Worried Noises

Summary

Money Stuff: The Podcast – "Worried Noises" (July 24, 2026)
Hosts: Matt Levine & Katie Greifeld

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld return for a bittersweet installment marking Katie’s final appearance before taking parental leave. The discussion mixes “sad jazz” goodbyes with a rollicking, witty exploration of current financial news—from the inventive and controversial tax strategies behind custom ETFs favored by the ultra-wealthy, to the regulatory irony in Gary Gensler’s cell phone saga, the monetization of market-moving social media posts, and increasingly creative intersections of finance, sports, and trading. If you're new to Money Stuff, expect deadpan banter, sharp technical breakdowns, and big-picture reflections on financial weirdness.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Farewell to Katie (01:07–02:37)

• The episode opens with Katie’s goodbye as she heads for parental leave until at least 2027.
• Matt reassures listeners that the show will continue with a rotating cast of guest hosts after August.

Notable quote:
"It's fun to have an hour locked in a room with you every week. It has been."
— Katie Greifeld [02:27]

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2. The Rise of 351 Exchange ETFs & Wealthy Tax Strategies (03:05–11:42)

Background:

• Discussion launches with “rebalancing,” smoothly segueing to 351 exchange ETFs.

How 351 Exchange ETFs Work:

• ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds) provide tax efficiency by enabling in-kind trading; taxes aren’t incurred until actual ETF shares are sold.
• Wealthy individuals can now use custom ETFs—particularly the "351 exchange ETF" structure—to defer or avoid taxes on concentrated stock holdings by converting personal portfolios into tradable ETF shares, then gradually diversifying.

Key Points:

• The Bloomberg team recently tracked over 105 of these ETFs, revealing prominent users like the Hot Pockets family and Gabe Plotkin (though his is pending).
• These “public” ETFs are technically available for ordinary investors, but their appeal lies in giving the rich institutional tools to dodge taxes legally.
• Some providers are “productizing” the service, opening up to more than just individual billionaire families.

Technical Insights:

• IRS rules require a degree of diversification (no more than 25% in one stock or 50% in five), sparking creative solutions like leveraged purchases to game the system.
• The Treasury views this as potentially abusive and is considering regulatory action but is currently limited to “worried noises.”

Notable quotes:

• “Once the stuff is in the ETF, you can sell your concentrated low basis stock and, and use the proceeds to buy S&P 500 or whatever. Without paying current taxes.”
  — Matt Levine [06:58]
• “It kind of reminds me of a conversation that we've had about crypto a bunch of times, which is it's in the code, you know, it's in the tax code. This is all.”
  — Katie Greifeld [10:16]
• “Tax is not exactly a code as law world, even though the code is literally the law.”
  — Matt Levine [10:59]

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3. Regulators and Gary Gensler’s Cell Phone Comedy (13:19–19:16)

The Irony:

• Gary Gensler, former SEC Chair, previously led a crackdown on bankers’ use of personal devices for business—a move that cost Wall Street billions in fines.
• Ironically, Gensler himself used personal email for CFTC business (due to technical confusion) and, when subpoenaed by Coinbase, the SEC claimed it had deleted the relevant text records due to an IT misunderstanding.

SEC vs. Crypto:

• Coinbase used the missing records as ammunition during its legal battle with the SEC, scoring a $150,000 “cell phone misuse” settlement—tiny compared to Wall Street fines.
• This symbolic victory inspired industry-wide schadenfreude, highlighting the double standards in regulatory culture.

Notable quotes:

• “If I'm the banks who paid these penalties, I'd be a little tempted to ask for a refund, a partial refund. Be like, hey guys, can we see your communications about cell phones? And they'll be like, no, you can't. Because as we already know, we deleted them all and then strike a settlement.”
  — Matt Levine [16:58]
• “Some poetic justice for Coinbase.”
  — Katie Greifeld [18:36]

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4. Truth Social’s API: Selling Market-Moving Trump Posts (19:16–25:24)

The Scheme:

• Trump Media’s Truth Social platform announces a new high-priced API, selling hedge funds millisecond-early access to posts from up to 10 accounts—most notably, Donald Trump.
• At $100,000/month per subscriber, the scheme could instantly eclipse the company’s ad revenue.

