moontower: a stoner dad explains options trading to his kids
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Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
26K on Sep 10, 2026 → 27K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #103 today · #99 a week ago · #107 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 20%
- Best rank seen
- #96
- Rank, 7 days
- −4 places
- Rank, 30 days
- +4 places
- Followers added
- +1.1K
- Posts
- 10
- Reactions per post
- 24
- Reactions tracked
- 803
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Nov 7, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 33 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: So you're interested in trading... — 63 reactions on Oct 28, 2026.
Recent posts
- "Conversational AI custom media eats traditional media” thesis
Friends, I’d let this thread seep into your cells before we continue. Ok, now you are ready. [Only do this hands-free via Bluetooth. Safety first.] While driving to pick up my kids, I interrupted the podcast that was playing to launch Grokbot’s voice mode to ask about TLT volatility (a random market idea popped into my head). The bot is connected to moontower.ai data via MCP and, of course, the internet and its own training data. Before I know it, I’m at the destination and never switched back to the podcast. This felt weirdly profound. Podcasts have an infovore following. But can anything…
- if it feels good you’re too late
In this issue: hacking hope if it feels good you’re too late the geometry of volatility scaling Friends, Jared Dillian has this great essay, The Reason We Do Everything , from earlier in the year that opens: Norm MacDonald, one of the funniest people to ever walk the planet, was also a degenerate gambler, busting out a number of times and going to zero. His therapist told him that he gambled in order to escape reality. Norm said, “That’s why everyone does everything.” You should read the essay, but today I just want to zoom in on something Norm said. I watched the recent documentary Judd…
- are the options market's odds any good?
Friends, We recently introduced the Verticals workflow , a screener for directional traders. You pick an expiry and a move measured in standard deviations (say +1 SD), and for every name on your watchlist, it finds the tightest vertical spread that is fully in the money if the stock gets there. The tool is convenient because the move is sized by each name's own vol, so a 1 SD rally in SPY and a 1 SD rally in TSLA are apples to apples. The price it shows is a Moontower fair value computed from a smoothed mark that lives inside the bid-ask. The screener sorts by Payout . For example, a 1-point…
- So you're interested in trading...
My cousin asked me for book recommendations to learn about trading. I dug this post up which I published a year ago which was also one of my most popular articles. As always I hope you find it useful or at least entertaining. Friends, This is a follow-up letter I wrote to someone who called me interested in learning to trade. Look, trading is a neat career for many reasons (I discuss that at the end of my chat with John ). But if you don’t enjoy the material below, it’s probably not a job you’ll like or excel in. Finding that out alone is worth diving into this. From the outside, it’s easy to…
- a market-maker for ants
In this issue: Introducing slate I-bonds vs TIPs Staring at an option quote Friends, I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m experimenting with bringing education and practical investing topics to IG. One of the experiments I plan to do Khan Academy-style short-form where I show my work on a “chalkboard” and speed it up for socials. Our little 10-year-old artist has one of these USB Huion drawing tablets lying around. I can use that to draw up the explainers, but on what software? I checked out some popular recs like Xournal+ and Openboard but found neither of them immediately delightful and just…
- the “rewind” tail hedge
Friends, Last week’s 2 risk premiums that work together spelled out the reasoning, risk, and sizing of my TIPs+oil trade. I didn’t consider the trade in terms of any momentum characteristics, but one leg is a falling knife, and the other keeps making new highs. The risk portion for both the components of the trade and the total portfolio relies on estimates of volatility both now and as the future leg ages. The issue with volatility is that it’s an incomplete description of risk. It’s a sampled standard deviation which has both practical and philosophical shortcomings. The practical drawback…
- like morning sex on doomsday
Friends, Emi and the engineers on my moontower.ai team have been harping on me to download Grokbot. It’s an always-on AI agent that lets you assign multi-step work to persistent AI teammates “staff” on their own cloud computers. The Cursor team (acquired by SpaceXAI) just feels like they nailed this. You keep hearing about “agents” working around the clo…
- when smarts are as cheap as sunshine
From the team behind the Arbor Trading Bootcamps which I constantly say are so good they should not exist: Join us at Metagame, November 6–8 at Lighthaven in Berkeley, for a weekend of games, puzzles, and immersive play. Explore tabletop games and RPGs, discover cryptic clues, and take part in a weekend-long Megagame connecting puzzles, games, and stories across the event. Moontower readers receive $50 off regular tickets. Explore Metagame and get tickets → In this issue: AI thoughts When smarts are as cheap as sunshine THE option-101 course for the internet Friends, I’ve been burying you…
- 2 risk premiums that work together
Friends, This week on The Options Trench I explained that I was going to buy TIPs. The video is a presentation on the mechanics of TIPs, how to interpret their yield, the risks, taxation, common misunderstandings, and why they are so interesting right now. The episode is a full hour and features slides, so hopefully it becomes a great reference for when you need to brush up. 📺 Everything You Ever Needed to Know about TIPS Bonds Recent pricing: 10y real yield 2.91% (Treasury real yield curve, Oct 9, 2026). Year ago: 1.75% (Oct 10, 2025). +116 bp. 10y nominal 5.24% , so 10y breakeven 2.33%…
- you can’t change minds
Friends, A great Munchie today. As usual, I highlight the parts I want to keepsake and inject my own comments here and there. LTCM Co-founder Victor Haghani: “Taking Risk Is Always a Negative” | 1 hr 12 min watch LTCM: right and ruined (01:27) It’s good to think about investing as being two decisions: what to invest in and how much. And almost all of the focus of financial media, training, education, financial education is on what we should invest in... And at LTCM, we found some really good whats to invest in. But the sizing decision, how much of those good things is the right amount of good…
- iron condor destroyer
Note of an Instagram Experiment I’m trying something new that has become much easier with Meta’s personal AI assistant Muse: turning Moontower posts into Instagram Stories and Reels. Math and personal finance ideas, one frame at a time. Muse handles the heavy lifting of reading the posts and synthesizing the arc. I then edit the frames and add music. This week so far: Why Godzilla can’t exist ( stories ) You already trade options. You just call it a car lease. ( stories ) Selling your 3% mortgage incinerates $188,000 ( stories ) The feedback has been encouraging! Follow @kris_to_the_max . In…
- “how i invest”
Friends, In the summer of 2025, Brian Portnoy asked me to write a chapter for How I Invest My Money: Volume Two . Volume One came out in 2020, co-edited by Brian and Josh Brown. The premise is for people who work in finance to explain what they do with their own money. Volume Two comes out October 20 from Harriman House. There are 25 contributors, including Barry Ritholtz, Kyla Scanlon, Matt Zeigler, and Ben Hunt. Morgan Housel and Christine Benz return from the first volume to say what’s changed for them since. My chapter is below the paywall in full. The word limit was tight. What’s in the…
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