Buy the Dip is back (again)

The biggest comeback since Istanbul '05*

Hello, it’s been a while.

So long, in fact, that many of you may have forgotten that a few years ago you signed up to my newsletter Buy The Dip. I put it on ice after I had another kid and started work on a book, in addition to then being the US markets editor at the FT. In my few hours of spare time I simply had to prioritise sustenance, sleep and my children vaguely remembering my face.

I’m now the editor of FT Alphaville (more on that later), had another kid (bringing the total up to three, all of which seem to know who I am!) and I’m working on another book (this time about the history of the bond market). So this felt like the right time to finally resurrect BTD, on the principle that, like having children, it’s never a good time to do it.

Except as some of you will have noticed, the email address says BTFD and it’s hosted by Substack, rather than TinyLetter. It turns out that old trusty TinyLetter is being killed. So I had to migrate everyone over here, and call it BTFD, because Buy The Dip was taken and BTD was apparently too short for Substack. Given that Alphaville is the only place at the FT where we can swear, the acronym of the full canonical wording works, but hopefully it won’t be caught by overzealous spam filters.

At this point I should say that I’m very very sorry for mass-migrating you all over here. There are too many to check with you all manually if it was ok. But obviously feel free to instantly unsubscribe with subzero hurt feelings. Really. Quite a few of you subscribed after the last BTD went out back in 2018, so you don’t even know what you haven’t been missing. Others may just already be facing newsletter overload. I get it, truly.

For those of you who stick around, hello again! I’ll use this newsletter for my own personal half-baked musings about finance, to distribute all the fully-baked, fantastic stuff we publish on Alphaville, and (eventually) to bang on about my new book, when it’s finally finished. I can’t promise this newsletter will be regular, but I’ll try.

Re Alphaville?

A lot of you will already be familiar with Alphaville, the FT’s finance blog. To the rest of you, here is our About page. The tl;dr is that we’re 1) irredeemably nerdy, 2) irredeemably snarky, and 3) completely free.

The FT hides it well (understandably, because paying subscribers are the FT’s lifeblood and also help keep all the lil Wigglesworths fed and clothed), but all you need to read Alphaville is to register with an email. Any email really. If you had you would have seen some of these bangers in 2023:

– Everything you don’t actually need to know about the economics of Succession.

– Fact-checking some dull bits of Elon Musk’s biography.

– PFOF and its discontents.

– Icahn seen clearly now the gains have gone.

– A comprehensive taxonomy of central bank logos, with jokes

– A quant winter’s tale.

– The price problem with Pret.

– A reality check on those Hamas insider trading claims.

– Private debt is out of control.

– The detailed, subjective ranking of research note graphic design you’ve always wanted.

– China’s Japanification.

– Treasury clearing 101.

– Meet the pizza-loving diplomat behind Antigua News’s big Credit Suisse scoop.

– The risky business that put IPO disaster CAB Payments on the map.

– Across the multimanagerverse.

– small caged mammal

This isn’t a comprehensive best-of-2023 list, just a selection that hopefully shows a little of the breadth and depth of what Alphaville produces. I’ve been a fan of the blog since before I joined the FT, and can honestly say I have the funnest job in financial journalism. We even have a swag shop and do a weekly charts quiz (plus a semi-annual London pub quiz, more on that anon).

Anyway, I’ll end it here and gird myself for the deluge of soul-crushing unsubscribes. Can you believe I managed to get to the end of this without a single plug of my book TRILLIONS?

Oops.

*This is a Liverpool FC reference, sorry.