Legal and Ethical Questions:

• Katie questions the legality and ethics of monetizing government policy pronouncements, albeit through a private, president-owned company.
• Matt draws a distinction between normal news feeds and the conflict created when a sitting president (as company owner) profits directly from volatility he creates.

Market Value:

• High-frequency traders see this as valuable “protection money”—a rare instance where milliseconds can make fortunes on policy shocks.
• The episode pokes fun at how absurd but ultimately legal (for now) the practice appears.

Notable quotes:

• “The pitch is like, this guy creates so much volatility you need to pay us to get advanced access to it.”
  — Matt Levine [24:04]
• “It feels reminiscent of the taco discussion. Like what he's putting out on Truth Social doesn't actually always match what happens in reality.”
  — Katie Greifeld [24:45]

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5. Sports Indexes & Financialization of Everything (26:02–29:29)

What Are “Sports Indexes”?

• Matt introduces a new financial product: indexes that track sports team performance (eventually, possibly athletes), turning “winning” or “losing” into a continuous ETF you can buy or sell.
• These products represent a new chapter in the blurring of financial markets and real-world events—combining sports betting, ETF structures, and index methodology into something both familiar and strange.

Product Structure Critique:

• The hosts collectively marvel at the proliferation of ETF wrappers—many tailored for tax savings or niche exposures, frequently criticized for double or triple layering fees.

Meta Commentary:

• The episode ends with jokes about the inevitable launch of a “diversified ETF of 351 ETFs,” exemplifying how financial innovation can eat itself.

Notable quotes:

• “You're not getting Hot Pockets. You're not getting a lot of special sauce. You're getting, like, these people have made a lot of money doing something else. And now they're coasting and diversifying, and you're getting the coasting and diversifying with two layers of fees. And then if — as I joked — someone launches a diversified ETF of these ETFs, then you're paying three levels of fees, which is too much, probably, but someone will do it. Why not?”
  — Matt Levine [29:31]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• “I'm jazzed. Sad jazz.” — Katie Greifeld [01:23]
• “It costs like the 106th time you do it.” — Matt Levine on the scaling of ETF “productization” [09:21]
• “Selling advanced access to tweets. Again, I don't know, I go back to my naive question, like, how could this be legal given that we do get policy via posts?” — Katie Greifeld [22:48]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Katie’s Goodbye & Show Changes: 01:07–02:37
• 351 Exchange ETFs, Tax Strategies, & Treasury’s Response: 03:05–11:42
• Gary Gensler’s Device Debacle & SEC vs. Crypto: 13:19–19:16
• Truth Social, Market-moving Posts, & API Business Model: 19:16–25:24
• Sports Indexes and Meta-ETFs: 26:02–29:29

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Tone & Style

The conversation is true to Money Stuff’s signature: witty, self-aware, and dryly humorous, mixing Wall Street inside baseball with accessible explanations and honest skepticism about the ever-expanding frontier of financial innovation.

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For Further Exploration

Listeners interested in custom ETFs, financial regulation, high-frequency trading, and the intersection of real-world events with trading will find this episode full of both technical insight and philosophical musing. The hosts leave open the big questions: will regulators ever move past “worried noises,” and has financialization finally outpaced common sense?

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Summarized by Money Stuff: The Podcast’s AI assistant, July 2026.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio news Katie. Yeah.

[B]

Today is your last podcast.

[A]

I know.

[B]

For some period of time.

[A]

Yeah. Until at least 2027. I'm sad, I gotta say.

[B]

Right. You definitely watched back what you were gonna say. You're like, I'm pretty jazzed to never do this podcast again.

[A]

Sad jazz.

[B]

No, I mean sad, sad.

[A]

I was saying to Anna, our producer before we started, I'm gonn to the

[B]

podcast to, you know. You mean when you return from parental leave? Not. Not like a visit in a month?

