newsletter

name

newsletter

description

Generate a personal daily market newsletter after the close. Reads today's daily note and all notes created/expanded during the session, then writes a narrative brief in clean markdown. The voice is analytical and structural — identifies tensions, connects threads, surfaces what the market is pricing vs what the data says. Not a recap. Use when the user says /newsletter, 'write the newsletter', 'daily brief', or 'wrap up the day'.

Daily Newsletter

Personal end-of-day market brief. The newsletter is a saved vault artifact at investing/Newsletter/YYYY-MM-DD.md, not just chat output. It's also displayed in chat for review, automatically rendered to MP3 via ElevenLabs TTS, and can be printed to paper via the dedicated two-column script. Treat it as a vault operation — check existing infrastructure in scripts/ before reaching for generic tooling.

Workflow

Step 1: Final ingestion (if needed)

If the user hasn't run /news recently or asks for a final sweep:

1. Run python scripts/quick_movers.py to check for late-day sigma movers
2. If significant movers have no vault coverage, flag them — but don't run a full /news cycle unless asked

Step 2: Gather the day's work

1. Read today's daily note (investing/Daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md) — run date to confirm date
2. If investing/Reports/YYYY-MM-DD-story-report.md exists, read it first. Treat it as the exhaustive story map for the day.
3. Extract every note listed under "Notes created/expanded"
4. Read each referenced note to understand the substance (not just the log entry)
5. Read the daily note's Synthesis section if one exists

Step 3: Identify the stories

Group the day's work into 2-5 stories. A "story" is not a note — it's a narrative thread that may span multiple notes. If the daily story report exists, select the most important threads from it rather than repeating every card. Examples:

• Intel-Apollo Fab 34 buyback (touches Intel, Apollo, Athene, Intel bonds)
• Iran oil timeline escalation (touches oil price timeline, analyst notes, sector notes)
• Semiconductor earnings season (touches multiple actor notes)

For each story, identify:

• What happened (facts, figures, dates)
• Why it matters (structural, not just price action)
• The tension or open question (what's unresolved, what the market may be mispricing)
• Connections to other vault themes

Newsletter sections weave in pre-existing vault context — not just today's edits. Read the touched note(s) in full before writing the section, not only the new content. The "what happened" line is today-specific; the "why it matters" and "the tension" lines should reflect the whole arc the note documents, including earlier events, prior framings, and structural context that anchor today's developments. A section that only narrates the day's additions misses the threads the vault has already built up.

Step 4: Write the newsletter

Format:

# [Date] — [One-line theme for the day]

## [Story 1 headline — active voice, names the tension]

[2-4 paragraphs. Lead with the news, move to the structural read, end with the open question. Exact figures. Named sources. Wikilinks to vault entities.]

## [Story 2 headline]

[Same structure]

...

## Threads to watch

[3-5 bullet points of unresolved questions or developing situations from today's work that deserve follow-up. These are forward-looking — what to check tomorrow.]

Voice rules

Baseline: docs/vault-note-guide.md → "Voice and Writing Standards" — analytical not editorial (no bull/bear calls), tensions named rather than "the market is missing" claims, exact figures with attribution, no bold in body, no emojis. Newsletter-specific:

• Structural, not reactive. Connect today's news to the vault's accumulated knowledge. The newsletter's value is context the reader already has from the vault — surface it.
• Sharp, not sterile. Personal research voice — the reader is a macro-focused investor who already knows the basics. Don't explain what Apollo does. Do explain why their return on Fab 34 matters for how we think about Intel's cost of capital.

