Animal Spirits Podcast - Stay the Course (EP.65)

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

The passing of Jack Bogle, interesting stories from his latest book, how to budget your money effectively, the impact of student loans on the housing market, what happens when baby boomers sell their stocks, the different groups that collectively own the stock market, Costco's amazing Kirkland Brand, our favorite movies from the 1990s and much more. Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Animal Spirits, the podcast that takes a completely different look at markets and investing, hosted by Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson, two guys who study the markets as a passion and invest for all the right reasons. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's wealth management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits, Michael and Ben. So we lost a legend last week. Jack Bogle died at 89 years old. And Ben, you and I both over the weekend read his new book, Stay the Course, which is probably the perfect title for his last book.

And it was a little eerie to read it in some way. So it came out in November 2018, so just a couple months old. And the last chapter... Wait, hold on. I thought it was 2019. Oh, I thought on Amazon they had the release date of 2011. 2018. Maybe it did just come out. Okay, because the copyright is 2019. Oh, okay. So either way, it just came out. The last chapter in the book was basically a farewell. It was almost like he knew, like, this was him signing off. Oh, he did like a memoir type thing? Yeah, it was very poetic. And he even shared a poem from a friend that he wanted to be read after he passed away. It was interesting to see all the outpouring of love and affection stories for the sky. It was, I think, very well deserved. And yeah, you're right. He's a hero and a legend. And I think the points been made a million times. But he's done more, I think, for any collective group of individual investors than anyone in history. It is not even. close. Yes, it is not even close and there will never be anybody else like Jack Bogle. So in this book,

the forward was written by Burton Malkiel. And if you take a look at his previous books and who wrote the forwards, it's all giant names in the industry. And something from the forward that stood out to me was Malkiel said, index funds don't provide average performance. They give the investor top desile returns. I think in a lot of ways, Bogle is a little bit underrated as an author. I've probably read, I don't know, maybe half of his books. They're really good. I mean, you know what he's going to say, but I thought this was really well done. It was kind of a history of Vanguard and not only of Vanguard, but of the funds and how they got started. And there was actually a lot of stuff in here I'd never heard before. I actually think that if you want to learn about the history

of Bogle and Vanguard, I think that clash of the cultures is actually a little bit better than this one. Yeah, that was a good one too. So you're right. There were, even though I've read, I think, four or five of his books, there was definitely nuggets here than I have never read before. For example, he said in 1975, I had never even heard of the now famous Eugene Fama. Later, when I came to understand the EMH, I could see that the uneven and often unpredictable efficiency of the market made the EMH an unreliable basis for indexing. And if you look at the history of this, it makes sense that his whole thing, he obviously was the father of index funds and he deserves a lot of credit for that. But more importantly, he was a father of low cost fees. So they said in 1981, 98% of Vanguard's assets were actively managed. So it wasn't just that he was pushing for index funds. He was pushing for lower fees across the board, which is great because it translated into both active and. and index fund fees coming down for people. So in 1990, when they got into international indexes, he split Europe and Pacific because he thought

that Japan was so inflated. That was really interesting. I picked that one out too. And I think Japan at one point was like 47% of the international market and now it's down to like eight. The big lesson here that I took away, people always kind of mock long-term buy and hold investors for just blindly doing stuff and not paying attention. But there's a case to be made here where you can still be very thoughtful about how you go about things.