[A]

Yeah. No, no, no, no. You're not going to see me, but I'm going to come back to Bloomberg. But I have all these goodbyes. Like, this is my last podcast. I filed my last newsletter. Tomorrow is my last TV show. I don't like saying goodbye again and again and again, but I feel like it's part of the process.

[B]

It is definitely part of the process. I'm sorry to burden you with another goodbye, but there is like administrative.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We have to be like friends listeners. This podcast will not be going dark for six months.

[A]

We're rebalancing.

[B]

We're rebalancing. I'm gonna take August off. Then we'll be coming back to you with like a rotating cast of guest hosts who will not be filling Katie's shoes but will be chatting with me.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

About the financial news of the week and whatnot and so forth.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We'll miss you.

[A]

I'll miss you, Matt. And I'll miss this podcast because it's fun to have an hour locked in a room with you every week. It has been.

[B]

Wow, that doesn't sound sincere.

[A]

No, it is.

[B]

Okay. Hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levine and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

[A]

And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television. I have a segue.

[B]

Okay, go.

[A]

Speaking of rebalancing. Okay, 351 exchanges.

[B]

Oh, yeah, you're going right into 351 exchanges. I mean, you love a 351 exchange. We're going to get some ETF into. Into the last podcast we do.

[A]

It's amazing that it's. I mean, it's one of the conversations happening this week is how this podcast, the Treasury Department, or the. The ETF industry in general, is getting very inventive in all the ways that it's like ducking taxes or at least deferring them. And the Treasury Department is, like, increasingly annoyed about that.

[B]

Right? Because, like, when I, like, first became aware of ETFs, the story was that index ETFs are more tax efficient than index mutual funds. Because when people trade out of an etf, it doesn't cause taxes for the people who remain in the etf. Because, like, if you own an index mutual fund, like, people who, like, leave the mutual fund, like, causes selling of stock, and so that causes a tax realization event for you. And so you have to pay taxes even though you haven't sold your mutual fund shares. And that's like, the nub of the idea. But then over time, ETFs realize that all of their stock trading could be done in kind so that they never had to incur taxes for their customers, for their investors. And so if you own an etf, you should never have to pay taxes on the trades that the ETF does. They could do cash stock trading. They don't anymore because they learned.

[A]

Why would they?

[B]

They've learned that they don't have to. There's a thing called a heartbeat, which is like a way you can, like, move stocks out of the ETF and move new stocks in without incurring taxes. So this is great. You can run an actively managed ETF without paying taxes. Now, I say it's great. It's obviously great for the customer. A few years ago, Bloomberg Zack Mitre had a big story about this, sort of suggesting that maybe it's not great and that in fact, it is a dodge around the tax rules. It's just like a matter of perspective. If you think that ETFs are supposed to not pay taxes, then, yeah, it's great. If you think that you're supposed to pay taxes when you sell stock, then it's not great, but it's just an aesthetic question. And that's where the state of the art was a few years ago. And then people realized that if an ETF is an entity that can trade stock without paying taxes, like a lot of people want to be able to do that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So like, why shouldn't you, like a rich family, also be an ETF and not have to pay taxes when you sell stock? And so that's what people have invented, which is called the 351 exchange ETF, which is you make yourself into an ETF and then you don't have to pay taxes when you sell stock.

[A]

Yeah, it's quite good. And there's some for them notable Bloomberg News had a great big take on this this week and they, they scraped the filings and they identified some of those wealthy families.

[B]

One of them is the guy who invented the hot pocket.

[A]

Yeah. The family behind the hot pocket, Gabe Plotkin. Sure of Gamestop fame. And then the real.

[B]

He doesn't have one yet. He's like thinking, he's like contemplating.

[A]

I think he's filed.

[B]

I'm saying about this because like one thing I wrote about this and not to get too ahead of ourselves, is like these things are technically public with their exchange rate. You and I, you and I could buy shares of this ETF. I feel like the GameStop people are going to find the Gabe Plotkin ETF. What are they going to do with it? I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, that's a good question.

[B]

It's like his personal wealth is exchange traded now or will be.

[A]

And so basically I, a wealthy investor, take my portfolio of appreciated and probably concentrated assets to the etf.

