Mark Skousen spent 45 years writing a single newsletter, and then walked across the street and started another one. The man is an economist by training, a CIA analyst by first job, a university professor by current title, and a newsletter publisher by the way most people actually know his name. In February 2026 he ended a four-decade run at Eagle Publishing’s Forecasts & Strategies to launch The Skousen Report at the Oxford Club, and the move turned a quiet academic into a suddenly active guru just as the SpaceX IPO and the defense-minerals trade became the most promoted themes of the summer.
Skousen is an economist who wandered into the newsletter trade rather than the reverse, which is rarer in the newsletter business than it sounds.
The Foundation
Mark Andrew Skousen was born October 19, 1947, in San Diego, California, where his father was an FBI agent. The family relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he grew up. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Brigham Young University, spent two years in Latin America on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and completed his Ph.D. in monetary economics at George Washington University in 1977.
His intellectual lineage runs through the Austrian school. He is the nephew of W. Cleon Skousen, the conservative political writer and former Salt Lake City police chief whose work influenced the American conservative movement, and Mark has spent his career in that orbit without ever being reducible to it. The Mises Institute has published sharp critiques of his historical work, and Skousen has answered them, which is the normal back-and-forth of an academic economist who also writes for the public. He cites Ludwig von Mises as an influence and has written extensively about the Austrian tradition, though his intellectual position is broader rather than doctrinaire; his textbooks cover Smith, Marx, and Keynes on equal terms.
The CIA Years
From 1972 to 1975, between his master’s degree and his doctorate, Skousen worked as an economic analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The role, he has said in interviews, is where he learned to gather intelligence from primary sources and built the Washington contact network that has fed his writing ever since. Three years is a short chapter in a five-decade career, but it is the credential he leads with when pitching subscribers, and it shows up on the first page of The Skousen Report’s marketing copy.
The Oxford Club publisher’s offer letter, dated January 2026 and quoted in Skousen’s own announcement, describes him as having “the unique distinction of having worked for the government (CIA), non-profits (president of FEE), and several for-profit companies,” and pitches the move as an opportunity to bring his intelligence background to a macro-strategist role. The framing is deliberate. The intelligence background is real, dated, and verifiable. The question for a reader is how much of the analyst’s tradecraft actually survives in a monthly stock letter.
The Academic and the Statistician
Skousen’s most durable contribution to economics is a number.
His 1990 book The Structure of Production (NYU Press) argued that Gross Domestic Product systematically understates the size of an economy because it measures only final output, ignoring the supply chain that produces it. He proposed Gross Output (GO), a measure that captures sales at every stage of production, from raw material to finished good. In spring 2014, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis began publishing GO quarterly alongside GDP, the first new government macro statistic since GDP itself was invented in the 1940s.
That is a change in how the U.S. government measures the economy, and it traces to a book Skousen wrote 24 years before it was adopted. In 2018, he received what is now called the Triple Crown in Economics, an award recognizing contributions across theory, history, and education, and in 2019 Chapman University named him My Favorite Professor. He holds the Doti-Spogli Endowed Chair of Free Enterprise at Chapman’s Argyros School of Business and Economics, where he has been a Presidential Fellow since 2014.
His textbook The Making of Modern Economics (Routledge, first edition 2001) is a standard university text that reframes the history of economic thought around Adam Smith’s “system of natural liberty” as the heroic through-line. It won the Choice Book Award for Outstanding Academic Title. It has been translated into Chinese, Turkish, and Spanish. Most investment newsletter publishers lack a textbook on a university syllabus; Skousen has one.
The Newsletter Career
The economist is what Skousen is. The newsletter is how most of his readers met him.
He founded Forecasts & Strategies in 1980 and edited it continuously for 45 years, first independently and then under Eagle Publishing, which acquired it in 2004 and passed it to Salem Communications in 2014. It is one of the longest continuously published investment newsletters in the United States. Alongside it, he ran several shorter-term trading services — Five Star Trader, Low-Priced Stock Trader, Fast Money Alert, and TNT Trader — and wrote the weekly Investor CAFE electronic letter.
