#287: Raw and Uncut

Michael Berman, Ph.D.
May 05, 2025

2,131 active subscribers.

S2N Spotlight

This letter is straight from the heart, raw and uncut.

From today you will see the active number of subscribers at the top of the email updated dynamically each day. This way you can track my progress in real time if that is of any interest.

I come from a family where we talk numbers. When someone says they are doing well, what does that mean if there are no numbers offered? I prefer it when someone says I am doing well, I made $x, or I have grown by y%. It is not because I need to know the actual amount it is because I have no context without it.

I have been writing for 14 months and have finally broken through 2,000 active subscribers. I never had the confidence to share this number before, as I was embarrassed by how few people were reading me. We all have an ego, despite our attempts to kill it. Somehow 1,999 is beneath me, yet 2,000 is ok. What a load of nonsense.

I have started and sold or closed a number of companies, at least 5 in the last 10 years, and with the sale goes the mailing list. So 14 months ago, with zero budget and recovering from a nasty business divorce, I started again.

I think I have made every mistake in the book, but I have learned fast and hustled more than I have probably hustled in my entire business career.

I am no longer shy about the 2,000+ subscribers; I am particularly proud of the open rate for a daily newsletter. The quality of people who subscribe is of a particularly high calibre—yes, that is you. The people who subscribe are captains of industry, medical professionals, top-rated economists, hedge fund managers of billion-dollar funds, asset managers of large pension and mutual funds, and traders with exemplary and not-so-good track records; investors and traders wanting to learn; and then of course there is my most important subscriber, my 78-year-old mother.

My mum taught me to do my first trade at age 13; I still remember Samancor, a manganese mine. I still don’t know what manganese does other than make for expensive urine if you buy the vitamin supplements. She drove me to the stockbroker to fill in the transfer forms and collect certificates on a regular basis as we bought and sold shares on tips. I loved walking into those fancy offices. Not a day passes where my mum doesn’t read my letters and comment with encouragement and questions. She is my greatest fan, and I am blessed to experience such unconditional love.

I like numbers, so I've been tracking things wanting to share for some time. The latest month is a week short, as my month starts on the 12th of the month. Maintaining and increasing my growth rate is a key objective of mine.

Just to complete this chapter, let me share how I have grown to 2,000 subscribers.

A fair number of you will have joined from LinkedIn, where I had/have some software running, inviting and messaging you to try S2N out in the background 🤫🤫. I promise all replies were me, but the chances are the first interaction came from a machine.

Beehiiv has been a revelation for me; I have grown a lot from the platform and Boosts in particular.

For some reason I have recently been attracted to cold mailing. For those who don’t know how this works, you purchase or scrape the emails of people who you think will appreciate your work. You then buy some domains and emails that are similar to the main one, as you don’t want the main domain to be banned as spam, and then you send thousands of emails trying to hook people. I get a buzz out of the infrastructure setup and the idea that a machine is working day and night for you.

I am still a rookie and learning my way around warming up the emails and making sure my emails land in the inbox and not spam. Here are my results so far. My conversion rate is below 2%, which is disappointing. Either I am targeting the wrong people or my landing page isn’t inspiring enough to convert them to subscribers.

On Friday I started a new strategy of building some lead magnets that I can exchange for a subscription to the newsletter for a free download. I haven’t yet released it into the wild other than to my list. Let’s see if it gives us a boost.

I am fortunate to have had a sponsor, Trade Nation, a quality broker, for nearly 12 months. My goal is to keep this publication free for readers forever. Therefore, sponsors are the lifeblood of this venture. Drop me a note.

I have a number of ideas to help grow the list, which I will experiment with over the next few months and share progress with you.

I have been building the Research Portal in public, and while it is still very much a work in progress, I remain confident this will become one of the most important features of the Signal2Noise platform. It annoys me that it has taken so long to get what I built months ago online. I have written thousands of lines of code that I have to prune and get into a format that I can show online the way I like to display things. Watch this space; the value is real, and it’s on me to showcase it. I guess I should do some YouTube videos explaining it and why it is of value.

Finally, if you would be so kind as to forward my work around and encourage people to sign up and try it, I will forever be grateful. I know that I am not for everyone. I am opinionated and sometimes flippant, but I am a truth seeker and a creative thinker, sometimes too contrarian. What I do guarantee is endless passion to do my best and share my insights in as unfiltered/unbiased a manner as possible.

S2N Observations

I have already taken a lot of your time, and new subscribers over the weekend are probably thinking, WTF.” It would be embarrassing if the active subscriber count read 1,900 tomorrow 😎.

Warren Buffet has done it again. Mr. Wonderful has increased Berkshire’s cash holdings to a record $347 billion and completely sidestepped all the market turmoil this year and resigned at the top of his game.

The famed investor delivered more than a 5,500,000% return on Berkshire’s stock. The man is a genius and someone who has made a real difference to the world with his prodigious talent.

Just a concluding thought about the stock market.

If you make the mistake of judging your performance every time you look at the performance of your portfolio, then you are bound to second-guess your decisions.

We now have many bears throwing in the towel thinking they made a mistake; this was a buy the dip moment. I disagree. Markets were very expensive prior to the tariff wrecking ball, and the reality of the situation still needs to wash through the system. Keep you on the prize and leave the day-to-day market prognosticating to the talking heads on TV and X. The S&P 500 is still in a -7% drawdown, which I believe will soon start to increase.