Yesterday, I left Substack. Tax Alpha Insider is now customized and independent. Look around and let me know what you think. I explain why I left later in this article.
Everyone will receive the same 3-4x emails per week. Paid subscribers just need to log in at taxalphainsider.com to have the same access they had before the migration (all hiccups should now be solved, and thanks to everyone who helped with the migration).
Here's what's on my radar in taxable wealth this week...
- AlphaSimplex (2024)(managed futures): Bonds Behaving Badly
- Newfound Research (2026): Why Bonds Still Belong: Rethinking Fixed Income in Modern Portfolios
- AQR (2025): A Brief Guide to the Mathematics and Taxation of Charitable Remainder Unitrusts
- AQR (2025): Combining Charitable Remainder Unitrusts and Tax-Aware Strategies to Diversify Low-Basis Stock
- IRC ยง1260: Gains from constructive ownership transactions
- The Tax Adviser (Knight, Knight 2016): Accounting for Notional Principal Contracts
Why I left Substack
I had been a top-100 finance writer on Substack since mid-2025.
But the fees and inflexibility bothered me, so I started considering flat-fee alternatives.
Substack benefits from being a social network and a place where people hang out. It can be useful for getting discovered. That's great if you're Michael Burry writing about stocks and retail investors want to copy your stock picks.
However, my audience is mostly professionals (advisers, researchers, asset managers). That means anyone Substack sent me likely wasn't a fit for my content.
That played out in the numbers. Substack was a modest source of free subs and a poor source of paid subs.
Unsurprisingly, my highest-quality referrals came from professional backlinks: various publications that had mentioned my work, direct referrals from readers, etc.
Key takeaway: content/platform fit really matters. Writing for a business audience on a consumer platform can work, but the platform itself won't do much to help.
The social signals on Substack are really valuable, but, like, how valuable?
The rising in finance and bestsellers in finance rankings are valuable social signals. They tell everyone where you rank in the finance writers category, and essentially make authors more credible and discoverable.
The bestseller badge tells the world the scale of your paid base. I had a white badge (hundreds of paid subscribers), and it was immediate social proof that at least some people valued my work.
Another social signal is simply the post engagements. People hearting the thing and sharing for all to see.
These things have value, and I'm sorry to see them go, but I was paying real money for them in the form of Substack's 10% of gross revenue fee, and it just didn't make sense.
When the fee is silently extracted every pay cycle, it's easy for it to go unnoticed.
Now that I've left Substack, the value-to-cost tradeoff is much clearer.
Like, if someone asked, "Would you pay tens of thousands of dollars to have your content ranked on Substack, have a bestseller badge, etc.?" I think most people would say no.
Key takeaway: what's all the social proof stuff really worth? I think that's a publication/audience-specific question, but it wasn't worth it for me.
Substack's finance community people reached out recently, and I politely told them that I wasn't getting value commensurate with the fees I was paying. They suggested they were building some AI tools and I told them that that just wasn't going to cut it, and that I could get those things for less than $100/mo at other providers.
I told them that if their services scaled with their fees, then it would be a no-brainer for me to stay. What do I mean by that? For example, I'm putting together a podcasting team right now (scheduler/producer, editor, audio, etc.), and if Substack could arrange all of those human services (not some dumb AI tools), I'd gladly pay.
Key takeaway: Substack wasn't solving my hard problem, which is scaling and producing higher-quality content. They were just a shell for my content.
The last thing that bugged me was Substack's visual inflexibility. I wanted to have a richer, more brand-specific experience, including my articles, tools, and data visualizations on the page directly, and Substack doesn't support that stuff well or at all. This wasn't a deal-breaker, but I'm happy I can do whatever I want on Ghost since the platform is open source and I can tweak the code, push it up to a server, and Ghost just hosts whatever crazy thing I can imagine.
This is a big change. Hopefully it's for the best.
TGIF.