[B]

Yeah. There's a footnote unconstitated, but go on.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking can't be too concentrated.

[B]

But you can. There are ways around that. There are ways around that.

[A]

Yeah. Maybe your portfolio is more concentrated than you would like it to be. You take it to the ETF or you make an ETF and then it uses in kind to basically diversify your portfolio.

[B]

Once the stuff is in the etf, you can sell your concentrated low basis stock and, and use the proceeds to buy S&P 500 or whatever. Without paying current taxes.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Because you're not selling it, you're like in kind swapping it.

[A]

Yeah. You're just deferring.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You decide when you want to take the tax hit.

[B]

Yeah. If you sell the etf Shares. If you take cash out of the

[A]

thing, then you pay taxes, but unless you die.

[B]

Unless you die. Right, which is not advised, but it kind of is. Right.

[A]

Yes. For your heirs.

[B]

Right. You know, I used to always quote my tax professor in law school, he had two laws of tax which is that it's always better to make more money than less money and always better to die later than sooner. But neither of the things is always absolutely true from a tax perspective anyway. But yeah, if you die, then your heir's gonna basis step up and you never pay any of the taxes on the gains.

[A]

So Bloomberg had this great article this week just sort of outlining how much of a thing it's become. I think they found, crunching the filings that 105 of these ETFs have been created.

[B]

So it's so wild because it's like there's all sorts of like high net worth tax strategies that you don't see public filings for because like this one, to save taxes, you have to become an etf. So you have to like exchange, trade your stock portfolio so you can find them.

[A]

Bloomberg News also had a scoop this week out that the Treasury Department considers some of these products as abusive and is looking at its tools, tools that it has available to address this proliferation. And it wasn't just 351s. They were also looking at box spread ETFs. And then there's like, have we talked

[B]

about the box spread ETFs? That's a good one.

[A]

That's another Zack Miter.

[B]

Yeah, we'll leave it for now.

[A]

But Zack Mitre, he actually has a

[B]

Pulitzer Prize which is for reporting about taxes.

[A]

Pretty cool. But yeah, looking at some of the reporting that we have, there's an interesting quote in the Big Take about what might be inviting more regulatory scrutiny now. And this has been going on for like two years. But what's become a little bit different is now you have some issuers who aren't just working with one individual, very wealthy family, they're like soliciting seed contributions.

[B]

This is productized. If you could do that the first time you do this, you have to do it for a billionaire because it's expensive to figure it out the hundredth time you do it, it's like, yeah,

[A]

it costs like the 106th time you do it.

[B]

So it's definitely being productized. The other thing that I think there's a little bit of subtext stuff is that there is a requirement that the portfolio you contribute has to be fairly diversified. You can't have more than. It's 25% of your money in one stock or more than 50% in five stocks. The most obvious use of this trade is you're a startup founder, you have zero basis super appreciated stock, you go public, you have a billion dollars of built in gains and you want to diversify without selling. And so you put it into an etf. You can't do that. You can't do that with just one stock. You need to have a diversified portfol. My understanding is that people have found borrowing mechanisms where you take your appreciated stock, you borrow a lot of money to contribute other stock, and then you have the diversified portfolio and then you can do the whole trade. So that seems like cheating too.

[A]

Yeah. When it comes to the Treasury Department getting upset about these things, it kind of reminds me of a conversation that we've had about crypto a bunch of times, which is it's in the code, you know, it's in the tax code. This is all.

[B]

That's not really true, is it? There is some treasury regulation that determines exactly what the contours of this are. And the treasury could change the regulation. Yeah, but also, like, tax is a weird system because I know, like, you're like, oh, crypto code is law. It's in the code. That's not how tax works. Tax always has like a form and function analysis where like, even if you can like find your way through the rules, judges and the IRS will be skeptical if you're doing stuff that like, clearly has only the purpose of evading taxes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So tax is not exactly a code as law world, even though the code is literally the law.

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

I know. I understand. As a former derivative structure and lover of financial shenanigans, I'm also disappointed. But as a lawyer and citizen, I'm like, I shouldn't be able to get away with too much.