In February 2026, the contract came up for renewal. The Oxford Club, a Baltimore-based publisher with more than 260,000 paid subscribers, made what Skousen publicly called an offer he could not refuse. The press release is dated January 9, 2026. The first issue of The Skousen Report shipped in February, distributed initially to more than 23,000 Chairman’s Circle subscribers, with the introductory price set at $199 per year against a regular rate around $249. He took the Macroeconomic Strategist title, and his wife Jo Ann continued as associate editor, as she has throughout his career. Two of his sons, Tim and Todd, were already inside the Oxford Club’s editorial and executive structure, which made the move a family affair.
The transition placed Skousen alongside Alexander Green, Marc Lichtenfeld, and Bryan Bottarelli on the Oxford Club masthead, which is a denser concentration of brand-name editors than most publishers carry. The timing is what makes it interesting from a coverage standpoint: Skousen has launched three distinct promotional campaigns in the first six months of the new job, which is faster cadence than he ran at Eagle for years.
The Track Record in Context
Skousen’s public marketing material claims his Forecasts & Strategies portfolio rose 35% in the year before the Oxford Club move, triple the Dow’s gain, with 17 of 17 recommendations profitable. Those numbers are self-reported, unaudited, and presented in the publisher’s own format, which is the standard condition of every newsletter track record in the industry. No independent auditor verifies newsletter performance. The figure is not necessarily wrong, but the verification chain does not exist. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The track record figures are self-reported and unaudited; actual subscriber results may differ.
What is verifiable is the longer arc. Skousen has been publishing continuously through four decades of market cycles, which is itself a survival signal in a business with high attrition. He has called turns on gold, the dollar, and emerging markets across multiple cycles, and the misses are as much a part of the record as the hits. A bearish macro call that lands three years late registers differently for a subscriber who bought on the call than it does in a multi-cycle arc.
The pattern that applies to most long-tenured newsletter editors holds here: the structural framework is real and durable, the individual calls vary, and the marketing presentation compresses the variation into a highlight reel. The only way to verify the track record is the way the industry itself resists, which is a dated, position-by-position ledger that includes the losers. Nobody publishes one. Skousen does not either.
Why Skousen Matters in 2026
The Oxford Club move is the headline, and it matters because it restructured the economics of Skousen’s operation. At Eagle he was one editor among many. At the Oxford Club he is the macro voice in a shop that previously did not have a dedicated macro strategist. The arrangement gives him a bigger distribution list, a higher editorial profile, and the incentive structure to produce promotional campaigns at a pace he had not sustained in years.
That is the context for the three 2026 pitches. The SpaceX Pre-IPO Play, the America Reloading Summit on defense and critical minerals, and the Drone Software IPO pitch are each built on a Skousen framework — a macro thesis, a named catalyst, a stated deadline, and a paid report behind the subscription wall. The theses range from a pre-IPO access story whose underlying IPO has already happened to a NATO defense theme that rests on verifiable public policy moves. Each is the kind of structural trade Skousen’s Austrian-school training pushes him toward: a real macro shift with a specific stock at the chokepoint.
The question his career raises is how the macro economist who spent forty years refining a structural framework translates it into a stream of timed promotional campaigns. The first six months at the Oxford Club show he is willing to try. The textbook and the Gross Output contribution establish the analytical foundation. The newsletter business is where the translation from analysis to timed pitch actually happens, and where the reader’s judgment engages.
Mark Skousen is an academic economist who runs a newsletter, and his 2026 moves are best read as the second act of someone who spent the first act building the credentials to justify the second. The framework is the durable asset; the timed campaigns are how that framework reaches a subscriber base four decades in the making. For the retail-access mechanics behind the pre-IPO pitches he has been running at the Oxford Club, see Pre-IPO Investing: How Retail Gets In. For the full gurus index, see Guru Dossiers.