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 →
- Top in Finance
- #42
- Paid leaderboard
- #41
- Subscribers
- 59K
- Paid subscribers
- 1,000+ paid
- Badge
- Bestseller 1k
- Followers
- 90K
- Paid plan
- $10/mo
- Recommends
- 20
- Podcast
- Yes
rounded by Substack
other newsletters
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: We Outsourced the Verb · The Market Has a Rule of Its Own
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 1, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #42 today · #42 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 22 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 8%
- Best rank seen
- #34
- Followers added
- +596
- Posts
- 4
- Reactions per post
- 178
- Reactions tracked
- 2.7K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 16, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 15 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: It’s Time to Complicate — 284 reactions on Aug 9, 2026.
Recent posts
- 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…
- It’s Time to Complicate
For five years, I have worked at a firm called Simplify. The irony has never been lost on me. Einstein said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. My entire research program argues that markets have violated the second clause. The migration of trillions of dollars from discretionary judgment into mechanical, price-insensitive strategies has simplified the act of investing. For an individual investor, much of that simplification has been enormously valuable. It lowered fees, broadened diversification, and removed a great deal of bad judgment from the process…
- Maid in Japan
An Apology One test of expertise is whether you can explain your subject to someone standing outside the field. Strip away the industry jargon and the idea should still hold up. Last week I failed that test. Several of you told me so, politely and otherwise. Part of the reason is worth explaining. Leveraged ETFs themselves are familiar ground -- I have traded and exploited their mechanics for over a decade. What sits at the outer limit of my understanding, and frankly of anyone’s, is what their flows do to the underlying securities. That is the breakthrough work the team at Tier1 Alpha…
- A Semi-Theory of Almost Everything
This is going to be a relatively long read. I would have written a shorter piece, but I did not have the time — or, more honestly, the skill to compress two weeks of work into fewer words. “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the leisure of making it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal I have been working nonstop on projects with hard deadlin…
← All trending finance newsletters
Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Yes, I give a fig... thoughts on markets from Michael Green. 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 1, 2026.