It’s the one list no finfluencer wants to find themself on this time of year
Who will take home the annual award for financial Twitter's naughtiest know-it-all?
Back in 2012, one of FinTwit’s early adopters got an idea.
An awful idea.
The account known as @fed_speak got a wonderful, awful idea:
With more and more hucksters & promoters joining rapidly growing financial Twitter to pontificate, prevaricate, and monetize followers, he thought, why not run a contest to pick the most insufferable markets bloviator of the preceding 12 months?
“At the time, FinTwit was a way to get real-time market-moving news and then have real time conversations about it with a small community of smart people,” @fed_speak told finfluential. (We’re not publishing @Fed_Speak’s name, though he was famously doxxed by none other than Martin Shkreli—more on that later.)
“The grift had just started to kind of peek its way through,” he continued. “FinTwit was growing, but there were people that were clearly talking way above their head or talking a book they don’t own or a hedge fund they don’t manage … clearly trying to take advantage of retail investors. So, I just kind of threw up a poll; you know, it was like a Google sheet.”
Thus was born, somewhere on a Merrill Lynch server, the Finance Charlatan of the Year Award.
Prominent boosters
A few hundred people voted that first year, but FCOTY has grown to attract several thousand participants annually. It didn’t hurt that @fed_speak had several finfluential friends on line, including Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, who spread the word about #FCOTY to his thousands of followers.
Most years, @fed_speak starts putting the slate of candidates together in early December—basically, he says, whenever he can find a free morning. (He was at Merrill when he started the contest, but now works in a corporate finance department.)
The list of nominees is loosely curated. He puts a few obvious candidates on the ballot right away, but most names are crowdsourced from his community of followers: “If 15 people want the same person on the ballot, I’ll put that person on the ballot.” He also accepts—and ultimately publishes the list of—write-ins.
The recipient, along with two runners up, is announced in the following weeks.
The “winners” circle
Dynasties come and go. The first three years were dominated by Hedgeye founder Keith McCullough, a former trader who has built a significant (280,000) following on Twitter, where he shares trade ideas and promotes various paid research offerings.
While some past Charlatans literally were convicted of financial crimes, @fed_speak attributes McCullough’s still unprecedented threepeat to nothing so much as his style.
“He’s more of a blowhard,” he says. “I think the [FinTwit] community felt like, ‘Hey, let’s call out somebody who’s trying to integrate with us and be part of us, but is clearly not actually trying to be a good-spirited part of this community.’”
Other past Charlatans have included Larry Kudlow, Ross Gerber, and Bill Ackman, among others.
@fed_speak says the unlucky winners typically react by trash talking him and his survey and invariably end up blocking him on Twitter. Not so, however, with macro investor and RealVision Founder Raoul Pal, who leaned into his accolade: “He won in 2020, and I remember him just loving the attention. Even though it was negative attention, he didn’t care.”
The time Martin Shkreli put a bounty on @fed_speak
Another honoree was considerably less amused.
Initially, fund manager, pharma exec and convicted felon Martin Shkreli seems not to have noticed having been named the 2015 Finance Charlatan award, perhaps owing to his FBI arrest on charges of securities fraud on the day the award was announced.
Most of the ensuing year went by without any reaction. But in December, @fed_speak tagged Shkreli as the reigning Charlatan in a post announcing the 2016 version of the poll. This time, Shkreli did notice and began engaging. That surprised @fed_speak, he says, because Shkreli was deep in the throes of his legal entanglements at the time, yet still elected to focus on an on-line slight from 12 months earlier: “He got really mad about something that by then was a year stale and he and I started going back and forth .… Then he went on 4chan—like the dark web—and posted a $10,000 bounty for anybody that could dox me.”
It didn’t take long.
“I’m in a meeting at work and my phone starts blowing up and it’s people telling me that I now have a website doxxing me on the Internet,” @fed_speak says. “So I take myself out of the meeting. I go to my office, lock my door and tell my admin to cancel the rest of my day.” He says he spent the next 48 or so hours changing every password in his digital life and trading comments with Shkreli: “At the time it was a very stressful day. But looking back at it, it’s a very funny story.”
The sad state of FinTwit today
While he helped build the community on financial Twitter and launched the FCOTY award on the platform, @fed_speak laments that Twitter/X isn’t what it used to be.
He still believes there are great follows on X—among others, he rates @awealthofcs (Ben Carlson), @michaelbatnick, @TheStalwart (Weisenthal), @tracyalloway, @Downtown (Josh Brown), @conorsen, @SamRo, @LJKawa (Luke Kawa) and @BullandBaird (Michael Antonelli)— but he says the vibe has shifted from rollicking and enlightening conversations to one-way blasts of hot takes and click bait. Any subsequent discussions, he says, take place episodically through DMs
“It used to be that everybody was in the same place and everybody was in the same conversation …. There’d be 15 people, you know, debating MMT for two days straight in a thread. That just never happens anymore. It just doesn’t work.”
FCOTY 2025
Though financial Twitter may have seen better days, @fed_speak still expects to announce this year’s recipient there in the last few weeks of December.
Why does he keep doing it?
“My hope,” he says, “would be that there’s tons of people that are just loosely on Twitter. They see random stuff pop up and they don’t know who to trust. Hopefully they can use this to be like, ‘Oh, wait, I keep seeing this person pop up, but smart people on Twitter seem to think that they don’t know what they’re talking about.’”
Charlatans beware.