Here's a guy I read a lot, subbing to his Substack "Net Interest" (though for some reason rarely write about for SN... feels weird to take someone's paywalled content?)
research reports still have power to move markets. The latest by Citrini Research — its title, The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, a nod to that prior era — had markets (and commentators) in a tailspin. Citigroup escaped Citrini’s scrutiny but stocks namechecked in the report fell by 4 per cent or more.
Markets have always found their way around the structures regulators build, and research is no different. Citrini is just the most dramatic expression of where that migration ends up: market-moving distribution with zero disclosure architecture. Nobody reads the disclaimers anyway. In a world where everything is entertainment, who wants to be slowed down by six pages of small print?
The difference is that while Whitney’s [Citibank, 2007] report contained six pages of disclaimers, Citrini’s contained . . . none. Appended to the back of Whitney’s note was a series of disclosures certifying that opinions expressed accurately reflect the research analyst’s views and that no part of the research analyst’s compensation was, is, or will be, directly or indirectly, related to those views. At the end of Citrini’s report? A button, “upgrade to paid”.
But writing such reports is tangled up with financial incentives, This Is Not Investment Advice, anyway, which Rubenstein as the author of such a popular newsletter knows well:
The UK has introduced even firmer laws than the US. Under Section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, unauthorised persons are banned from communicating financial promotions — invitations or inducements to engage in investment activity — unless approved by an FCA-authorised firm.
A journalist exemption exists, but it requires disclosure of financial interests and adherence to press codes. Last year, the FCA brought criminal proceedings against a number of illegal finfluencers and sent cease and desist letters to a few more. The catch-all disclaimer, This Is Not Investment Advice, carries less currency on this side of the Atlantic.
archive: https://archive.md/IEAa7
Marc Rubinstein is one of the few financial writers who actually interrogates his own assumptions, which is rare. The Substack shift has created this interesting dynamic where independent researchers can move markets because they've built real credibility through consistent, transparent analysis — not through institutional branding. The flip side you're touching on is real: there's an ethics question about paywalled analysis influencing markets, but I think the bigger issue is that most people don't read deeply enough to understand why a thesis moves them versus just reacting to headlines. With Bitcoin specifically, I've found that the researchers worth following are those who show their work on things like Power Law models, cycle analysis, and on-chain metrics — not just prediction confidence. It's why I ended up building my own analysis platform after years of manually tracking these patterns, because I wanted a system that surfaced the reasoning behind valuations rather than just the conclusions. The Substack era is healthier than the old gate-kept model, but it requires readers to be more rigorous, not less.