So Bogle said they wanted to launch an EFA fund. And he said instead of doing a broad index fund because I didn't want almost 70% of your non-US exposure in one region, we split it up. And so he split it up into Europe and Pacific stocks. So he was very thoughtful about that because he basically knew Japan was so wildly overvalued. Same thing with value and growth. He suggested growth for your early years and value for your later years, not because he thought that one was better than the other, but growth has just lower dividends. So it would be a way to defer taxes on that and use the dividends from value as part of your income and retirement. And he actually was very adamant that he didn't anticipate one doing better than the other. And since the time that they came out, I think they did exactly the same performance. And much to his regret, investors in those two funds, as you would expect, just traded in and out pretty much the worst times possible. Did not capture the returns. You don't think of Vanguard in this way, but he mentioned in the book that those are the two largest smart beta funds that are out there. Like, you don't think of Vanguard in those ways, but it's amazing how big they are in ways like that as well. At one point, he told the story about the Magellan Fund, which was Peter Lynch's baby. And he said from 1984 until 1993, it outpaced the SP 500 indexed by three and a half percent a year. Peter Lynch retired in 1990 and they began to fall behind. During the next quarter century, the cumulative return on Magellan Fund totaled 539%, which sounds like a lot of it is, but that's a shortfall of 266 percentage points behind the cumulative 805% return on the S&P 500. The great thing about him is he knows his stuff, but his books are full of data too, because when you hear him give an interview, he offered a lot of great sound bites and he was very good communicating that way, but his books are full of really great data that it's, it kind of hits you over the head with it. I was watching a video that Jason Zweig did with him recently. And he was telling Bogle about how Mark Cuban said that diversification is like basically a scam. Right. I saw that too. And Bogle just sort of laughed. But he has so much data. So in 1951, he wrote his thesis about mutual funds can make no claims to superior performance

than the index. And then in 1976, the data that he had from 51 going forward matched it that mutual funds did not beat the market. And then from 1976 to today, of course, it's the same story. And it has nothing to do with intelligence or anything like that. It is just what he likes to say is the simple arithmetic of the market. That before costs, the total dollars must equal the return of the market. And then after costs, it's obviously less. My favorite stat from the book was that over 80% of Vanguard assets are in funds launched before 1997.

Yeah, that was very good. Which is kind of unbelievable. What did he call them? The traditional index funds, TIFs. No, but there was, he had a name for those. I forget what he called them. Okay, but it is amazing because people assume that it's almost like indexing is a fad of late. And Vanguard has been laying the groundwork in planning.

the seeds for a long time. It's not like they just kind of willy-nilly got into this. The other thing was, it sounded like in the 80s, their market share was declining year after year. They went through a lot of hard times in their first 10 or 15 years, it sounds like. He said basically all the growth they had was because of the market, not because they were bringing in a ton of funds. And then money market funds were a huge source of survivability in the early years. Yeah, it sounded like it basically saved the industry. He said that during the 1980s, their mutual fund assets went from like 250 billion to 1.5 trillion. And money market funds were the big part of that. He said half of the increase came from them. They went from $2 billion to $570 billion. So it's interesting

that in the late 70s and early 80s, money market funds went from being basically nothing to this huge piece of the mutual fund industry. And then of course, the biggest innovation was the mutual structure of these mutual funds, which I've read this story, I don't know, two dozen times and I'm still not exactly sure what this means, like exactly. So the shareholders own the mutual funds which own the company. Yeah. I kind of think about it like the Green Bay Packers, how like the fans own the Packers. But it's just the fact that there's No. And so all cost savings are pushed through to the owners as opposed to the management company. And there's no profits paid out to shareholders or dividends. Although, you know what was interesting was they talked about the VPP or the something, the internal ownership system and savings that get passed through to employees of Vanguard. So they're not technically profits, but they are. Right. They're getting a piece. Something. And the other thing is he made an interesting point that he had this great idea to save investors money. But it was also kind of his career, kind of stalled out at that point. And he said a lot of people at the time said, I got lucky. And I was just trying. to still make away my career. And he said, in a lot of ways, they're right. This was kind of a last

gasp for me to kind of make waves and change my career path in a lot of ways. So in terms of saving investors money, in 2017 alone, we estimate that Vanguard's low cost saved investors $29 billion in fees and expenses. That's crazy. $29 billion. That is quite a bit of money. So, all right, anything more that you want to highlight before we move on? No, I wrote a piece about it last week about all the things I learned. I'll post that. But I think it was great to see just the total outpouring of support for him and kind of get the recognition that he definitely deserved. You know, there are a lot of seniors in investing that are, I don't want to say any day now, but certainly over the next 10, 15 years, like Buffett and Munger and Markowitz is still alive and Malchiel. And I don't think any of them

