moontower: a stoner dad explains options trading to his kids
Applying financial theory to life in real-time «math, education, parenting, games, business, and occasionally hair bands🎸»
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- #105
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- #103
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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: #105 today · #104 a week ago · #105 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 20%
- Best rank seen
- #96
- Rank, 7 days
- −1 place
- Subscribers added
- +1.0K
- Followers added
- +719
- Posts
- 10
- Reactions per post
- 23
- Reactions tracked
- 610
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 18, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 26 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: after this post you will be sizing bets in your head — 59 reactions on Sep 13, 2026.
Recent posts
- when smarts are as cheap as sunshine
- 2 risk premiums that work together
- you can’t change minds
- iron condor destroyer
- “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…
- vibey vs discrete trades
Friends, At the Robinhood Summit last week, Mat Cashman and I hosted a “Trading Lab” emphasizing that options are surgical tools. You only want to reach for them when you have a specific view. While their payoff is highly levered to nailing a particular timing, they are unforgiving to vague forecasts like “I generally want to be long this stock”. If you buy the stock instead, you know your exposure. Your delta is 1.00 and doesn’t change. If you buy an option, your exposure changes due to time passing alone. So that initial decision thrusts you into a series of future decisions, each one…
- academic acceleration
In this issue: academic acceleration wrapping up Kelly option topics from the RH Summit game and food recs Friends, One of my close friends runs an advisory for HS students applying to college. He wrote this guest post years ago: Moneyballing College Admissions . He lives in the Bay Area and told me he’s seeing more parents complaining about the lack of acceleration options in the public school. He said outside CA it’s becoming far more common for high schoolers to take AP Calculus BC before senior year. My 8th graders’ goal is to take it by junior year, giving himself a chance to take…
- soulcraft
Programming note: Moontower will be back next Sunday. I’ll be in Houston this week for HOOD Summit 2026, Robinhood’s annual investor and trader conference. If you’re going, come see me. Friends reunion in DFW area over Labor Day weekend. There was a station where you could have a custom cowboy hat made. Pretty neat party biz! In this issue: soulcraft grab a coffee and derive this with me Friends, My second favorite thing after a piece of art, writing, music, movie, and sport that I love is watching someone else gush over things they love. It’s why the Lost in Vegas guys are so endearing…
- the math of why “crappy” investments aren’t cheaper
Friends, Back in May, I shared a Jane Street-style interview question I found online. Flip a fair coin 100 times. Call the number of heads H and the number of tails T. What’s E[H × T]? I multiplied the expected number of heads by the expected number of tails to get 2,500. I flubbed the answer because, while the flips are independent, the totals aren’t. Every additional head means one fewer tail. There’s a missing covariance term in the way I set up the problem. If you’re interested in the solution and all of its logic, review turning a Jane Street interview question blunder to a lesson . In…
- who are the rich people, factorio in print, 9 scary words
Friends, Amazing munchies to snack on this week… Listen 🎙️There’s a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America ( Bloomberg Odd Lots ) About: In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The…
- blindsided
In this issue: blindsided “end behavior” Friends, Blindsided My cousin Nicole just had her first child in the past year and is now compiling resources for new parents in light of where her attention has obviously been. In our family chat, she asked: When you became a new parent, what blindsided you the most? I’ll share my answer, which I qualify with both the awareness that having a child is a gamble on many levels and that conception itself is a miracle and should never be taken for granted. What was I blindsided by? [9:16 AM, 9/16/2026] Kris Abdelmessih: that they were gonna be so awesome…
- trade prospecting ahead of the Fed meeting
Programming Note : Mid-week publishing schedule is bumped by a day to get this out before the Fed today. The next post will be Sunday. Friends, Yesterday’s post offered some market thoughts and the following backdrop heading into the Fed meeting after the Jackson Hole Keynote 3 weeks ago: The chance of a 25 bps hike shot from 35% to 90% The 10-year yield is up 20 bps Oil is up 25% The 30-year yield is flattish Equity indices are down less than 2% EEM is down 2.7% Gold is down 7% BTC is down 5.5% Let’s ignore oil as it’s not directly Fed-related. The significant moves here have been gold which…
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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: moontower: a stoner dad explains options trading to his kids. 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.