How to read FT Alphaville for free

“Is FT Alphaville free?” we’re often asked. Yes! we answer. From the “sign in” page click the big “register” button. That’s it. Done.

You can also use this link to sign up for direct paywall-free access, forever. All we ask for in return is an email address.

Other questions we’re asked include: “How can I read Financial Times’s Alphaville blog”, “What is FT Alphaville”, “How do I read FT Alphaville”, and “FT Alphaville height, weight, net worth, age, birthday, wiki”.

Here’s another question: is it easy to keep up-to-date with Alphaville’s daily market-moving financial news and commentary? Yes! we say. It couldn’t be easier. Let us count the ways.

Registering an email means you can use the FT’s excellent build-your-own alert system. Just click the “add to myFT” box on the Alphaville masthead. After that go to myFT (top right) and look for “Contact preferences”, which opens up options for an email digest (daily or weekly), instant alerts and a custom RSS feed.

There’s an open-access Alphaville RSS feed, though we hide it very well these days. Adding us to myFT and setting up instant alerts is really the best way to read about investment bank research fonts, interest rate hedging, Pretflation and pub quizzes before your friends.

Just one official Alphaville account remains on X, a microblogging website that’s accessed via Twitter.com. We’re cognisant of concerns about X’s reliability as a news provider under new ownership but, frankly, we were there before Elon and intend to still be there after he’s gone.

We’re @Alphaville.FT.com on Bluesky, a janky and self-righteous clone of Twitter circa 2011.

Irritatingly, there’s not yet a dedicated Alphaville feed on the Bloomberg Terminal. One workaround is to NH our tweets via TWT_FTALPHAVILLE.

It’s important in these turbulent times to know which social media news sources are verified and which are snide. Here’s a non-complete list of places Alphaville is not:

We’re not on Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, Quora, Gab, Club Penguin or Yo. That may change, but we’ll let you know if it does. The blog editor’s on LinkedIn, apparently by choice, but there’s no collective Alphaville presence there either.

We’re not on Mastodon. We tried; it’s not for us.

We’re not on Telegram. We experimented with Telegram channels in 2020 as a way to crowdsource live markets coverage, but everyone lost interest pretty quickly and we don’t intend to revive the idea any time soon.

In 2012 we were on Reddit and Tumblr, but the staffer who thought this might be a good idea left many years ago without sharing passwords. Any posts appearing under our name in these places are definitely not official.

The same goes for everywhere else, pretty much.

The most reliable way to follow Alphaville is on FT.com. Everything we write is published there and it’s all completely free to read, so you should probably bookmark the homepage. Do it now before you forget.

And if you still don’t get FT Alphaville, click here for the explainer of what you’re missing.