FT Alphaville
We're the FT's finance blog. If it's dumb, delightful or just weird and involves money we're probably interested in it.
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What they write about
The Financial Times' markets blog, covering whatever is dumb, delightful or strange about money. Recurring subjects include bond yields and monetary policy, artificial-intelligence valuations and capital spending, hedge funds and private markets, and accounting oddities, wrapped in a running daily miscellany.
- markets
- bonds
- artificial intelligence
- hedge funds
- private markets
- financial humour
Recent examples: Attention is all you need · AI is Poochie
Written from FT Alphaville’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
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #32 today · #31 a week ago · #36 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 42 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 7%
- Best rank seen
- #30
- Rank, 7 days
- −1 place
- Rank, 30 days
- +4 places
- Followers added
- +6.3K
- Posts
- 4
- Reactions per post
- 90
- Reactions tracked
- 1.6K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Oct 19, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 18 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: This is nuts. When's the crash? — 305 reactions on Jul 24, 2026.
Recent posts
- Attention is all you need
The bull market may be faltering, but it’s boom time in the marketplace for bull. Here’s Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar : “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. The logic, he said, is: “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I’m showing you my chips are all in.” The counterargument is: C’mon, no they’re not. Palantir (which does net income of $684,290 per employee) can’t be assumed to employ idiots. It’s weird for an executive to…
- AI is Poochie
You’re Alphaville readers. We won’t patronise you by explaining Simpsons references, such as the one in the headline, which refers to when Homer ruined the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon by adding a hipster dog called Poochie: Homer: One, Poochie needs to be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine. Two, whenever Poochie’s not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking “Where’s Poochie”? Three... It’s where we are now. AI has entered its “louder, angrier, and with access to a time machine” phase. Here’s a small cross-section of what AI’s done for us this week: SoftBank…
- Middle-aged spreads
Nearly everything that happens in financial markets can be explained by some combination of regulatory arbitrage, tax avoidance, and fashion. Stuart Wheeler dodged the second by applying the first and chanced on the third. In 1974, Wheeler was looking to give UK punters a way to speculate on gold without buying physical bullion, which was subject to exchange controls at the time. The mechanism he used, a spread bet, wasn’t all that novel. Chicago bookmakers were taking cash-settled wagers on sporting margins in the 1940s, while the bucket-shop brokers of the late 19th and early 20th century…
- ‘Ponzi-like schemes’
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Turkey’s stock market crisis was how long it took to arrive. Everyone saw it coming. Market gains over the past couple of years were so obviously ridiculous that shenanigans were the only rational explanation: Turkish authorities last week filed a bunch of criminal complaints over alleged share price manipulation, Justice Minister Akin Gurlek having belatedly spotted potentially “ Ponzi-like schemes ” afoot. Executives including Emre Tezmen, chair of investment brokerage Tera Yatırım, were arrested . Funds that were holding an estimated $17bn for…
- Frites don’t fail me now
FT, January 29 2026 - “ Das glut: why Germans are handing out free potatoes ”. Thanks to the right combination of rain and sunshine through the summer, farmers across Germany experienced a bumper harvest. According to the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the national yield totalled 13.4 million tonnes — more than two million tonnes above the average, and the highest harvest in 25 years. The glut far exceeded the sector’s processing capacity, leaving the potatoes piling up in storage and farmers desperate to unload the spuds as prices collapsed. [… T]he current predicament was “the…
- Nothing is certain except death and robotaxis
It’s exhausting, honestly, to be told so often that a higher intelligence will want us dead. As well as being quite rude, death threats don’t match our conventional understanding of intelligence. Book-smarts and murder have a negative correlation . Intellectuals don’t often talk about their perceived inferiors as a pestilence (though, undoubtedly, there are some in the fields of science and technology who do). You’ll already know why we’re talking apocalypse again. He’s been all over the news : Pseudo-sentient computers might eradicate humanity, but why? There’s no shortage of scenarios…
- Is Stephen Miran... right?
Why are bond yield climbing? This is evidently an easy question to answer, because we have a lot of them. Just pick whatever answer best fits your priors. Some say inflation fears are the main culprit . Others say rate fears — either that rates are too low to contain inflation, or going to go higher to contain inflation. Then there are debt fears , because investors have only now discovered that governments are borrowing a lot. Perhaps the torrential supply of AI-financing bonds is also having an effect? The Fed’s eroding credibility is hurting bonds, some say. A higher term premium, the…
- To err is humanoid
The period when robots moved like people doing the robot took decades to arrive, was brief, and is already over. Technologists accelerated past anything anticipated by interpretive dance. Doing the robot, once appreciated as science fiction, has quickly become a historical reenactment. You’re reading Alphaville’s weekly newsletter. Register on the FT website for daily blog access and sign up for the email below. It’s all free. We’d known already that machines had surpassed our human capacity for physical comedy. What this week’s World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing added were new levels of…
- The silicon god delusion
There was a time when a CEO talking about the singularity would bring the priest and the doctor running over the fields. It feels a very long time ago. Here's some of a letter sent this week by the leaders of Stripe to its locked-in shareholders. It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis. The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of…
- Big deal? Big deal
Journalists like stories, and the stories they like most of all are their own. Anyone who’s been stuck making small talk with a reporter in a pub or at a party will know how ready we are to slip into autobiography. Our favourite subject is us. Among the most susceptible to self-mythology are the merger-and-acquisition reporters. It’s a weird job, to be fair. Deal reporters have to triangulate facts by talking all day to millionaires about transaction plans that can deliver only one person in the conversation a new yacht. Seeking to rationalise how they spend their lives, deal reporters might…
- AI people need people
Theme Park ( 1994 ) had a bug. One of the management simulation game’s central mechanics was that, if you underpaid park staff or put too few on litter collection, they’d walk off the job and form a picket line at the entrance. However, if the player picked up a protester and dropped them back inside the park’s perimeter fence, they would immediately forget their grievance and return to work. This was back in the days when software came in a shrink-wrapped box, long before online patches. The striking-worker bug wasn’t in the power of the game’s co-creator, Demis Hassabis, to fix. All he…
- Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness might sound like a show to miss at the Edinburgh Fringe, but what it’s staging is much more entertaining. By now you probably know the story, but it bears repeating. Having gone down with the ship at FTX in 2022, Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI and, after two years, was very publicly fired. The then-22-year-old used his moment and his network to raise some external capital; write a quacky manifesto ; take on a heap of leverage to make single-theme bets on mostly publicly listed stocks that would sit on top of a stake in Anthropic; and ride this Jenga…
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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: FT Alphaville. 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: Oct 21, 2026.