Blogger to Substack

I wrote my first blog post on September 17, 2008, five days into a market crisis that changed the way I thought about economies, markets and business, and I posted it on Google Blogger. In the fourteen years since, I have added 635 more posts, on topics ranging the spectrum in finance, and I am grateful for all of the people who have read or browsed through these posts (21.6 million, if the Google counter is to be believed). In the course of writing these posts, I have been forced to rethink and reexamine my core beliefs about markets, and frame my thoughts in a way that appeal to a broader audience. My posts are long and verbose, and I am sorry for that failing, but the 9000+ pages that they comprise have given birth to at least two books, allowed me to update my other eight and given me the raw material for my teaching. In short, almost every new idea that I have had, every company that I have valued and every one of my investment thoughts in the last fifteen years has shown up first on my blog.

Along the way, I have considered moving from Google Blogger to more powerful platforms, and have generally decided that the benefits of doing so would exceed the costs. Google has offered me a free and powerful vehicle for my posts, and I am grateful for that. Since I have no desire to run ads or monetize my posts, alternative platforms that offer better ways of doing so don’t appeal to me. My one concern, though, is that since Blogger is such a tiny part of the Google portfolio, it could very well be abandoned by the company, and it is, my posts could very disappear into virtual nothingness.

Since some of the writers I enjoy reading are on Substack, I was intrigued by its look and structure. When I realized how easily my Google posts (all 636) could be ported from Blogger to Substack, I decided to duplicate my site on this new platform. If you are a cynic and wondering what it will cost you, the Substack version of my blog will continue to be free of ads and subscription charges, and I will continue to add my new posts on both Blogger and Substack. If you do receive my posts as emails, you may want to consider shifting to Substack, because it has a more polished set up for adding your name to a mailing list, and for formatting the posts for emails.

In short, I am not trying to change the way I write posts and how I share them, but I am following the first rule in finance, of diversification (across platforms). If you are happy reading my posts on Blogger, please continue to do so, and you won’t notice a difference. If you would like to try out the Substack version, and if it works better for you, I would love to see you there.