Charts (optional)

The print pipeline resolves Obsidian image embeds (![[chart.png]] / ![[chart.png|caption]]) to figures that span both columns. Use them sparingly:

• At most 1-2 charts per newsletter, total. Pick the single chart that anchors the day's most important story. A 400-800 word brief turns into a chart catalog if every story gets a chart.
• Only embed charts that already live in a touched note. Do not generate a fresh chart for the newsletter — the chart must be one you saw while reading the day's notes. This keeps charts anchored to vault state and avoids duplicate plumbing.
• Place the embed inside the relevant story section (after the lead paragraph, before the structural read), not in a trailing "Charts" appendix.
• The optional caption (after the |) renders as italic figcaption under the image. Use it to name the chart's point in one clause, not to repeat the surrounding paragraph.

What NOT to include

• Routine stub creation (unless the stub itself is interesting — e.g., a new actor entering the vault)
• Compliance fixes, formatting changes, editorial cleanup
• Notes that were only lightly touched (typo fix, added one link)
• Repetition of the daily note's edit log — the newsletter replaces it, not duplicates it

Length

Target 400-800 words total. Shorter is better if the day was quiet. Longer is fine if multiple major stories landed. Never pad.

Step 5: Save, render audio, and print

1. Save to vault. Write the newsletter markdown to investing/Newsletter/YYYY-MM-DD.md with frontmatter:

   ---
   date: YYYY-MM-DD
   type: newsletter
   tags: [newsletter]
   ---
   

2. Display in chat for review — same content as the saved file.

3. Render to audio (default). After saving, automatically generate the MP3 audio version:

   python scripts/audio_render.py YYYY-MM-DD
   

   What it does: reads the saved markdown, adapts it for spoken delivery (strips wikilink brackets; expands percent ranges, dollar magnitudes, quarter and fiscal-year abbreviations, bps, MoU, σ; smooths em-dashes into comma-pauses), then renders to investing/Newsletter/YYYY-MM-DD.mp3 via the auto-fallback chain: ElevenLabs primary (voice sarah, model eleven_multilingual_v2) → OpenAI fallback (voice nova, model gpt-4o-mini-tts) on any provider failure (auth, quota, network, server). Both keys live in .env. Newsletter is ~5-7 min listen at 8K chars / 3 chunks.

   Open the MP3 in the user's default player after generation:

   start "" "investing/Newsletter/YYYY-MM-DD.mp3"
   

   Quota note: ElevenLabs free tier is 10K chars/month — one full newsletter consumes the monthly budget, after which the chain auto-falls-through to OpenAI without intervention. OpenAI TTS is ~$0.10/newsletter on gpt-4o-mini-tts, billed against the existing API account. Use --preview to render only the first chunk (sample test). Use --dry-run to inspect the adapted text without an API call. Pin to one provider with --provider {elevenlabs,openai} to disable fallback. Override voice with --voice (ElevenLabs: sarah, adam, rachel, charlotte, george, brian; OpenAI: alloy, echo, fable, onyx, nova, shimmer, ash, sage, coral).

   If both providers fail, don't block the workflow — note the failure in chat and continue with print/save.

4. Print to paper when the user says "print", "send to print", "print it", etc. Use the dedicated script, never raw Out-Printer or notepad /p:

   python scripts/print_newsletter.py YYYY-MM-DD --print
   

   What it does: renders the markdown to HTML with column-count: 2 CSS (Georgia serif, 8.75pt, justified, column rule), generates investing/Newsletter/YYYY-MM-DD.pdf via Chrome headless, then prints via Edge kiosk-printing to the default printer (HPFA4FA6 (HP DeskJet 2700 series)). Override the printer with --printer NAME. Frontmatter is stripped; wikilinks are preserved and rendered in a subtle gray so the reader can see what's linked on paper.

   Do not improvise with Out-Printer, notepad /p, or a hand-rolled HTML. The two-column layout and visible wikilinks are the point.

   Note: the edit-logger will record the Newsletter file as [[YYYY-MM-DD]] (Newsletter), which collides with the daily note's own name and can trip the daily-summary hook. Add a one-line summary block to the daily note under ## Notes created/expanded (e.g., ### Newsletter — EOD brief) mentioning [[YYYY-MM-DD]] before ending the session.