a lot of financial newsletters because I write one for a living.
Part of that is market research. I like to know what my competitors are doing. But more than that, I enjoy reading high-quality work.
Good writing is like smart investing: exposure to the best pays dividends.
At this point I’ve written something like 220 morning dispatches for Opening Bell Daily, and before that something like 750 for Business Insider, though the product I wrote there no longer exists.
There’s a lesson in that statement. Most things in business and media don’t last.
On a whim, I asked ChatGPT to name the best financial newsletters. To my surprise, Opening Bell Daily — launched less than a year ago — appeared next to The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Morning Brew.
I won’t argue with the world’s most popular AI.
Small wins like this are satisfying but misleading. Recognition — especially packaged as a list — is always a lagging indicator.
By the time anyone names you “among the best,” the most interesting part of the story is already over.
Instead of asking what goes into great work, I find it more useful to study the opposite. It’s far easier to assess the ways you might be stupid than it is to dream up ways to be smart.
If the best newsletters are built on small, compounding efforts, then we can say that the worst are those that short-circuit this process.
Sure, bad newsletters might be uninteresting or poorly written. But those are surface problems. The real reason most fail is because they violate the underlying calculus to success.
As Charlie Munger said, the best way to get what you want is to deserve it. In the newsletter business, “deserving” comes down to showing up long enough that excellence becomes inevitable.
I’ve had colleagues in media talk about starting a newsletter (or podcast, YouTube channel, TikTok…) but that early earnestness always flames out. They quit before compounding becomes visible, and the practice never coagulates into habit.
Almost no one is able to push past early and bad iterations that don’t gain traction.
The best newsletters endure. Their writers aren’t always the smartest or most eloquent — they’re the ones who refuse to miss a deadline. Cadence, more than style or innovation or genius, is what separates what lasts from what fizzles.
It’s hard to gain trust and credibility on a newsletter that publishes sporadically. Meanwhile, the ones that hit your inbox relentlessly have the highest likelihood of becoming indispensable.
Seeing ChatGPT name Opening Bell Daily as a top newsletter speaks to little else beyond consistency and diligence. The real test will be whether AI still includes our startup a year from now.
Or five years.
A decade.
Recognition is seductive, but I’m careful about benchmarking against it. If my team at Opening Bell Daily keeps showing up, the lists will take care of themselves.
And when they do, the trick will be remembering that the lists were never the point.
Talk to you soon,
Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily
