The best* of FT Alphaville 2024
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
René Magritte said: “Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.” For FT Alphaville, it’s the same, but we post. Sometimes it’s a considered effortpost; other times a swift shitpost. We love them all like parents love their children: fiercely, equally, but with a fair amount of “ffs” along the way.
For logistical reasons we pause the post factory for Christmas so, for anyone who needs a fix over the holidays, below is a collection of some of the stuff we got up to over the past calendar year.
A reminder: all posts are FREE to read. All you have to do is register with an email address.
Beyond posting we have lots of plans for the coming year (such as our first pub quiz in Washington DC, an inaugural art show in London. and maybe some kind online forum to fill the gap left by The Long Room’s closure) but let us know in the comments or by email what else you’d love to see. Who knows, maybe we’ll bring back Camp Alphaville, as we could all do with some peace, love and higher returns.
In the meantime, have a smashing holiday break, may SOFR behave over New Year, and see you all on the other side. Love, Alphaville. xoxoxoxo
Some of Alphaville’s 2024 highlights
— Bill Ackman or American Psycho? Take the quiz
In retrospect, kicking off the year with this absolute banger set a high bar for 2024 that we continually fell short of. Ackman bragged that he got a “perfect” score, successfully sorting his own tweets from Patrick Bateman’s murder-fabulist inner monologue.
— A window into private credit marks
Alexandra Scaggs opened 2024 with a timely post on what would become a big theme this year: private credit valuations. You will be SHOCKED to learn that marks aren’t always entirely consistent and credible. See also: Is private credit a systemic risk? and How is private credit weathering its first big rate hiking cycle?
— Gary Stevenson claims to have been the best trader in the world. His old colleagues disagree
Rob Smith — an honorary Alphavillain and 2024 British Journalism Awards winner — wrote the breeziest 5,000 words you’ll ever read on the realities of short-term interest rates trading as part of a fact-checking of Citi trader turned inequality influencer Gary Stevenson .
— ETFs are eating the bond market
The magic of blogging is that it can be iterative. But sometimes it makes sense to pull together the disparate threads into a monster post — in this case, an almost 6,000-word beast on the myriad ways that ETFs are rewiring fixed income.
— A deep dive into the Government’s £3.7mn wine cellar
The start of a series of extravagantly detailed posts on the UK Government Hospitality Wine Cellar, ranging from April’s “Another pointless article about the UK’s strategic wine reserves” and November’s “Amazingly, there is more to say about the UK government’s £3.8mn wine cellar”, and culminating in “The ultimate guide to the UK’s sovereign wine fund”, which revealed that fantastical private-market valuations are a thing in oenophilia as well.
— Everything you always wanted to know about bonds (but were afraid to ask)
Toby Nangle has delivered some incredibly high-quality posts over the past year — please check out Liz and the LASH or TIPSplaining a lousy inflation hedge — but judging by feedback this might be the best. It features a roller-skating rates monkey, which we really should use in more posts.
— MicroStrategy’s secret sauce is volatility, not bitcoin
Lots to choose from among Craig Coben’s 2024 work, such as his look at investment banking workloads, Ackman’s IPO, and Wall Street’s bizarre co-head fetish. However, while it might be recency bias, his latest post on MicroStrategy stands out from the crowd — perhaps because of Craig’s line that convertible bonds are the financial equivalent of a mullet: “Serious business in the front (debt), party in the back (equity).” Also check out his companion piece on MicroStrategy’s record-shattering ATM.
— Britain, consultation nation
The UK is the Saudi Arabia of “other business services”. In this post, Louis took a thorough look at exactly what that means.
— Breaking down the Melrose founders’ last big score
Melrose Industries has been one of the UK’s stock market’s biggest wealth-creation machines over the past two decades. But how much of a £330mn payout to three co-founders this year was earned, and how much was thanks to financial engineering? Find out in this deep and detailed investigation (plus follow-up) from Bryce Elder.
— Jane Street is big. Like, really, really big
Writing about Jane Street is a bit like what we imagine writing about the Kardashians is like for red-top reporters: everything ~everything~ gets incredible traffic (by our standards at least). Perhaps understandably so, given that even the interns make more than Jay Powell. The above was a chunky post that went through all the fascinating titbits that could be found in Jane Street’s bond prospectus.
— Who’ll buy the Treasuries? (Alphaville’s version)
All you wanted to ask about the swelling Treasury market and didn’t dare ask, answered helpfully by Alexandra.