will receive the unanimous outpouring of support as Jack Bo. I agree. Okay. It's moving on. Our friend Dan Egan wrote a post about how he budgets his personal cash flow. And this actually came about part of the way through one of our back Slack channels where Jake, I'm picking myself, him because he talked about this, how he gets his money coming in and he ferries it out right away for all these different expenses and investment accounts. And he has it all automated. So he wrote this whole piece called how one behavioral scientist optimizes his monthly cash flow. And this is really interesting because I think this is one of the personal finance areas where people probably have the hardest time because a lot of people just don't have a household budget or don't think about it this intelligently. What did you think about Dan's budget here? I thought it's great. I like the way he described. He said his budget is inspired by golf balls and beer method of prioritization where he gets the big things done first. This is like that idea where you, you pour the rocks into a jar and then it looks like it's full and then you pour some sand in there and it looks like it's still full and then you pour some beer over the top of it and it still keeps filling up. So the idea is to get the big stuff done first, which is kind of the way that I think about my budget too is getting those big expenses right out of the way and automating them.

And I think the best thing he does in here is he says that the approach is saving to be a bill you have to pay. And then the spending is the negotiable part. That's basically the way that I approach it to. So that was the method advocated by that wealthy barber book. And I think it's simple, but it's so powerful is that you have to automate your savings, whether it's 10% or whatever it is, you have to pay yourself first. And if you don't do that automatically, which is so easy to do these days, it's very hard to do that because as Dan said, one of the hardest lessons I've learned is that I should bet it gets my own self-control. So as far as what Dan is doing exactly with having such minimal amount in a savings, because he is pretty meticulous

about where his spending is going. There's obviously a lot of ways to skin the cat, but he has found something that clearly works for him, which is great. The automation is the key. You're never going to save what's left over because what's left over almost always gets spent. that's the way to was the old Jerry Seinfeld routine. Like, it's amazing how the amount of news in a single day fits perfectly into a newspaper every single day. That's the same thing with your spending. If it's there, you're going to spend it. So it's not there. It's much easier to prioritize what's left over and figure out what really matters to you after all the necessities are taking over. And I think if you approach saving as something of a necessity, that's helpful in getting your mind framed the right way. So speaking of spending and budgeting, what did you think about the homeownership and student loan piece from the Wall Street Journal the other weekend? I thought it was a little bit of a stretch. made sense. So the stat was Federal Reserve did a study and they said homeownership among people 24 to 32 fell 9% between 2005 and 2014. And the Fed said roughly 400,000 borrowers who would have owned a home by 2014 didn't because of student loans. That seemed like a stretch to me.

Yeah, that was too clean. And what they didn't mention was that 2005 was the peak in homeownership at that age group. So you're measuring against the peak. But the median since 1990 was 39% and now it's down to, what, 36%. So it's not a huge decrease. And that was almost the peak of the real estate bubble too. Right. That's what I'm saying. So there are a lot of factors involved. This doesn't talk about sensitivities to, or preferences to living in the city and maybe preferences to renting versus buying because there are so many ancillary costs involved in buying aside from just the down payment. So are there people that would have bought a house that didn't because of their student loans? Of course there are. Do I think that's like a giant macro story? I'm not so

Plus, the financial crisis obviously didn't help. And then how do you balance that out with the fact that the people who came up with student loans also made more money realistically, you'd think, than they would have if they hadn't gone to school. So. Right. That's a good point, too. So yeah, it's hard to say. But one of the things that they did in the article that I thought was pretty cool was they showed different cities and how much they attract college graduates. And as an example, San Francisco ranks 11th in population, but only fifth in drawing power, attracting 2% of more of alumni from 139 different schools. So that makes sense. sense that everyone wanted to go there. Okay, yeah, this is a cool chart. So someone posted this on Twitter last week, and I think I retweeted it. Neil Brendan had my favorite down-up special last year called Three Mikes, and he had this piece where he said, first of all, student loans would never be the problem they are if you just change the name to small business loans. And if you think about it, that's what they really are. Like, I personally am a business. And so if you had to go to the small business desk at a bank and say, I need to take out $150,000 for a small business loan, and they'd say, okay, what's your idea? They'd say, well, I'm going to get blackout drunk for the next

four years, and I'm going to end up with a degree in sociology. Like, it is kind of crazy when you think about it in those terms. Speaking of, Stan, if I was going to mention this later in the show, but here we are. So, Sebastian Manascar was on Howard Stern last week. I think I've seen some of his close before. I've never seen a full special of his, but he was funny on the show and seems like a very nice guy and whatever, whatever. I watched his new special Stay Hungry.

