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 Sep 30, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #99 today · #101 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 21 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 19%
- Best rank seen
- #96
- Rank, 7 days
- +2 places
- Subscribers added
- +1.0K
- Followers added
- +345
- Posts
- 11
- Reactions per post
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- Reactions tracked
- 447
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 18, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 19 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: after this post you will be sizing bets in your head — 56 reactions on Sep 13, 2026.
Recent posts
- 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…
- why i'm not more bearish equities compared to 6 months ago
Programming Note: I normally publish Munchies on Wednesday and the paid post on Thursday, but this week I will post both a day early, as they are market-related and I want to get them out ahead of the Fed meeting. Friends, I’ll start with updating some broad market observations I laid out in March and then square that with what option surfaces are telling us in the context of the Fed meeting and beyond. The Fed meeting is a highly skewed event with a 25 bp hike more than about 90% priced in. The probability of Fed target rate between 3.75% and 4% has shot from 35% to 90% in under 3 weeks…
- after this post you will be sizing bets in your head
In this issue: slow burn mental bet sizing for everyone sizing for real-life decisions Friends, Riddle me this: Over the years, I’ve administered 2 reader polls to take the pulse of why you bother reading this newsletter. Both times I’ve asked the above question but with an open-ended fill-in-the-blank template. The answers come back in all shapes and sizes, but most of them can be boiled down to “smart” or “stupid”. My reactions to the “stupid” responses: My writing has a style that can be, at times, counterproductive. It’s often unfiltered and parenthetical. My wife constantly tells me that…
- betting on direction with short-dated spreads
Friends, I’ve published several posts in the past month about option collars. collar shopping the risk-reward of option collars additional thoughts on the risk-reward of option collars Most of what I’ve written leans on an artifact of option pricing namely that the further out in time you go, the more call premium there is to work with. I started talking about this in May’s high implied vol can work for or against you . High IV makes calls grow faster in value than puts, which can make it more attractive for hedgers to finance downside. The quirk comes from option pricing conventions that…
- Unpaywalled:"Achievement" is a fickle mistress
Friends, This post is from the archive and makes sense to share at the start of the school year (not that our kids haven’t been back in school for a month already). A theme running through recent posts has been about preparing for post HS life, or really helping your kids think about the future. The arguments, with a few substitutions, apply to all of us as well. See: The College Monopoly is a Tiger Trap Moneyballing College Admissions How To Order Off-Menu We’re going to continue the theme today. Maybe get a bit spicier even idk. I tweeted this: I gave a talk to this group last fall. They…
- sizing directional option trades
Programming note : In honor of Labor Day, Moontower will not labor this weekend. Consider it a break for your eyes. See you next week. Friends, Options are surgical tools. If your thesis is simply “I want to be long,” just buy the stock. An option turns your directional view into a parlay with time. That said, if you do choose options, this post is about how to size the trade. You’ll learn: Two sizing approaches and their tradeoffs How to choose between them Where the option frameworks plug into your general portfolio construction
- “is that log?”
Friends, Several kinds of Munchies for your enjoyment today… “Is that log?” There’s this hedge fund manager who has a Pavlovian habit of looking at any growth-of-a-dollar chart and blurting “Is that log?” The onlookers who endured this routine quietly suspected that he doesn’t really know what that means. You can receive this story in any number of ways. The most adaptive conclusion is “America rewards risk-taking above all” but, hey, I’m not here to judge your reaction. Still, in loyalty to the moontower shtick, my “yes, and” is to say it would be nice to know what logarithms mean since they…
- macro is just chemistry
In this issue: energy as the ultimate currency “middle manager” fiction Friends, A year ago I wrote a piece called Capitalism Is a Temporary Condition . Buried in it was a thought: An investor in an age of acceleration watches as commodity prices, real things, hover in familiar territory while “future cash flows discounted” reward attention — in some cases because of optimistic stories, in some cases because the company exchanges cash for BTC (an act which adds no economic value), and in some cases for nostalgic lolz. Today, it’s embarrassing to think of actual value. The most basic form is…
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