— Trump Media’s auditor is really bad at spelling his own name
George Steer is heading over to the bright lights of New York for MainFT next year, but he leaves an Alphaville body of work that was wonderfully strong and varied. He met yet another “Satoshi Nakamoto”, attended an Nvidia earnings party, and ran investigations of Chinese microcaps, EF Hutton 2.0, and [checks notes] Hot Mom International. But his most distinguished work is probably the Ben Borgers/BF Borgers/Blake Borgers/Ben F orgers oeuvre. See also: OK maybe Trump Media’s auditor is really bad at a lot of things.
— We tried to design the perfect sellside note. How did we do?
After writing a detailed ranking of sellside research note design in 2023, we thought it was time for FT Alphaville to get in the arena ourselves. Or rather, to make Louis spend an inordinate amount of time designing our own perfect FTAV note. Nailed it.
— ARK Invest’s ‘seemingly outlandish’ economic forecasts
Very much in shitpost territory, this one.
— What does Trump’s $100k watch tell us about the future of luxury goods?
When Donald Trump unveiled a $100,000 tourbillon, FT Alphaville’s senior horological correspondent Bryce Elder did a teardown and calculated the gross margin to be about 75 per cent. Building on FTAV’s coverage of Rolex ecomomics and Swiss export trends, it’s more content about watchmaking than we ever thought justifiable possible.
— Is private equity actually worth it?
A surprisingly controversial and hotly disputed question, despite PE having now been around for four decades and managing north of $5tn. The effortpost in search of an answer ended up clocking in at over 5,000 words, with lots of charts and one Patrick Star meme.
— The inequity method of accounting
Apropos private equity, here’s a post from MainFT’s brilliant Sujeet Indap on some of the most incredible private equity shenanigans and accounting weaponisation you’ll ever read (and re-read).
— Liz Truss’s certifiable bat skit
We try to avoid writing about politics and culture war stuff here. After all, there are enough pixels wasted on it elsewhere. But politicians and culture warriors occasionally amble into our territory, such as when Liz Truss talked about infrastructure investment while getting bats wrong.
— The Barclay heir battling bankruptcy, the Seigneur, and the Sark IPO
When former Alphavillain Jemima Kelly said that she wanted to go back to Sark and follow up her 2019 banger dispatch from the island, we couldn’t say no. So here is Sark IV: This Time It’s Snarky(er).
— Welcome to Super Micro galaxy
Super Micro, “the archetypal stock of AI mania”, has lost over two-thirds of its value since this acerbic, hype-demolishing post by Bryce.
— Walkers’ Sensations Poppadoms vs HMRC: Crunch time
Find someone who loves you as much as Louis loves to write about recondite tax law cases. This one — Walkers Snack Foods Ltd v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — looked at whether Sensations Poppadoms are a snack or a meal component. As Louis noted: “The law is great because it forces things that should never be in words to be in words.”
— The biggest superstonks of all time
You’ll never guess which stock is the greatest wealth compounder of all time (well, ok, unless you’ve already read the post, in which case move along)
— Warhammer is weird. That’s why it works
The most recent entry into our 2024 pantheon, but if you missed it, Louis’ Games Workshop deep-dive is worth a holiday read. The true story of how a weird Nottingham-based company got millions of people around the world addicted to “plastic crack”, as told by an addict who regrets nothing.
— Bitcoin hit $100,000. What’s next?
Alex spent most of 2024 making and nurturing a delightful little up-and-coming poaster called Henry (we have high hopes for his 2025 output), but on her return she came up with this banger: by far the most rigorous bitcoin prediction framework we’ve seen.
— A top Tory donor’s tangled web presence
“Politically, Julio Herrera Velutini occupies a unique position. Without ever holding public office, he wields significant political influence. His connections span from presidents to prime ministers, from the left to the right of the political spectrum. Julio’s influence is often a matter of public debate, given his ability to sway policy decisions, his role in shaping economic policies, and his support for Latin America’s entry into the world markets.” Simply great stuff from MainFT’s Cynthia O’Murchu.
— You can’t call a company Scorpio Bastardo
An interactive walkthrough of more than 700 formation applications Companies House has rejected because the corporate name requested was either funny or unfunny. This is as close as we get to NSFW.
Another (arguably performatively long) effortpost, this time looking at the dismal performance of smaller American stocks. The on-off renaissance for small-caps has been a low-key theme for Alphaville this year. It will be interesting to see if anything changes in 2025, or if US small-caps really are permamently impaired.
FTAV’s crypto coverage over the years has always mixed serious investigation with high-minded theory and low-level absurdity. Occasionally, we also throw in a bit of reaction bait, because it’s never not funny to see people furious about how richer they are than us.
In retrospect, it’s hard to know exactly when we broke Louis. It might have been when we forced him to make a racing chart of the biggest FTSE companies over time. But the silent scream of small caged mammal is the one that will echo through the ages.
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