Hey everyone,

It’s been a minute since I wrote a post here. I wanted to provide a brief update going forward. I recently started a new role that at least for the foreseeable future I want to invest substantial time in, and a large part of that role will be quantitative and research communication. Because of that, coupled with some strong ethics about newsletters and subscriptions in general, I wanted to provide an update on the newsletter.

Many of you followed here from my first blog on Medium, where I started writing (or if you’re a really old follower, you may have read my old posts on reddit). In the beginning, I simply did this to share ideas and out of passion, and I’m happy to say that passion has stayed remarkably constant over time. My passion is to write and cheerlead ideas I find interesting. That has evolved substantially over the past year.

I’m still very loathe to call myself an influencer, mostly because the connotations of it make me uncomfortable. As I hope you’ve felt reading my posts, I am simply a curious learner and student of the markets and mathematics. If you’ve read my writings, you’ve read both insecurity and indecision — and not in a bad way! I’ve worn novelty on my sleeve; when you’re a beginner, and especially starting out, people tend to be much more forgiving of mistakes and weight passion and earnest inquiry more heavily.

But then you get a lot of followers and that message get lost in translation. As I’ve grown in popularity in this niche, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with “influencing” others, and writing without the benefit of an editor and gratuitous fact-checking. While I proudly read some of my old posts, I do indeed cringe at others. I’m sure in a few years I’ll look back at most of them with a mix of nostalgia and horror. Or to keep it short - I want to focus on quality, well-cited content, with the same bent as before. Thankfully, in my position joining Moody’s Analytics, I have access to substantially more resources and an intelligent, experienced team to help ensure writing quality.

To keep it short — for now, I have paused billing subscriptions. I am going to write 1-2 more premium-first (1-2 days lead time over all others) posts over the next month, or figure out some other way to provide content before the billing cycle is over. As a reminder, the core mandate of this blog — the only reason I agreed to a subscription fee in the first place — was to donate money to charity. I’m proud to say we, together, succeeded:

75% of the money has or will be donated directly to charities. I’ve been posting the monthly donations, but I will compile them into either a thread I’ll later link in the comments (I need to do some math on the remainder) or another post on the blog.

The remaining 25% I reserved for potential taxes, and if it turns out to be untaxed, I am going to use it either for some social good public project or donate it to charity as well.

Considering the subscription aspect of the blog began in April, I’ve been donating and keeping receipts of the monthly revenue. I’ve been amortizing annual subscriptions for donations, and will contact all annual subscription holders to either provide a refund or ask if they are fine with the current charitable setup over the next few days.

I want to clarify however — I still intend to write. My core ethos is I believe information should be free to all, and this was the ethos that led me way back when to release the NOPE paper and thesis publicly (surprise to people who hate me — I was talking about it on Twitter long before I was particularly notable, and refused to make a website for it until 6 months later. Funny enough, Sean actually made the website and then offered partnership, which I accepted later on.). I will be writing both here when I have cool ideas to share, and hope you get as excited as me reading them. My latest career journey has taken me into quant credit, so expect to hear a lot more about that in the near future.

Thanks for listening as always.

Lily

Onto other things.

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