[A]

Well, put this on the list of the things that I'll be looking at in six months. Will the treasury actually do anything about it? Or the forum in which they said that they considered some of these products abusive and that they were looking at. It was an industry gathering that Bloomberg News reported on. Yeah, it wasn't.

[B]

Take it back a little bit, guys. It's not like the Hot Pockets family are going to jail. It's like, you know.

[A]

But will they progress beyond worried noises? I don't know. Remains to be seen. Money Stuff is brought to you by OTC Markets Group. Thinking about joining the exploding overnight market space but unsure where to start. Designed to meet the needs of a growing international investor base. OTC Markets Overnight Platform for Exchange Listed Securities Moon ATS provides access to Global securities in US dollars from 8:00pm to 4:00am Eastern Sunday through Thursday. Extend your trading day and trade Global securities in US dollars through a FINRA licensed broker dealer. In the first half of 2026, over US$28.1 billion traded on Moon ATS. Learn more about Moon ATS visit otcmarkets.com Moon Moon ATS is operated by OTC Link, LLC, a FINRA registered broker dealer. The Bloomberg this Weekend Podcast News, Politics and the Lighter side of Bloomberg the Great wealth transfer includes $570 billion in classic cars. I'm not in a position to be inheriting any classic car. My brother did inherit my non classic

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[A]

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[B]

Speaking of regulators making worried noises, should we talk about Gary Gensler's cell phone?

[A]

Got it.

[B]

Can I tell you so this is incredible. So Gary Gensler was the chair of the SEC in the Biden administration and during his reign as chair of the SEC he spearheaded a crackdown on investment bankers texting on their personal phones about work that extracted billions of dollars of funds from banks, brokerages, ratings agencies, private like everyone had to cough up money because it turns out that there is not a financial services firm on earth that never had an employee who texted about work on their personal phones.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So that was kind of like his big initiative at the sec. That and cracking down on crypto. Before he was the chair of the sec quite a long time before he was the chair of the cftc, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which I only

[A]

fully appreciated like two weeks ago.

[B]

It was in like the 2000 and tens. During that time MF Global, the futures brokerage run by Jon Corzine collapsed and there was some controversy there because Corzine is quite politically connected and it was partners at Goldman with Gensler and I think Gensler recused himself from the review. But anyway political stuff came up and there were reviews of this and it turned out that Gensler had been emailing CFTC staff about MF Global from his personal email on his personal computer and it turns out that the reason he did that was that. And this is from like a Wall Street Journal story about the CFTC inspector general report. Mr. Gensler repeatedly Use his personal email while dealing with MF Global issues while he was away from the Agency's Washington headquarters saying, quote, he did not know how to access his official email at. Anyway, anyway, that's just good comedy. So then he ran the sec, he cracked down on crypto and cell phones.

[A]

And this is a neat intersection, actually of both of those things.

[B]

Right. So JP Morgan paid like a $200 million fine. Right. And the SEC goes after JP Morgan for the phones. Like, JP Morgan is not going to like, go to court and fight tooth and nail because, you know, it's like a repeat player. It has to have the favor of the sec. He also went after Coinbase to just shut down Coinbase. There was, let's compromise. It was like Coinbase crypto, all of it illegal. So Coinbase had really no choice but to fight tooth and nail. And one thing they did as part of their just, you know, all out war with the SEC was send the SEC a subpoena saying, we want to review Gary Gensler's communications about the crypto industry to see if he had buy, you know, whatever, like, and a judge is like, okay, you can ask for that. And so they said, you know, please give us any messages from Gary Gensler's home phone too, his personal phone too, about the crypto industry. And the SEC came back and said, we accidentally deleted all of Gary Gensler's communications from the relevant time period because of an IT misunderstanding. And so this week, Coinbase published an op ed in the Wall Street Journal gloating about they've settled at the SEC. No longer the Gary Gensler SEC. A more sympathetic SEC. They've settled at the SEC, which has agreed pay them $150,000 for cell phone

[A]

misuse, which is not very much.