I watched the whole thing, and it wasn't for me. Like, I'm not saying that he's not funny. Maybe that particular one. I just didn't think it was good. So we saw him in Chicago last week. Some of his old ones are definitely better. But seeing him in person, he changed a lot of it up for his live show. I actually thought the show that I went to was way funnier than the one they used for Netflix.

So I don't know if he toned it down or didn't use his best material, but my wife and I watched the Netflix one. We both kind of said he was way better at the show we saw Matt than he was on the Netflix special. And I also think, to your point, he is a very physical comedian. Yes, it's a little better in person. He's probably funnier in person, but I was very disappointed. I think I laughed like three or four times. Watch some of his older ones on Netflix.

Those are better Netflix specials. Okay. I'm going to do it. It wasn't his best stuff, but I still like it. him. So moving on, we've heard this argument a lot just in passing like, oh, when boomers go to sell their stocks. So David Chowell tweeted something from, I think this is from Goldman, but I can't remember, showing that the wealthiest 1% of households now own about 50% of total household equities. Point being that these are people that have so much wealth that they're never going to sell their stocks. Yeah, it's going to be passed down to the next generations. And the people who think that the boomers collectively are going to be this wave of selling that's going to just overwhelm the markets. It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I think that is a straw man to the highest degree. Yeah, I think the other number is like the top 10% owns like 84, 85%. So getting them to sell, it just doesn't seem to make sense. And then also Sam Rowe shared this. I think this is from the same report, the share of the corporate equity market. And the thing that obviously stands out as households now own 34% of the stock market, whereas in 1945, they owned 95% of it. This chart is great. And I think is it possible the fact that this chart shows how over time the holders of equities have become so diversified, That's one of the things that makes it so much harder to gauge sentiment in the market. Because back then, you literally could look to the retail crowd, the mom and pop people, and that was your gauge of sentiment. Whereas today, it's households, mutual funds, pensions, foreign investors, ETFs, all this stuff. It's much more spread out. And so I think it's harder to tell what the collective market is doing.

I think sentiment is like the ultimate confirmation biases, especially on Twitter. You latch on to certain things that certain people say. And that person who you might use as a gauge for sentiment might have like a $5,000 trading account. Right. Yeah, Twitter is tough. It's so easy. So here's my stat of the week for you now that you're moving out to the suburbs soon. So Costco has a brand called Kirkland. That's like their in-house brand. Do they have Costco's on New York City? Is that even possible? Okay. In the city? I don't know if they're in Manhattan. I think there is one, but I'm not positive. They're definitely on Long Island. So this stat last year, Kirkland brand alone raked in $40 billion, which was a double-digit increase from 2017. But that's more than J.C. Penny and Macy's combined. And it also beat out Campbell Soup, Kellogg and Hershey put together. So just their own brand at Costco. So my point to you is get that. Costco membership when you head out to the suburbs. It's worth it. I thought you only go to Amazon. We do have a Costco membership and we probably go there once a month to stock up. It's worth it. I will say that. Costco is worth a membership, especially when you have a hungry mouths to feed. Did you see this thing? Ram Capital tweeted this. A video of somebody eating with a fork attached to their iPhone. It's pretty bad. I can't tell if that was a joke. I don't think it is. Honestly, nothing would surprise me

at this point. But think about how many germs are on your phone. That's disgusting, right? Oh, gross. That's the first thing you thought of? Beyond the other stuff, yes. The idea of not being able to put your phone down. Yes, that's pretty bad. What's next? So this is kind of a checkup on last week we talked about, is the volatility and mortgage rates going to lead to a higher volatility in housing prices? And so Bill McBride put...

What are you doing, channel checks? Yes. I was out door to door last week. So rates fell like 50 basis points pretty quickly. And they found that mortgage applications rose to their strongest level in years with purchase applications rising to the highest levels since 2010 and refinance applications the highest level since last spring. So rates fell 50 basis points and people rushed out to buy again. Wait, for every buyer of a house, is there a seller? I do believe so. I don't know.

