What the Adam Hayes Moon Guide Actually Is
I've seen this come up a lot lately and honestly, I'm not entirely sure what people are referring to when they say "Adam Hayes Moon Guide." Adam Hayes is a known writer and former Goldman Sachs economist who covers behavioral economics, market psychology, and Federal Reserve policy. He's written for Bloomberg, the New York Times, and runs a Substack. But I don't recognize "Moon Guide" as anything he's published or produced. It could be a fan-made compilation, a nickname for a specific piece of his writing that went viral somewhere, or something entirely unrelated that just happens to share those names. Here's the thing — I've read a decent amount of Hayes' work over the years. His stuff on why conventional economic models keep failing, his explanations of how central bank communication shapes market behavior, his breakdowns of liquidity traps and yield curve dynamics. That's all solid. But there isn't a standalone document or guide called the Moon Guide that I can point you to with confidence.
Adam Hayes Moon Guide — What You Might Actually Be Looking For
If someone told you about this and you're trying to find it, my best guess is one of a few things. First, it could be a misattribution. Sometimes people attach famous names to PDFs or Notion templates they find on Reddit or Twitter, and the actual author never signed it. I've seen this happen with trading guides, macro strategy notes, you name it. Second, it might be a private or paid piece — Hayes has a Substack and sometimes releases deeper content behind a paywall or in limitedcirculation formats. A "Moon Guide" could be an inside nickname for one of those drops that never made it into public search results. I ran into this exact problem last year when a colleague sent me a link to what they called the "Hayes liquidity framework guide." I followed the link, it was a Google Doc, and after reading through it I realized it was actually a summary someone had written *about* Hayes' ideas, not by him. The real source material was scattered across three different Bloomberg columns from 2019 to 2021. I spent about two hours pulling the original references together and building my own notes. That's usually how these things go — the viral name is attached to a derivative, not the primary source. What I can tell you with certainty is that if you're interested in Hayes' actual work, his most useful writing tends to cluster around a few areas. He writes extensively about why economists keep getting surprised by markets, how narrative and psychology feed into asset pricing, and the mechanics of how the Fed's balance sheet operations actually translate into overnight rates and broader financial conditions. His explanation of the Fed's reverse repo facility and how it acts as a shadow interest rate ceiling is one of the clearest pieces of writing on the topic, period. If you're looking for something that functions like a "guide" to understanding modern monetary operations through his lens, that's where you'd start.
The counterintuitive part that beginners miss is that Hayes isn't really arguing for a specific investment strategy. His work is more diagnostic than prescriptive. He's showing you why the models you've been taught don't predict what's happening, not handing you a playbook for what to do next. I've seen people treat his writing like a trading manual and then get confused when he never actually tells you to buy or sell anything. That's not a flaw in his writing, it's just a mismatch between what the work does and what some readers expect it to do. One practical note: if you're trying to track down a specific document called the Adam Hayes Moon Guide, your best bet is probably checking his Substack archives directly or his Twitter/X thread history. Sometimes these things surface as a thread that got compiled into a PDF by a third party and the original context gets lost. I found a similar situation once where a "complete guide" was just a thread he'd posted in March 2023 about money market fund flows, and someone had screenshotted it, run it through an OCR tool, and reposted it as a polished document six months later. The content was fine, but it was incomplete — he'd referenced follow-up threads that weren't included. If you can share where you heard about the Moon Guide specifically, I might be able to point you closer to what it actually is. Otherwise, I'd recommend starting with his published columns and building from there rather than chasing a title that may not exist in the form you're imagining.
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