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: Californication · Re-release: Pay Attention to Our Privates
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: #42 today · #39 a week ago · #45 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 63 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
- −3 places
- Rank, 30 days
- +3 places
- Followers added
- +1.1K
- Posts
- 4
- Reactions per post
- 160
- Reactions tracked
- 3.4K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 16, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 21 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: It’s Time to Complicate — 284 reactions on Aug 9, 2026.
Recent posts
- Californication
The Debate Nobody Wants to Have On October 28, six days before California’s vote on Proposition 40, Tyler Cowen published the results of an anonymous AI audit of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s research. The numbers were spectacular if taken at face value: 138 papers examined, 2,035 alleged problems, and 147 findings supposedly significant enough to change a headline result. Cowen promptly called for a radical reassessment of their research and its policy implications. “I am not even sure what to say at this point. We need a radical revaluation of this work, and of the associated policy…
- Re-release: Pay Attention to Our Privates
MWG Note: I’m sending out two notes this weekend. The first is credit focused and mostly a re-release of the only post I ever pulled. It was not pulled because I decided to change my mind, but rather because the post revealed too much information about the work that became Tier1 Alpha Asset Management. The announced drawdown in a significant HY fund likely starts the clarion for the next stage of an incipient credit event, facilitated by the Fed’s inattention to actual information available. Regardless, THIS note will be paywalled as it’s really only useful to professional investors and damn…
- Number Go Up
On a 10-day around the world tour that has left me wondering exactly which time zone I’m writing from and when this will hit your emails, I’ve decided to extend a Twitter debate into an expanded essay. The debate combined elements of The Mockery Machine , faux intellectualism, and… of course… the faith-like elements that permeate our modern investment world. For those with more fulfilling lives to keep them off social media, “This is my quant” is a reference to the scene from the movie, The Big Short, in which Jared (Subway guy/Ryan Gosling) demonstrates his certainty in his analysis by…
- 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…
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