MONEY STUFF
“Wall Street's inner workings, explained daily by the only writer who makes securities law funny.”
WEEKDAYS · FREE · ONE SPONSOR SLOT
Subscribe to Money Stuff if you want to actually understand the machinery behind the day's finance news, taught by someone who built that machinery and thinks it's hilarious. Skip it if you only have five minutes; this is the longest, densest read in your inbox, and that's the point.
| Price | Free by email |
|---|---|
| Paid tier | None; the same column also runs on Bloomberg.com with a subscription |
| Cadence | Weekdays (measured: four consecutive essay days, plus a short Friday podcast note) |
| Arrives | Just after 11 am Pacific in every sampled issue (10:47 to 11:24 am) |
| Read time | About 18 minutes per essay issue (measured 3,861 to 4,817 words) |
| Structure | 3 to 5 titled essays plus the "Things happen" link roundup, every issue |
| Links | 72 to 79 per essay issue |
| Publisher | Bloomberg (Bloomberg Opinion) |
| Founded | 2013, when Levine joined Bloomberg Opinion |
| Readership | About 300,000 subscribers as reported in 2024; a 2025 profile put readers at 500,000 |
| Ad model | One "Presented by" sponsor slot up top plus a small programmatic unit; the essays themselves are never interrupted |
Who should read Money Stuff?
Money Stuff is the closest thing finance has to a shared daily text: roughly 300,000 subscribers, a readership estimated at half a million, and a decade of being the first thing forwarded around trading desks when something weird happens in markets.
This is the industry's water cooler. When something strange happens in markets, the question on the desk is what Levine will say about it tomorrow.
No jargon is assumed; every mechanism is built from scratch in plain English, and the jokes carry you through the dense parts. This is the best free finance education on the internet.
Four thousand words a day is the product, not a flaw. If you want finance in headline form, read Morning Brew and let Levine go.
What you actually get, in order
Each issue is a set of self-contained essays on whatever was most interesting in finance yesterday, then a link roundup. Our sampled section titles ran from "SPVs" and "OpenAI margin loan" to "Hedgehog Hedge Fund" and "Dentists!"
Why it's one of the best in its category
The story so far
Matt Levine took the scenic route to becoming finance's favorite writer: a classics degree at Harvard, Yale Law School, mergers and acquisitions at Wachtell Lipton, then four years structuring equity derivatives at Goldman Sachs. He started blogging at Dealbreaker in 2011 and joined Bloomberg Opinion in 2013, where the column became Money Stuff.
The newsletter version became Bloomberg's flagship: the rare daily where the length is the draw, delivered free by email while nearly everything else at Bloomberg sits behind one of media's most expensive paywalls. Reported subscriber counts have climbed from 150,000 in 2021 to about 300,000 in 2024, with a 2025 Harvard Magazine profile putting readers at half a million.
Since 2022 there's also the Money Stuff podcast, co-hosted with Bloomberg's Katie Greifeld, which is what the short Friday editions in our sample point to. The email remains the main event: one writer, every weekday, still free.