Substack is So Interesting

The first time I heard about the engineered recession in Q1 and Q2 2025 was on a paid substack.

"Controlled sell off in tech" was what I heard, and "checkmate the Fed" (See footnote). Moving down while surpressing vol - we'll buy in summer, says the desks.

Interestingly, I just found another article on another person's substack on this topic, although it's not as timely: https://kyla.substack.com/p/an-orchestrated-recession-trumps

Fake reasons to sell

The timing of some of the big moves were so conveniently timed with certain events or delayed news.

For example, a very delayed news about a new LLM model to dump Nasdaq 100 1000 points or almost 5% on the Sunday night of 1/26/2025. What a joke it is to use it as an excuse to dump the semis.

I like Substack, it's good compared to Medium, which is absolutely trash in every aspect. I tried to log in to view the half 1/2 of the first page of any articles, and I allowed cross site cookies, and it still won't let me.

To read Medium articles despite the pain, you should try the Redirector browser extension to rewrite the URL to Freedium (or use my open source URL Regex Replace extension on GitHub - also published on Chrome Web Store, but might be outdated).

Substack product designer is very smart - I can see that they really want it to become a social reading platform. You can see what anyone is subscribed to, and the likes, comments etc. It's almost like Twitter, but a with much cleaner interface.

I do not publish on Substack, but I can imagine it's become really popular among web publishers who just want to write (without the pain to make a site like this one). What were the other popular choices? Blogpost? Wordpress? M*dium? WIX? I visit a lot of personal sites and they won't look the same, unlike some of the managed publishing platforms.

Some observations

• Price range: from full open access, to $8 (lowest monthly sub I've seen, like slowboring.com) to serveral hundreds per month.
• Within trading substacks, the lowest paying one I've seen is the moontower's $16/mo, most are in range of 30-40, a more expensive one I remember is volvibe's, whose data studies are priced at$125/mo
• Lots of people are free subs, and many are paying readers - the one I'm paying for has 1k> readers paying 35/mo

The bad

• When you sub to a substack, you'll be asked to rate, comment, recommend or something - I need to click the Maybe Later button 3 times to get back to the reading.
• Constant reminder and popups to sub is why I hated it for a long time. I still do.

The good

• Content discovery - for example, using the Reads page, I jumped from Vixology (posts VIX mix, a kinda naive but highly interesting and informative proprietary vol gauge daily) to kyla's substack (she wrote books) linked above, to https://www.sherryning.com (custom domain, but still on substack, which at a glance is about completely different domains - art? life? the language is so complex that I used a translator to read some passages. This post drew my attention)
• Allowing authors to set how much they want to charge so that we have higher quality stuff to read
• You can sort posts by popularity, that's how I found the post linked in the bullet above
• Standard REST API, no boring Cloudflare CAPTCHA / Turnstile. Yes I RE'ed the API to scrape some posts and chat history.

Besides the posts linked above, I'll share some of the interesting reads I found this week on Substack:

• https://www.slowboring.com/p/men-and-women-are-different (I still remember the height gap 2 days after reading it)
• I linked nopeitslily's medium / substack in my post on the NOPE Dashboard earlier, but I read her post on Greeks again this week in an attempt to build a more intuitive model on higher order greeks in my head to predict the direction of dealer rehedging Here's the link: https://nopeitslily.substack.com/p/an-intuitive-understanding-of-the
  On reading this again after a few months, I finally understand what she meant by 'for some people, vol is the only thing that matters'
• I read some interesting stuff that I do not yet understand and is probably not of interest of the typical reader of this site, which I assume, is on the more tech savvy side but not into studying market mechanisms, so I won't link them here. Other types of readers are cyber stalkers and bots? 🤔
• A few weeks ago I read a substack that's dedicated to studying the topic of 'retiring in Bali', which is very interesting (I probably used the word too much - like vol, words are also clustered)
• https://kevincoldiron.substack.com/p/the-s-and-p-500-carry-trade this is a good one to read along side my [Aug 5, 2024](/tags/20240805) series. The diagrams showing relative size of different instruments in the SPX complex is very interesting :)
  I went back to the ES chart after Powell started speaking the FOMC statement was sent out on 12/18/2024 and did some rough calculations on the notional transacted and it was absolutely insane. The notional traded every minute was like $3 trillion. My rough calculation was using anchored VWAP from 2 pm to determine the avg price (because it was just moving too fast), then multiply by volume in a minute window of my choice and 50.

Footnote:

• Checkmate the Fed: Fed is believed to continue to hold rate cuts and err on the side of caution, so someone may want to create a mini recession to force them to cut the rate.
  This is not my idea, but I like the theory and I think this is how it's gonna play out, and Fed Watch is implying increased possibility of more cuts this year. See also kyla's post linked above.