Yes, I give a fig... thoughts on markets from Michael Green
Thoughts on financial markets and economics from the founder of Tier1 Alpha Asset Management -- the passive-aware asset manager
Read Yes, I give a fig... thoughts on markets from Michael Green →
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What they write about
Market structure and economics from a fund manager whose work centres on passive investing flows. Recurring subjects include index fund demand and price insensitivity, Treasury debt management and policy proposals, consumer sentiment and the labour market, and Japanese interest rates.
- market structure
- passive investing
- macro
- treasury policy
- japan
- consumer sentiment
Recent examples: Be My Guest -- The Machine Responds · A Top Tier Update
Written from Yes, I give a fig... thoughts on markets from Michael Green’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)
59K on Sep 10, 2026 → 59K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #38 today · #37 a week ago · #43 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 8%
- Best rank seen
- #34
- Rank, 7 days
- −1 place
- Rank, 30 days
- +5 places
- Followers added
- +924
- Posts
- 4
- Reactions per post
- 168
- Reactions tracked
- 3.0K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 16, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 18 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: It’s Time to Complicate — 284 reactions on Aug 9, 2026.
Recent posts
- Be My Guest -- The Machine Responds
Below is an essay that I have debated publishing. I fed my recent Quiet Turning series into ChatGPT in private (incognito) mode at highest reasoning levels and set it free on my writings. I wanted to understand what I may have missed. After reading the essay, I spent much time pondering it. I hope you do the same. The essay itself demanded a preface, assessing the odds we face. The Machine is responsible for this as well with emphasis added by myself where appropriate. I also happen to roughly agree with the cited probabilities, even as I acknowledge they are qualitative and subject to human…
- A Top Tier Update
This week was going to be a further exploration of the impact of AI on our society, but (preview) I simply didn’t have it in me to publish a largely somber observation written ENTIRELY by AI in a week that I want to express gratitude to the (largely) human contributions that are bringing Tier1 to launch. A consideration of the “non-human” contributions flows naturally. The objective at Tier1 is to build the next great investment management firm. We are not playing for pennies and our GP investors share that aspiration. Thank you to them for the vote of confidence and dollars that gives us the…
- Don’t Zig When You Can Zweig
“But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.” — Celeborn, The Fellowship of the Rings In a recent column , Jason Zweig examined the expanding collection of unusual exchange-traded funds. Among the proposals are funds linked to NHL team statistics, including leveraged versions. His advice is sensible: understand whether you are investing or gambling before putting money into the product. I would like to ask a simpler question: “Why are we building it?” The…
- We Outsourced the Verb
The Private Cost of Judgment Finance delegates enormous amounts of judgment. Mandates constrain portfolios, benchmarks define deviation, risk systems set limits, and committees establish policy. Each layer can improve decisions. Each layer can also provide a sentence in which no human appears to have acted: “the benchmark required it”, “risk rejected it”, “the model said no, I’m sorry”. Or, as we are seeing in bonds, the model said “Less of those.” AI makes the delegation much easier. A model can interrogate a filing, compare management’s claim with the historical recordand, and place a…
- The Market Has a Rule of Its Own
To my readers: We’ll return to the philosophical next week. But Wednesday’s Fed decision to hike—and, more importantly, the explanation for why—requires a detour into Bondville. This note is written BOTH for you and for policy makers. I’ll attempt to summarize as plainly as possible, but there will be technical terms and details. For my readers and those who should not need it: “No Market Is Free” Economics often teaches us to think of markets as if they exist first and rules are added later. That is backwards. Every market is shaped by rules. Accounting rules matter. Tax rules matter…
- The Machine Never Releases
"The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity." — William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun I ended The Quiet Turning with a qualified sentence: “Preserve room for forgiveness and context, because a society that remembers everything without understanding anything will become unbearable.” That essay was about the falling cost of checking a claim. A founder could once say that a database was one hundred terabytes rather than one because nobody in the room was…
- The Quiet Turning
“There is a new common knowledge. Everybody knows that everybody knows that the way you make a killing is to bet that grifters are gonna’ grift, and nobody’s going to lift a finger to stop them.” — Rusty Guinn, 2020
- The Vibecession Was Real
“What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!” — Kevin Warsh Readers of a certain age will recognize that Kevin Warsh did not, in fact, deliver those immortal lines in John Landis’s Animal House . But the misattribution feels appropriate. Warsh appears to have flopped back to hawk for much the same reason Bluto launched into that speech: the argument itself has become secondary to the question, “ Who’s with me?” That matters because Warsh inherits a hostile room. The Federal Reserve Board is populated by…
- Great, Scott...
Disclosure: Earlier this year I sent Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a proposal called the Sovereign Debt Optimization Facility: a voluntary tender exchange of deep-discount vintage long bonds for current-coupon par bonds. Treasury did not announce that proposal last week. It announced a cash buyback program, materially different in both mechanics and optics. I have had no communication with the Secretary since sending the proposal, received no nonpublic information about the decision, and learned of the announcement when everyone else did. Everything here comes from public prices, public…
- And Get What You Deserve
For my subscribers and followers, do not click on any links until I confirm I have regained control of @ProfPlum99 I stupidly clicked on a link in a forwarded email. Dumbest man alive, indeed.
- Sometimes, You Get What You Need
Lots of chatter as Secretary Bessent has begun what I believe are the first steps outlined in my piece, “ What the Treasury Needs ”: I want to be very clear that this is an indication that the aircraft carrier has begun to turn, it is NOT an executed turn. The initial impact will be a further flattening of the yield curve and a sharp correction LOWER in real rates. The initial reaction is exactly as I expected: This should send the US$ lower and gold higher WITHOUT a meaningful increase in inflation expectations. Note the forward inflation swap above (5y5INFSW in orange) has ticked lower on…
- Anchors Aweigh, My Boys
Thank you for the many kind comments on the new Tier1 Asset Management launch. I appreciate the support and will honestly say it is helping propel me through the 18-hour days I’m working. To answer a repeated question, Tier1 plans to offer both ETFs for all and SMAs (separately managed accounts) for institutional accounts. We expect to register two ETFs in the coming weeks, at which point I’ll have to go quiet due to compliance It's been an incredible week as we’ve started bringing on our operational team and continued improving our tech stack. To put it in perspective, when we had our first…
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