The Story of the Best Financial Newsletter in the World
Keeping my job at Business Insider would have been the easy choice, but it was time to build something new.
When Business Insider offered me a job to write a markets newsletter in 2021, I was wrapping up graduate school in California.
I had no formal training in finance, economics, or stocks, but I committed to the role and moved to New York City.
The editorial product at the time — called “10 Things Before the Opening Bell” — had existed for several years as a morning headline roundup. From what I’ve gathered, it was something a staff reporter would spin up when they had a spare moment in their day, but it was not a priority.
So I was brought on to revamp it full-time.
Odd to say it now, but a few years ago newsletters were not seen as a big thing, or even the next big thing.
These days you can build a whole company around one. When I first got to Business Insider, the medium was still viewed as a relatively niche interest. For a young writer with gumption, that meant opportunity.
Our three-person newsletter team operated like a startup within the newsroom. We were scrappy and resourceful and willing to experiment.
Early on, the other parts of the business didn’t pay much attention to us, which is what gave us the latitude to do interesting work.
My editor, who was also my boss, gave me three simple writing guidelines that I still carry today:
Write like you’re telling a story to a friend
Write in your own voice
Use as little jargon as possible
These rules might seem obvious, yet among the intelligentsia of media, Wall Street, and academics, they are not often followed. Newsletters, mostly read on mobile phones, expose bad and uninformed writing because the format leaves little room for wordiness or pretense.
With the writing rulebook established, we started publishing this newsletter five days a week with the aim of promoting stories from across the newsroom. Summarizing and repackaging other reporters’ coverage became my crash-course for markets and finance.
It was fun, and I was a quick study.
Within a few months I’d started tying in my own reporting into the newsletter — about the stock market, Federal Reserve, policy, options trading. The works.
By the end of my first year the product had changed dramatically. What started as a list of headlines evolved into an original, high-cadence column. By 18 months, our newsletter audience had ballooned to more than 2.4 million. I’d become increasingly comfortable splicing my personality into the writing. It was a hit.
More than once I was told that it was the best financial newsletter in media.
Just as momentum was picking up, though, a faceless someone decided to shake things up.
One afternoon, I got a call from one of the high-up editors — someone who had never phoned me before. I thought I was about to get fired. Given the volatility of media, that actually would have surprised me less than the news I received instead:
The business side has decided to sunset your newsletter.
“Sunset” meaning discontinue — my most memorable encounter with the type of corporate-speak bosses like to use to try and lessen the blow of bad news.
When I asked who made the final call, the editor reiterated that it was “the business side.” It did not feel good to hear that there was apparently no one in particular behind a decision that dramatically changed the course of my career.
As it turns out, Business Insider was “sunsetting” all three of its newsletters — markets, tech and banking — in order to consolidate its resources and audience into a single product that would cover all three verticals simultaneously.
Now, I don’t have a background in marketing. But I understand enough to know that if you try to make something for everyone, you end up with something for no one.
To be clear, I’m glad I wasn’t fired on that phone call. I did a lot more work I’m proud of after that conversation. Still, I never could shake the feeling that my time at BI suddenly had an expiration date.
It also happened that I’d seen many colleagues of mine quit or get canned around the same time.
In one sense I have “the business side” to thank for pushing me to explore new opportunities. You might think that sounds pretty vanilla. But for me that was a radical notion — I worked with so much enthusiasm for that publication that I sincerely thought I’d be a lifer there.
Corporations can change on a dime, and they are under no obligation to consult their employees on strategy. That’s one takeaway from working in mainstream media.
All this, too, accelerated my suspicions about mainstream media. The industry at large seemed to be circling the drain. It’s been apparent for several years now. That is no longer an original thing to say, but that doesn’t mean it’s false.
Very few of my friends rely on national legacy outlets for information. Most prefer a handful of industry-specific newsletters, blogs, and podcasts — many of which have robust businesses built on top of them.
My sense is media will continue to fracture into smaller, more specialized publications.
In any case, it would have been easy for me to stay at BI. I earned a good living with good benefits. I liked the people I worked with. Climbing the newsroom hierarchy seemed attainable. What’s more, several reporter friends of mine at BI advised against my exit.
Independent journalists, one guy told me, are the ones who wish they had the jobs we have now.
Another colleague warned that the world isn’t so kind to reporters without a name-brand newsroom.
Event invites will dry up.
Sources won’t answer your calls anymore.
Meanwhile, almost everyone brought up that giving up a steady paycheck while paying rent in New York City is financial suicide.
Something about me: I believe doing hard things is a better North Star than cautionary wisdom. Well-intentioned advice is my favorite motivation.
So, I quit my job. It was not easy and not without risk. But I knew I had work to do outside of that newsroom.
Soon after, I co-founded an independent financial news outlet, Opening Bell Daily, with my partner Anthony Pompliano.
We wasted no time. The first edition of the new newsletter hit inboxes five days after I walked out of BI.
This afternoon I’ll be writing the 74th.
After writing something close to 1,000 editions of BI’s newsletter, I know what I’m doing with this one. Running the business has its own learning curve, but the editorial content is exactly in my wheelhouse.
Producing an insightful and concise newsletter that makes readers smarter is my bread and butter.
Just like I heard in my previous role, readers tell me today that this is the best financial newsletter in the industry. I am working extremely hard to make sure they are right.
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