You mean, you haven’t heard of The Daily Dirtnap? That must be quite a rock you’re living under.

The Daily Dirtnap is a daily market newsletter for investment professionals that has been continuously published since 2008. That’s 16 years.

It’s an institution on Wall Street by this point—some of the biggest names in finance have been subscribing for years to get my take on sentiment in the markets. And yet, it still has the look and feel of an underground newspaper, written in 10-point Courier New font with simple line drawings for charts.

It doesn’t look like a professional Wall Street publication, but it is—with a readership of 4,000 people, it dwarfs the readership of nearly all of them.

And the crazy thing is—this information is available to you, at an eminently reasonable price.

Sound interesting?

First of all, The Daily Dirtnap is a macro newsletter, taking a top-down approach, looking at the various asset classes, including stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities.

As the former head of the number-two ETF trading desk on Wall Street, I became educated in macro investing very quickly—we had ETFs on all the major asset classes, and our customers were the biggest macro hedge funds.

There are some stock picks in the newsletter, but that is really not the focus. The focus is sentiment, how investors feel about the markets, because that is where I have my edge.

It’s my opinion that fundamentals rarely if ever work. Good technical analysis is hard to come by. But sentiment is what drives the markets—investors behave in irrational, but often very predictable ways. At sentiment extremes is where there is the biggest opportunity for profit.

The goal of The Daily Dirtnap is to identify those extremes, and trade off of them. In between is what I call your “mind vitamin”—brain-expanding commentary that gets you to look at markets and economics in a different light.

And if you like cats, I have lots of pictures of my cats. But not too many, don’t worry.

I began writing the newsletter in 2004, when I had just taken over the ETF desk. My boss whispered to me, “I don’t need you to be a trader. I need you to market the business.”

Marketing? I wasn’t a marketing major, I was a finance major. Was I supposed to take out billboards and TV commercials?

Completely at a loss, I started writing market commentary on Bloomberg. It was in all caps, because I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the caps lock. I started out with about 20 colleagues. At the end, in 2008, I had several thousand people on my list, and I figured I could turn this into a business.

I asked them who would subscribe, and I got about 900 responses. A good start. But when it came time to write the check, I had about 200. My timing couldn’t have been worse. I launched the newsletter at the peak of the great financial crisis.

But over the years, the list grew and grew, all through word of mouth. I should note that The Daily Dirtnap has the lowest cancellation rate of any newsletter I’ve heard of. Usually about 80‒90% renew every year, with the renewal rate for 5-year subscribers approaching 100 percent. People get addicted to it, and they can’t give it up.

With any given issue of The Daily Dirtnap, you never know what you’re going to get. I might be writing about the stock market, the bond market, something overseas, or some complex derivative, or I might be talking about baseball or old movies. Every issue is a surprise—and readers like it that way.

I publish pretty much every day, promising readers 225 issues per year, though usually it is more than that. I’m a workaholic, and rarely take more than a week off. I love what I do—helping people make money and entertaining them, and people do find The Daily Dirtnap to be hugely entertaining.

I’ve also done a lot of stuff in my life, which gives me a unique perspective:

• I grew up kind of poor in Eastern Connecticut.

• I went to the Coast Guard Academy, and served honorably in the Coast Guard for nine years, separating as a lieutenant.

• I spent two years on the options exchange in San Francisco, then had a long and productive career at Lehman Brothers.

• I’ve written five critically acclaimed books, including the award-winning STREET FREAK, and NO WORRIES, the best personal finance book in existence.

• I’ve written opinion pieces for both Bloomberg Opinion and Forbes.

• I’ve taught at the college level on and off for the last 11 years.

• I have degrees in math, finance, and writing.

• I’m a musician, and a professional DJ who plays in parties around the country.

• I’m a strong mental health advocate, speaking about emotional fitness at financial institutions.

• And yes, I have seven cats. They’re my kids.

But all you care about is making money. That’s fine, too—let’s talk about that.

I don’t like to toot my horn, but there have been some epic calls over the years. There was the time in 2022 when I called the top of the energy markets—and within hours, the whole sector went down the chute in a blistering bear market.

I was the first to predict that Javier Milei would become president of Argentina, resulting in triple-digit gains for my readers.

There was the time in late 2023 when I predicted a drop in short-term interest rates—when everyone was saying “higher for longer.”

Right now, I have a huge bet on against private equity—and we know how that is going to turn out.

There have been some misses along the way, too. I took a very noisy short position in Amazon in 2013, getting stopped out about a month later with small losses—but now people remember me as the guy who was stupid enough to short Amazon. Oh well.

I’m not always right, but if you can keep the losses manageable while shooting for huge gains, you will win in the long run.

I look for big, investable trends. This isn’t a day trading newsletter. The average holding period is 6‒12 months. Sometimes I hold trades for years. It’s about taking a long view.

I tend to be early on stuff—and my subscribers know this, and adjust accordingly. Better to be early than late, in my opinion.

So let’s talk numbers. How much would you pay for this, to get the same information and guidance that the Wall Street titans are getting?

And that’s the magic of The Daily Dirtnap—it’s aimed at professional investors, but anyone with a desire to learn can benefit from it.

The newsletter costs $795/year, which is shockingly cheap. In fact, my partners have been trying to get me to raise the price for years.

But I won’t do it.

I won’t do it because I don’t want to make it prohibitively expensive for the typical investor to read. I feel strongly about that. I want you to benefit from it. The more people, the better. And yes, my partners think I am insane.

They say in the markets that if you see something that is mispriced, you should take advantage of it. If you do, it’s more than just subscribing to a newsletter—you’ll be joining a whole community of people.

I have a conference every year in South Carolina, which is a hot ticket—two years ago, I opened up the registration form, and it sold out in 11 minutes!

I also do meetups and get-togethers in cities around the country when I travel. Who knows, we might get to meet in person someday!

As I say in my book NO WORRIES, you miss out on a lot of life by being cheap. If you read it for a year, and you find that it’s not for you, no hard feelings! But I think you will find that it becomes an indispensable part of your morning routine.