Capital Mischief
Capital Mischief: what I learned briefing six presidents, applied to your portfolio. The market-moving events. Before the smart money sees them.
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What they write about
Long-form essays connecting geopolitics and commodity prices to everyday costs, written by a former presidential briefer. Recurring subjects include diesel and oil markets, inflation as households experience it, energy infrastructure and conflict, and a reader advice column. Also covers the author's fiction writing.
- geopolitics
- oil
- diesel
- inflation
- essays
- advice column
Recent examples: I BET AGAINST THE BLUE WAVE AT 85%. THE MAN WHO WROTE BURN IT DOWN SAW IT COMING. · TUCKER CARLSON SAYS TRUMP COULD DECIDE ON A NUCLEAR STRIKE ON IRAN BY NOVEMBER 7. THE POLLS OPEN TOMORROW.
Written from Capital Mischief’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
22K on Sep 10, 2026 → 22K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #101 today · #103 a week ago · #107 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 62 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 20%
- Best rank seen
- #97
- Rank, 7 days
- +2 places
- Rank, 30 days
- +6 places
- Followers added
- +1.1K
- Posts
- 19
- Reactions per post
- 158
- Reactions tracked
- 8.7K
- Tickers covered
- 1
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 28, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 55 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: Trump's Greenland "Infinite Life Agreement" Arrived Six Days Before Xi. That's the Point. — 300 reactions on Sep 19, 2026.
Recent posts
- I BET AGAINST THE BLUE WAVE AT 85%. THE MAN WHO WROTE BURN IT DOWN SAW IT COMING.
On Friday I gave Republicans an 85% chance of keeping the Senate. This morning Democrats hold 54 seats . Republicans hold 44. Two races are still counting, and Mississippi, a state I counted as safe and never bothered to mention, is being decided by fewer than 50 votes out of 945,000 . Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, whose seat I filed under safe and never mentioned. This morning it is being decided by fewer votes than there are seats on a school bus. I wrote on Friday that everyone would say I'm nuts, and that some of them would turn out to be right. It was all of them: the models, the markets and…
- TUCKER CARLSON SAYS TRUMP COULD DECIDE ON A NUCLEAR STRIKE ON IRAN BY NOVEMBER 7. THE POLLS OPEN TOMORROW.
President Trump in the Situation Room on June 21, 2025, the night the B-2s he sent from Missouri hit Fordow. Wednesday is the earliest date anyone has leaked for the next one, and the room looks the same with the lights on. INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT: 02 NOV 2026 07:30 EST // DAY 248 OF THE WAR // MISCHIEF CLEARANCE REQUIRED // ⬛⬛⬛ EYES ONLY. TOP SECRET. ⬛⬛⬛ THE BOARD AT 07:30 EST POLLS OPEN IN: 22 hours and change, Eastern time. DAYS SINCE THE LAST AMERICAN STRIKE ON IRAN: 62, counting from September 1, the date MS NOW uses. The Air Force hit a launcher on Qeshm Island on Thursday night after…
- Dear Charlie #54: A Reader Came In Under the Margin of Error, and a Mother Priced the Smoking Bet by the Customer
- The Last Race in the Galápagos Still Hasn't Been Called: Nine Voters, Three Factions, One Pearl-Handled Revolver
The Mischief Library: Refreshing an Election Map From the Galápagos Is Like Checking Your Portfolio From Inside a Shark Cage Saturday: The Mischief Library. I read 50+ books a year so you don't have to. Not airport fiction about Navy SEALs with relationship issues. Real books. Every Saturday I hand you three books and tell you why they matter. Some weeks it's war. Some weeks it's classical music. Some weeks it's the habits that build wealth. This week it's two books and a movie, because I'm on vacation and the third book is a Netflix password. I promised Cristina no posts this week. This is…
- EVERYONE HAS COUNTED THE SEATS. NOBODY HAS COUNTED THE VOTES.
