Roadmap | Winter 2025-26

We can learn a lot from failure. Previous publications tried to do too much and accomplished too little. Back to the drawing board!

17 DEC 2025

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Working in investment banking research, I structured a daily markets commentary for a global audience that included contributions from colleagues around the world. This produced a comprehensive report that served as a reference for notable events in interest rates, foreign exchange, and emerging markets. The commentary I led needed to be many things to many people every day, and so it was.

I wanted to share that kind of knowledge with everyone, not just institutional finance professionals. Plenty of people want (and everyone deserves) reliable sources of information about what is happening in our world. Experienced perspective could be useful, especially an expertise in interest rates and the macroeconomic and geopolitical currents that might move them.

I began by writing the way I had before, only without an appreciation for how much my mission, means, and audience had changed. Gone were the immense resources at my disposal and the wisdom and diligence of peers. Live markets data and a sizable captive audience that provided real-time feedback were also out. I discovered that reproducing the caliber and scope of an institutional markets daily on my own from day one was impossible. More importantly, I lost track of who I was writing for.

People are busy and have enough to do. Time and attention are limited. Very few want homework in a digital ecosystem geared to captivate. But many people do want to learn about markets and world affairs and my challenge is to help - or at least give everyone some places to start.

I love reading, but not everybody does or has the time to read at length. The digests were too long. Less is more. The summaries needed to be concise with an emphasis on a handful of focal points, not a compendium of facts. I often neglected to answer a fundamental question: Why does any of this matter?

Going forward, I will target a body length of 500 words (or less) and clearly explain the relevance of highlighted topics. I hope these recaps will only take a few minutes of your time.

If you ever worked on a trading floor or in another chaotic environment, you might be used to having your attention span strained. Good writing should not do that. I will cover three or four topics that I suspect might be useful to know. I will share other headlines with sources at the end. If I can give more attention to a topic in greater depth, I will do that in a separate note.

I am still figuring out how to adjust to AI and generative models in particular, which are already so integrated that I am not sure what to think about online information. Are people writing and vetting the articles and posts we see? Datum Research will always be composed and reviewed by a person.

But making information more accessible is a great use of AI. I will produce short video and audio content, and for that I will use local AI transcription and captioning tools. I will do my best to improve accessibility generally, including larger fonts, shorter blocks of text, consistent and clear formatting, and alt text for visual elements.

The new recap and video updates will represent the initial core offering for members in the new year. Some notes, updates, and outlooks will be made available to all subscribers. I will also aim to write more consistently about the Fed in a more approachable way.

In order to produce quality, dependable work, I will need to stagger publications. I am aiming for recaps on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with video updates on Tuesday and Thursday; other content will be posted intermittently. I will start and build from there.

I hope these changes will make Datum Research useful to you and welcome your feedback!

Thank you for reading,

Eddie von der Schmidt

Datum Research