2022 Year in Review. Thank You!

The year is drawing to a close, let's review FinanceTLDR's 2022. Sharing newsletter stats and our favorite issues published this year.

This has been a wild year.

The major US stock indices closed out 2022 with their worst performance since 2008. Bonds have fared terribly as well. The Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index fell by more than 11% this year. In its 45 years of existence, the index has only fallen five times with 1994 being its next steepest drop at 2.9%.

This has also been an extraordinary year for international politics. From a land war in Europe, to pandemic turmoil in China, to a Federal Reserve that seems intent on bringing the US economy into a recession, the world feels like it’s in fast-forward mode.

Humanity is sprinting through uncharted territory.

2022 in a nutshell.

As for this humble, mundane, and not-so-extraordinary finance newsletter, 2022 has also been a pivotal year.

Last year, the team set a goal of reaching 1,000 subscribers by year-end. This year, the newsletter surpassed 6,000 subscribers with 1,500 consistent readers per issue. We cannot be more grateful to our readers for keeping up with the newsletter, issue after issue.

It has been a ton of work but your readership made the countless hours of research, writing, and proofreading worth it.

This year, we published 90 newsletter issues with a total word count of over 120,000. That’s basically a novel! Across all issues, the word “inflation” appeared exactly 500 times.

Here are our top 5 favorite issues for the year.

May 27th - Swimming With Rebalancing Whales!

Exploring why four major market corrections leading up to the end of 2020 ended with V-shaped bottoms in the last week of a financial quarter. A very interesting way to predict how big money moves markets.

---

May 16th - What the Fed Is Really Scared About

In this issue published early in the year, we discussed how much of a problem the hot labor market would be for the Federal Reserve. Today, while other inflation drivers are cooling off, the labor market is still extraordinarily tight and that’s all Fed Chair Jerome Powell could talk about in the most recent FOMC press conference.

---

Oct 17th - This Time, It’s Different

Even as the market shrugged off interest rate hikes and focused on the possibility of cooling inflation and slowing rate hikes as bullish signals, we discussed why the delayed negative impact of rate hikes on the economy will likely cause a recession in the next year. Fast forward two months and a recession in 2023 is now the topic du jour in financial media.

---

July 29th - The Unstoppable TikTok

Exploring what makes TikTok so powerful as a social media platform. We came up with a framework that we’re calling “Time to Emotional Engagement” to better describe why TikTok is so much better at drawing the attention of its users vs other social media platforms.

---

Nov 11th - Binance Finishes Off FTX

Crypto seems to have interesting things happening at all times and this was certainly the story of the year for the burgeoning industry. Who would’ve thought a multi-billion dollar company could be destroyed in just a few tweets but 2022 just does not disappoint!

Thank You, See You Next Year!

We had a blast writing for FinanceTLDR this year and we hope readers found the newsletter not only interesting to read but informative as well.

Next year, we’re going to work even harder at upping our research and writing quality. This is a never-ending learning process in our goal to be a super easy-to-read and highly informative finance publication that takes respecting your time seriously.

Thank you and see you next year!