[B]

It's not very much compared to the $200 million that JP Morgan paid. But, you know, the SEC is somewhat less profitable.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Also, it's just like, I guess it's

[A]

more symbolic than anything else.

[B]

It's more symbolic than anything else. Although I wrote about this, like, if I'm the banks who paid these penalties, I'd be a little tempted to ask for a refund, a partial refund. Be like, hey guys, can we see your communications about cell phones? And they'll be like, no, you can't. Because as we already know, we deleted them all and then strike a settlement. But again, banks are in a different position from Coinbase. They have to sort of stay friendly with the regulator. Like Coinbase.

[A]

Yeah, Coinbase. I was reading this and I was in some ways reminded of GrayScale suing the SEC after they had been repeatedly denied Converting GBTC into an etf.

[B]

Well, this was a bomb period where the SEC was like, absolutely opposed to crypto in all forms. And if you're a crypto firm, you have nothing to lose, you know? Yeah, you got to fight the sec. The posture of, like, traditional financial services has never been, we're going to fight the SEC to the death because you just need a lot of, like, regulatory sympathy from them. But in crypto, that was just not true.

[A]

Yeah, well, maybe we won't see banks do this. Maybe you'll see more crypto firms do this. But.

[B]

Well, the crypto firms didn't pay the cell phone funds. Although, interestingly, like when the SEC brought its big case against Coinbase, basically saying, you know, you're operating an illegal securities exchange, you're not registered as a national securities exchange, and you're trading all these crypto tokens that we think are securities. Right. One of the things they said in that is by not registering as a securities exchange, Coinbase is not complying with record keeping obligations. So, like, the SEC wanted to see Coinbase's software too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But instead they were a host on their own cell phone.

[A]

Some poetic justice for Coinbase.

[B]

It's really very funny. It's really like, Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer at Coinbase, wrote this op ed in the Wall Street Journal just to gloat, you know.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, why not?

[B]

Just to be like, you know, ha ha. And like, I did hear from like one or two financial services firms being like, God bless them, Gosh, people were not happy about the cell ph.

[A]

Let's talk about truth API.

[B]

Yeah. It's so wild this happened last week, but it's like, still reverberating.

[A]

I know it's naive, but my primary, most urgent question remains. It's like, how is this legal help?

[B]

Like, like, the answer is, if Trump does it, it's legal.

[A]

That's not satisfying.

[B]

It's very unsatisfying. No, like, so Trump Media, which is, please, have we mentioned, is a nuclear fusion company.

[A]

I feel like we have.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I had no recollection of that until you said it.

[B]

I forget. But no. So Trump Media and Technology Corp. Publicly traded, you know, multi billion dollar market cap company, is a social media platform. Its revenue is something like a million dollars a quarter from, I don't know, ads, untruth, social maybe or something. I don't really know. Not from nuclear fusion, amusingly. But they did buy a nuclear fusion company. They're merging with a nuclear fusion company. Their business is now a social media company, some like, ETF stuff and a nuclear fusion company.

[A]

Perfect.

[B]

But their social media company has a new revenue source, which is that they've announced that they're launching an API where you can get fast, let's say fast access to tweets, truths posts on Truth Social. Now, most social media companies have APIs. So, like on X you can get access to like the fire hose of posts on X. But Truth Social is launching an API with 10 accounts. So you can get fast access to 10 accounts because you don't care about everyone posting on Truth Social. No, you would probably pay more for one account. But that one account, Donald Trump's account, is very market moving.

[A]

Yeah. And very active.

[B]

And very active. And people, you know, have, they currently scrape it and they have automated tools to, you know, ingest Donald Trump's market moving pronouncements and trade on them. And Truth Social is like, we want some of that revenue. So instead of just giving it to everyone at the same time for free, they'll. They'll give it to hedge funds and quantitative trading firms who pay $100,000 a month early. Now, they say it's not early, they say it's at the same time as everyone else, which is like a philosophical. Like if you get the feed from Truth Social at the same time that, like, it gets sent to, like, you know, render in the browser, like, you get it a little faster. Yeah, it's just like you, it arrives at your computers before it arrives at the eyeballs of other people. Right. But it's like, whatever, it's imperceptibly faster. It's a millisecond faster. And that is long enough for a high frequency trading firm to make use of the information. So they're sort of selling advanced access to the US Government's policy pronouncements, but they're only selling a millisecond of advanced access. So it's like. Yeah, it's deniable.

