RIP: @Nonrelatedsense

I didn’t know the Tweeter known as @Nonrelatedsense, but I interacted with him many times. I’m deeply saddened to learn of his passing. He was a great addition to the sometimes-raucous arena we call Finance Twitter.

Jason Zweig added in the WSJ:

That’s never been clearer than it was a few days ago, when the person behind the @Nonrelatedsense account died, prompting an outpouring of love and grief in the financial quadrant of Twitter known as FinTwit. (Although I know who he was and where he worked, I’m honoring the wishes of his family and friends to preserve his anonymity.)

Those who followed him, even without meeting him in real life, felt as if we had lost one of our smartest friends.

NRS tweeted more than 117,000 times—an inimitable mix of investing insights, snarky quips, nature photographs and cocktail recipes. He exchanged what had to be thousands of direct messages with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people who sought his opinions. (I was among them.)

NRS was blunt, cynical, often profane, but seldom cruel—even though he saw clearly that the business model of many financial companies is to pile up mountains of fees from a blizzard of flim-flam and gibberish. A financial adviser obsessed with mutual funds and income-oriented investments, he could smell baloney in a single sniff—and as soon as he detected it, he mocked it.

At the same time, his tweets and messages were infused with skeptical wisdom and profound uncertainty about how much anyone can ever know (“your confidence in this thesis is far too high to be credible”).

“I only knew him through his Twitter identity,” Cliff Asness, co-founder of AQR Capital Management in Greenwich, Conn., which manages $194 billion in assets, told me this week. “But it was very clear he was very knowledgeable about finance, a great wit and committed to the truth.”

Jason was kind enough to add me to his list of Tweeters who provide “witty but informative market takes.”

Posted by on July 19th, 2019 at 4:54 pm


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