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matt_levine157 karma

Oh man. I don't have a great answer here because it is hard to measure success but here are two stories, both of which I have probably told in some form:

  1. As a journalist, my favorite bad pitch is Dentacoin, the cryptocurrency for dentists. What is bad about this is (1) cryptocurrency for dentists and (2) they have sent me daily emails about it for months. Each email is about a new dental practice adopting it or something (???), so I assume they are having some kind of success.
  2. As a banker, I kept a folder of Bad Pitchbook Pages. When I left, out of misplaced scrupulousness, I handed it off to someone else on my desk rather than sneaking it out with me. One of my favorites was a page listing clients we had previously worked with on some sort of transaction. But the transaction was confidential - not like a bond offering but something that companies don't disclose (I forget what, maybe a tax thing or something). And so the list was an *accurate*, real list of like 60 companies names, *all of them blacked out*. Just 60 black bars on a page with like "Our Satisfied Clients" at the top.

matt_levine147 karma

I dunno that sounds like a fine question, though thinking about my time in banking I am not sure I could have answered it. Like in what I did - a capital-markets-and-derivatives desk in the investment banking group at a giant bank - a lot of my day-to-day work was pretty project-oriented. You'd be working to get a trade done, which meant opening proprietary pricing software to price the trade, and opening Excel to make some charts and financial analyses for the client to understand how the trade worked, and then opening Word to mark up an offering memo or an ISDA confirm, and then sending emails to lawyers to ask about those documents, and then making a new spreadsheet and sending it to credit to get credit approval, and then writing a committee memo in Word, and a lot of emails along the way.

And another big part of my work was writing and reviewing pitchbooks (in Word, oddly; GS does pitchbooks in Word and I have basically no idea how to use PowerPoint), and then getting on planes to visit companies and be like "the convert market is hot, you could do a bond at 1s up 30, let's do it," and having them nod politely, and then getting back on the plane.

matt_levine98 karma

  1. That is a hard question having to do with audience appeal and my own interests and skills evolving, but one part of the answer is that in the few years after the financial crisis there were a lot of really detailed disclosures--often from court documents--about derivatives deals gone wrong. Since the statute of limitations ran on a lot of this stuff, there are fewer of those things. It is hard to write in detail about derivatives structures when, as is often the case, the actual deal terms are not public.
  2. I dunno, do you have any ideas? I do think that what I do is fun for me and people seem to like it, and there are not super obvious things that I would be better at. One answer is I suppose "structure weird deals for hedge funds"; like, I admire the people who came up with the Codere/etc. trades and it might be fun to be one of them. (Lucrative too.)

matt_levine85 karma

Super boring: I have an RSS feed of many (mostly obvious) sources, I spend a lot of time on Twitter, I skim the web pages of major financial publications, and people email me stuff. Probably the majority of things I write about, especially at the top of the newsletter, are just things that have been in Bloomberg News or the WSJ or FT or Times or wherever. A significant minority are SEC enforcement actions, etc., which tend to come in through my RSS. The rest is sometimes from RSS but probably mostly from tips.

matt_levine73 karma

I made the leap by making the leap. I had no particular background or reason to think I'd be good at blogging about finance on the internet, but I didn't really want to be a banker anymore and I thought it'd be fun, so I did it. It was helpful that I had saved up, not only enough money to subsidize working at Dealbreaker for a while, but also a certain amount of, like, prestige. Like if I went and screwed around at Dealbreaker for six months and it was a disaster, I'd still have Harvard/Yale/Wachtell/Goldman on my resume and I could probably bounce back somehow.

I ... look there are moments when I wished I could afford more real estate, but I gotta tell you it almost never bugs me not to work in finance. So far the tradeoffs have been, not just worth it, but comically, obviously worth it.

(But that said I've gotten very lucky in what I do now and if I were not, like, writing this newsletter for Bloomberg I might have a different perspective.)