[A]

Yeah. Apparently this is launching August 1st. This is a done deal.

[B]

Apparently. Got at least five firms signed up, which means that the majority of their revenue will come from selling advanced access to Trump's pronouncements. Right. Because they make, you know, a million dollars a quarter. Right. So five subscribers at $100,000 a month is like, you know, $1.5 million a quarter. So most of the revenue is going to become from selling advanced access to Trump's policy pronouncements, which is quite a business. Quite a business. And, you know, eventually will be superseded by all the revenue from nuclear fusion.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But for now, selling advanced access to tweets.

[A]

Again, I don't know. I go back to my naive question, like, how could this be legal given that we do get policy via posts?

[B]

It's just a bizarre new world.

[A]

It is.

[B]

You know, it's interesting. If you were like posting on Twitter or X, right, and X sells an API, you could argue that X would be making money by selling advance access to US policy pronouncements.

[A]

Mm.

[B]

And X would probably say no. Look like every organization has a, you know, advanced data feed. The New York Times and Bloomberg will deliver news to subscribers. Right. Like people pay for access to news.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's different though. It's one thing to say if X did it, they would be reasonable. It's different when the company is majority owned by the president. Right. Like he is profiting on his own policy pronouncements and creation of volatility. Yeah, that's what everyone wants, man. That's what everyone wants.

[A]

Apparently. According to reporting, the pitch included a quote attributed to a J.P. morgan portfolio manager saying we're one Truth Social post away from being up or down 5% every day.

[B]

It's in the pitch.

[A]

It's in the pitch.

[B]

The pitch is like, this guy creates so much volatility you need to pay us to get advanced access to it.

[A]

Yeah. I do wonder, I mean, how true that is. I feel like we could be over egging just the amount of useful signal that comes from these Truth Social posts. I mean, hedge funds are going to pay for it.

[B]

If you're a big high frequency trading firm, like a million dollars a year to once a year with reasonably high probability, get out first in a catastrophic market drop because he declares war on Truth Social media.

[A]

Yeah, easy, Fair. I mean, yes, the price, it's not like every day.

[B]

It's a huge source of value. It's like insurance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's protection money.

[A]

Yeah, but even still, I don't know, it feels reminiscent of the taco discussion. Like what he's putting out on Truth Social doesn't actually always match what happens in reality.

[B]

You definitely need like an AI model to try to extract some signals from it in the millisecond advantage you get.

[A]

But like, yeah, there's signals, there are signals. I just wonder if some of his posts might lose their potency.

[B]

Yeah, but this is not a hundred million dollar a year business. But it's a million dollar a year business for five quant trading firms.

[A]

Well, I'm excited for their next earnings report.

[B]

I actually am. Because the revenue will triple, quadruple and it will all come from this.

[A]

That's the thing. I feel like you'll be able to back it out.

[B]

They might just break it out separately.

[A]

That would be useful.

[B]

It's a teeny tiny business. But even if they don't, because the run rate has been pretty steadily, like a million dollars of miscellaneous. I've always joked that it's like a substack. It makes about as much money as a well read substack newsletter, but it pays $100 million a year in executive benefits. But now it'll be slightly different. Slightly different. I do want to tell you one other thing.

[A]

Yeah, please.

[B]

Started to talk about.

[A]

Yeah. And then we quickly shushed ourselves because

[B]

we wanted to save it for the podcast. But I got an email today and I wrote about it. Someone's launching sports indexes, which is yet another like a pincer movement around sports ETFs.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What does that mean?

[A]

Yeah, tell me what this means.

[B]

I hoped it meant that like when the index goes up, it's because sports are up.

[A]

Just general sports.

