The Financial Times’ markets blog, FT Alphaville, launched a free weekly newsletter on Substack on November 21, 2025, as a means of reaching a younger investor demographic. The newsletter, released every Friday, aims to provide a curated package of Alphaville’s analysis alongside financial content from across the web and charts from the wider Financial Times.
According to Sarah Ebner, Director of Editorial Growth and Engagement at the FT, the decision to utilize Substack was informed by research indicating a strong resonance between Alphaville’s content and younger readers. The FT views Substack as a platform where this audience is already active, offering a direct communication channel. The newsletter is not intended to replace the existing Alphaville blog, which remains the central hub for the team’s operations.
The Alphaville team, led by editor Robin Wigglesworth, includes Louis Ashworth, who joined in September 2022, and newsletter anchor Bryce Elder. Wigglesworth described the newsletter as being “for smart, open-minded readers who are curious about markets, economics, and the geeky mechanics of finance, even if they don’t work in those fields.”
The Substack newsletter offers a blend of original reporting, curated content, and visual elements. It includes a selection of charts from across the Financial Times. The newsletter also serves as a promotional tool for Alphaville’s offline events, including pub quizzes, chart shows, and social gatherings.
FT Alphaville was originally launched in 2006 as a service providing financial market professionals with timely information. The platform’s purpose, according to its “About” page, remains to cater to an audience that is “smart, informed, questioning, open-minded, sometimes obsessive and occasionally unserious.” Readers can access Alphaville content by registering with their email address for “free limited access.”
The launch of the Substack newsletter represents a broader shift in how financial news is distributed and consumed, acknowledging that younger investors are increasingly accessing information through inboxes and Substack feeds rather than traditional news websites. The FT is attempting to bypass the challenges of search engine visibility and the unreliability of social media algorithms by delivering content directly to subscribers.
