I recently spent a bit too much time trying to find out when a man in Brooklyn presses a button.
His name is Matt Levine, and he writes a popular daily finance newsletter for Bloomberg called Money Stuff. He’s known for his incisive and humorous commentary on Wall Street, which makes complex concepts accessible to non-experts while remaining relevant to a large audience of industry insiders.
I’ve now subscribed to Money Stuff for six years and noticed it comes out later than it once did. Out of curiosity, I decided to graph the times Money Stuff has come out.
And the result was surprisingly linear-ish.
It’s just so tidy! If you do the math, you find that Money Stuff has come out about 47 minutes later every year since 2015. That works out to about four minutes a month or 12 seconds a business day. Clearly, the rate has varied a bit and it’s not perfectly linear (hence the “ish”) but the sheer contiguity is striking.
What’s strange is that in life schedules tend to move in blocks—not monthly four-minute increments. You move and your commute gets seventeen minutes longer, you start having a standing meeting Tuesday mornings—or even your editor says “let’s put the newsletter out at 11 instead of 9.”
So, you’d expect this chart to look a bit more like a bunch of floating steps. This is actually true from 2019 to 2021 when the times bunch around noon. You can pretty safely guess that Money Stuff was scheduled to be released at that time, since during this period newsletters were not released before noon.
Probably the almost uniformly-gradual shifts in release times have just happened, but I would like to imagine that it’s all part of a sophisticated daypart repositioning strategy. Rather than move Money Stuff from the morning to the afternoon at once, a clever marketing VP thought it would be wise to move it back by a few seconds each day so as to not upset discerning readers.
Now, there’s some other stuff you can do with the data. For instance, you can look at the days of the week on which Money Stuff has come out.
Lastly you can see that Money Stuff has gotten a bit longer in recent years.
The word counts are better viewed quarterly totals, which show us that there has been increasingly more Money Stuff.
I suppose you might wonder about the point of the above exercise. Other than being sort of interesting, reading Money Stuff is part of the routines of tens of thousands of people. The charts above describe how certain fundamental elements of that experience have changed: whether you read it with oatmeal or a tuna sandwich, and whether you can finish reading by the time you’re done eating.
ncG1vNJzZmickaO2prjSraannV6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6mpqedqWLAtcHFn2Siq12htq%2BxwKtkoquY