[B]

Sports vibes are good, they're more sporting, more points are being scored. But that's not what it means. What it actually means is that like they have a sports index for each team. I think eventually athletes do, but whatever.

[A]

But like for each sports team.

[B]

Yeah. So like each team in season. So each baseball team, let's say right now, will have a. Will have an index and the index, broadly speaking, will go up when the team wins or does other good stuff. Will go down when the team loses or does other bad stuff. Exactly how, like what the methodology of that is. I don't know. The point, I think, I think is we've talked about the sports gambling ETFs, right? So right now there's like a proposed sports gambling ETF where it's like actively managed, non transparent. A guy makes some bets and you hope the guy makes some good bets. Yeah, you can't like sit down and watch a game and be like, oh, I hope this team wins because it's in my portfolio. Right. Because you don't even know. Right. Or like, but it's not like transparent. And we talked about, like, they should just be like a bet on the Mets ETF where, you know, it doubles if the Mets win and goes to zero if the Mets lose. But that's really inconvenient because your ETF goes to zero. You have to kind of restart from scratch every day. This whole thing, the index just solves the problem. The index is like, the index is at like 7,000. And if the Mets win, it goes to like, 7,500. Right. So you're just in a continuous ETF that goes up and down with the Mets winning and losing. You buy your favorite team's ETF index. ETF putting index in quotes. Because it's not an index. It's called an index, but it's just like some sort of numerical translation of the team's performance. And then, like, if the team does well, you make money, and if it does poorly, you lose money. And so you have, like, sports gambling, but in a true ETF wrapper.

[A]

So by the time I come back, there's going to be like, double.

[B]

There's like eight different product structures of sports ETFs. Yeah.

[A]

Maybe you can get some, like, pear trade I'm going to have left to

[B]

become a consultant for. Isn't that just inevitable?

[A]

I mean, just wait until I'm back or. I don't know, maybe.

[B]

I'm kidding, by the way. I would never. I would never.

[A]

There's a twinkle in his eyes.

[B]

There's a something in my eyes.

[A]

Oh, my God, it's a tear.

[B]

Tear.

[A]

Also speaking into existence, someone's definitely going to launch a diversified ETF of 351 exchange ETFs.

[B]

Oh, I joked about that, but they're not really.

[A]

You got to be careful with these jokes.

[B]

I know, like, someone emailed me to be like, yeah, but like, look at what's actually in it. Right. So, like, first of all, there's a pretty high management fee on these ETFs, because they are. They're not an ETF. They're like someone's tax advisor getting paid for tax advice. Right. So the management fee is high. And secondly, it is essentially some guy's diversified portfolio, which means that what the ETF manager does is go out and buy diversified ETFs. So these ETFs are wrapped around QQQ and Spy and whatever. And so you're paying two levels of fees to own, like, these people's portfolios. And it's not really a good product for anyone other than the rich family that plopped the stuff into the 350.

[A]

You're not actually getting Hot Pockets.

[B]

You're not getting hot. You're not getting. You're not getting a lot of special sauce. You're getting, like, these people have made a lot of money doing something else. And now they're like, coasting and diversifying. And you're getting the coasting and diversifying with two layers of fees. And then if as I joked, someone launches a diversified ETF of these ETFs, then you're paying three levels of fees, which is too much, probably, but someone will do it. Why not? Yeah, because like, the pitch of the diversified ETF is like, look at all these rich families with, like, fancy financial advice. They have created these bespoke ETFs just for themselves. Don't you want the same financial product as the founding family of Hot Pockets? You can get it with our diversified etf. It's a good pitch. It's just, like, wrong.

[A]

Yeah, it doesn't bear out that way.

[B]

Right. And that was the Money Stuff podcast. I'm Matt Levine.

[A]

And I'm Katie Greifeld.

[B]

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money stuff newsletter on bloomberg.com

[A]

and you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on the close between 3 and 5pm Eastern.

[B]

We'd love to hear from you. You can send an email to moneypodoomberg.net Ask us a question and we might answer it on the air.

[A]

You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.

[B]

The Money Stuff podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Ondahn.

[A]

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

[B]

Amy Keen is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff. Sam.