Fridays belong to Fortunate Fishes, my free podcast, in which very rich people explain how they got that way and I nod as though I already knew. This week there is no podcast. I am in the Galápagos, where the animals have had the protection of the law since 1959 and act like it, which is more than can be said for anyone running for Congress. I promised Cristina no posts this week. A marriage, like a treaty, is a document both parties reserve the right to reinterpret. You started the reinterpretation. The messages came all week, at a volume the satellite dish was not built for, and they asked…
- A SHARK IGNORED ME, A SEA LION IGNORED ME, AND I HAVE NEVER FELT SO RESPECTED
A Galápagos sea lion inspects two snorkelers and finds them unremarkable. It is the closest thing the islands have to a customs officer. I promised Cristina there would be no posts this week. Officially, this is a postcard. It went to law school. Saturday's post warned you that if anything arrived from the Galápagos, you should blame Elon Musk . He put a satellite over the one place on earth Cristina thought was safe. The dish on the Hermes works beautifully. Blame accepted. The Hermes at dusk on Monday, with the lights coming on. Somewhere up top is the satellite dish that just breached my…
- I BOUGHT TWO CRUSHED AI STOCKS WHILE WALL STREET PANICKED. ONE IS DOWN 52%. YOU HAVE UNTIL WEDNESDAY.
No geopolitics this Monday. The midterms update comes Wednesday, as promised. Geopolitics will keep. It always does. That is the whole problem with it. I wrote this on Saturday, on a plane to Ecuador, at 35,000 feet, which is the last place on earth a man can read a Meta bond prospectus without his wife asking what he is doing. I finished it Sunday afternoon. My vacation officially began Sunday at 6 p.m., Cristina time. Cristina time is enforced more strictly than anything at the Federal Reserve, and the Fed at least lets people dissent. Cristina issues verdicts. This is an R360 trip. Nearly…
- Dear Charlie #53: Her Grandmother Wrote the Exit Plan, and a Reader Caught My Cold Box Making Diesel
- The Cloud Is Concrete, the Bonds Run to 2049, and Your Annuity Is in There Somewhere
The Mischief Library: Calling a Concrete Building Financed to 2049 "The Cloud" Is Like Calling Your Mortgage a Sleepover Saturday: The Mischief Library. I read 50+ books a year so you don't have to. Not airport fiction about Navy SEALs with relationship issues. Real books. Every Saturday I hand you three books and tell you why they matter. Some weeks it's war. Some weeks it's classical music. Some weeks it's the habits that build wealth. This week it's the cloud. It turns out the cloud is made of concrete. In Richland Parish, Louisiana, Meta is pouring a data center that will draw 4,500…
- Britnie Faith Turner: How a Missionary With $18 in the Bank Got Rich on Purpose, Bought a Private Island and Rescued 9,000 Children
Eighteen Dollars, One Tent and an Argument With God Britnie Turner was 17, on a mission trip in Costa Rica, when the last girl in the prayer line would not tell her name. Britnie asked again. Nothing. So she asked the translator what was going on. The girl could not speak. Her own father had sexually abused her, and the words had stopped. In that community, Britnie learned, nobody considered this unusual. That night she went back to her tent, got on her knees, and told God she did not care what it looked like. She wanted to be the one who came back and made this not a thing. She had $18 in…
- I Called These Three. Up 33%, 37%, 71%. And Why I’m not selling.
From left, Susie Wiles, Darren Woods, Donald Trump and Maryann Mannen at the January 9 White House meeting. A handshake is easier to arrange than an investment framework. In Maracaibo on Saturday, Delcy Rodríguez announced that Venezuela expects nearly $76 billion of oil and gas investment over five years . Her government says 61 agreements are signed and another 44 are being negotiated . The hotel is taking reservations again. Nobody has inspected the wiring. You remember Darren Woods and "uninvestable" in the East Room . Chevron has since signed expanded Venezuelan agreements ; Exxon was…
- I ASKED FOR 100 READERS. 341 SHOWED UP, LEFT 14,649 NOTES, AND SEVEN OF THEM JUST WON $10,000.
Three Hundred Forty-One Strangers Walk Into a Manuscript On September 5th I offered to pay one reader $3,000 to tell me what is wrong with my novel . I asked for 100 readers. I assumed I would spend September begging relatives. 341 of you showed up. You read a 146,000-word thriller that no bookstore has ever seen, on a website I built for the purpose, in the same 30 days you were supposed to be holding down jobs, raising children and, in at least one case I suspect, running a small country. Between September 14 and October 14 you left 14,649 comments in the margins. That is about 488 a day…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Capital Mischief. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Nov 10, 2026.