Is Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) another Matt Levine of fintech? Or is he something else? I know several people outside of the industry (including myself) who read pretty much everything he writes, which includes a lot of technical detail written very accessibly.

As a non-finance person who subscribes to Matt Levine, I'm not sure any other industry is as endlessly creative and public. 

Take for example a story from Levine's most recent newsletter, about a recently-popular retail trader strategy. You buy 1 share of a company about do a reverse-split to avoid being delisted from Nasdaq for falling under $1. If the company doesn't support fractional shares, anyone with a partial share gets their 1 share rounded up to a full share in the reverse-split, so ex. a $0.40 share becomes worth $4.00 in a 1:10 split. Only makes sense with one share, since $0.80 of shares also becomes $4.00, and so on. In the three days from the recent announcement of a reverse-split to its occurrence, one particular company went from 5000 shareholders to nearly 200,000, all requesting their "round-up share". The company ended up forfeiting ~20% of their ownership to retail traders trying to make a couple bucks, all for maintaining the dignity of staying listed on Nasdaq.

(Levine tells the story better than I; he has a patented style of building up all the relevant financial instruments and market context, then laying down the punchline where the incentives you've just learned drive bizarre behavior.)

I'm sure there's wacky stories in other industries too (medtech? pharmaceutical?), but they tend to be more private. Because in finance all of this happened on the public market, and everyone involved is required by law to publish lots of information, the story can be told.


EDIT: I just realized the actual linked article is much longer than the snippet presented and offers its own, similar-ish answer. I do want to respond to one point from Gwern's article:

OK, but surely there are still plenty of areas where the preconditions are met? (Particularly rapidly-developing ones, like cryptocurrency or AI recently?) So where are their Matt Levines?

Levine covers both cryptocurrency and AI anyway. Someone could probably focus more on the technical/political side of AI and do something comparable to Levine, though... and, come to think of it, that person is named @Zvi. But, no offense to Zvi who I also read, Levine is a superior writer, so it's not surprising he has much wider reach.

Derek Lowe I believe does the closest to a Matt Levine for Pharma (and chem): https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline

He has a really fun to read series titled "Things I Won't Work With" where he talks a bunch about dangerous chemicals: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-work-with 

@gwern I think it prolly makes sense for me to assign this post to your account? Let me know if you're OK with that.

• Scott Alexander for psychiatry and drugs and many other topics
• Paul Graham for startups specifically, but his essays cover a much wider space
• Scott Adams for persuasion, humor, and recently a lot of political commentary - not neutral; he has his own agendas
• Robin Hanson - Economics, esp. long-term, very much out-of-distribution thinking
• Zvi Mowshowitz for AI news (and some other research-heavy topics; previously COVID-19)

I second Patrick McKenzie.

1. What other fields except finance have a tradition of reading weekly/daily news? Surely not chemistry, drug development, petroleum, fracking, …
2. Maybe there actually is a Matt Levine of petroleum but we don't know? 

I've only read a little bit of Martin Gardner, but he might be the Matt Levine of recreational math.

After reading this, I prompted Claude with

Please write a parody of chapter 3 of the 1926 winnie the pooh, where instead of winnie and piglet searching for a woozle, some bloggers are looking for bloggers similar to matt levine, and not realizing that they are the bloggers who are similar to matt levine. This will be a humorous reply to the attached post.