When Niccolo Porcello worked as an office manager at a Connecticut hedge fund, his colleagues on the trading floor knew he wasn’t exactly enamored with their line of work.
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And they loved him for it.
“My politics do not at all necessarily align with capital accumulation,” he told Business Insider. “I was pretty vocal about that in that space, and that honestly made everyone at the hedge fund really like me because I was a very sort of like rare specimen in their world.”
It was an aha moment for Porcello, who hadn’t interacted with the industry much before: the ranks of high finance are full of folks willing to talk openly about the nature of their work and interested in broader cultural dialogue.
So in November, when he helped launch The New York Review of Finance, a print newsletter, alongside Paige Oamek and Michael Nicholas, it was one of the groups of readers they aimed to reach. Before the first edition was even released in November, they had captured the attention of curious bankers, perhaps even more than they had expected.
“We’ve been really surprised by how many Wall Street people we have reached,” Porcello said. “A ton of people came up to the party and were like, ‘Oh we saw this on Twitter — we work at a bank nearby.'”
The paper’s first edition featured a look at financial-data firm Bloomberg, where the 2025 NYC mayoral election was apparently a hot-button topic. It was written by an anonymous employee. In fact, all the stories in the New York Review of Finance are written without bylines. Oamek says the level of candor it allows will attract readers.
It was an example of the type of dispatch that the three Brooklyn-based founders hope will foster open discussion.
“I think we want to build a kind of legitimacy through that openness,” Oamek said of the no-byline policy, “such that when things do go more awry, which they will, people know this is a place they can turn to that they can give us that gossip, that this is a community that they can be a part of.”
But the paper also aims to be lighthearted and irreverent, almost to the point where the reader might be forgiven for thinking the whole thing might be a meme. There’s a section providing financial horoscopes, and the publication’s social media pages post cryptic warnings like, “You are about to lose all of your money.”
Even the medium—print only—makes one wonder if it’s a serious endeavor. Can a print paper serving a somewhat niche audience of culturally aware Wall Streeters be viable? The founders say they have so far found a way to make that part of the equation work, building a recurring revenue stream from a combination of subscription sales at $40 a year and ad space.
Their first two advertisers are a wine shop and a jazz bar.
More than anything, though, the print format allows readers to engage with the paper’s high-minded, long-form articles as they would with a magazine like The New Yorker.
The world may have also reached a point where print feels fresh again, Porcello said.
“Speaking for myself, but I think also Paige and Michael, we’re all just so tired of reading stuff on our phones, and it’s nice to be able to have a physical thing to hold on the subway,” Porcello said. “It folds up. It fits in your pocket almost.”
The paper is set to launch its second edition later this month.