You're trying to figure that out on your own, I think. Okay. What's this survey you got here? Well, I'll get to that in a second. Necker value shared a post, a Barron's interview with Stanley Drucken Miller from March 1988. And the title of Stanley Drucker Miller still bearish. And he was short the Niki in March 1988. And it went up another 80% before its peak. So I'm guessing that he covered. But to me, the most amazing thing about Drucken Miller is that there's a lot of articles where he seems to be on the wrong side and he obviously has a bearish bent. And yet he has the ability to put up this ridiculous track record that is literally unparalleled seemingly like with a bearish disposition. Is that not the most incredible thing ever that he is able to either change his mind so quickly or whatever he does? It is amazing. Every bubble or bear market or crash, it seems like there's a story about him being the wrong way on maybe just what he's saying. And then somehow he makes it out okay. I think he's had like literally one losing order. So he must be just the most fantastic risk manager of all time. And he seems to be the ultimate watch what he does, not what he says. Can I throw a conspiracy theory here? Have we ever seen

his audited return numbers before? Just saying, I'm not kidding. All right. So anyway, getting to the survey. So in this article, there was a company called Rosen Company, and it's a low cost brokerage or whatever. And it showed the average commission based on a telephone survey from December in 1987. So the average commission is a thousand shares at $20 was $386. So that's almost 2% commission on a $20,000 transaction. Jeez. Now, they were holding themselves out to be the low cost alternative and they were showing $115, which means that they were charging just 0.59% or something like that. Wow. Amazing how things have changed. That's crazy. Okay. So a few people sent us this one. This was another Reddit investing story. By the way, I tried to get to the

bottom of this and I felt like Owen Wilson and Zoolander. It's inside the computer. They're beating the computer. I couldn't figure out how to use Reddit. So I'm on this thread and I'm like, what happened? I just see a million comments and I don't know what exactly happened. I thought you meant trying to figure out what a box spread is. I've never heard of a box spread before. No, trying to get to the source of the comment. I don't get Reddit either. It looks like it's from like 1984. It is amazing how old school they've kept it there. And obviously, a lot of people know how to do it. I'm the same way with you. I don't know how it works, but people keep sending us stuff. So apparently, this guy put on some exotic option strategy, for us exotic

anyway, because we're not options traders. But from what I understand, a fairly routine strategy, but it was done on UVXY, which is a VIX product, and that's problematic in the first place. But I gather that he thought it was like a risk-free trade that he was going to make a few thousand dollars a month. And it turns out that he spent $5,000 and Robin Hood shut him off. And now he was Robin Hood $58,000. But apparently from some of the comments that I could find, this was so obviously destined to fail that Robin Hood should be on the hook is what some people were saying. People were saying Robin Hood sent out an email about it. I don't know. It's possible this kind of stuff was just made up, but it sounds like this really happened where this guy basically guaranteed

himself like a $5,000 gain, but put up like 200 grand as like a risk to guarantee himself five grand, which obviously is the opposite of an asymmetric trade. So that's the old picking up nickels in front of, uh, and it sounds like people were patting this guy in the back saying, oh, way to go, man, like right away. And then finally someone who understood what it meant and said, oh, wait, you're screwed. You're going to lose a lot of money on this. And that's what happened. Were you able to follow the three? No, I don't know how it works either. Someone give us an explainer on how red it works. I have no idea. No, no, please don't. Please don't. It's too much. That's true. We're past that state. It's never going to happen.

All right. So, Ram Capital over the weekend also tweeted something about named the best movies of the 90s. So you and I wanted to take a minute to talk about this because this is, at least I'm a 90s child. So he asked this question. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I am too. And I think the 90s has the best decade of movies maybe ever, right? Oh, it's so weird that you think that. Why? Because I grew up then. It's also the best music ever and the, no, definitely not the best TV ever. But my immediate response to him was I said the obvious answer is Shawshank Redemption, but the true answer is dumb and dumber. And third place is swingers. And so you said, all right, let's go through into our top 10, which this is maybe the hardest thing I've had to do in months. My brain is fried because I couldn't do it. We were saying before this that you can argue that the next 10 are even better than the top 10. Yes. And it's so hard to do like the favorites list because I could probably spend my whole weekend with a spreadsheet and a bunch of Red Bulls trying to stay up late coming up a scheme for how to rank these. And I still wouldn't get it. Speaking of Red Bull, that just reminded me, I listened to Mike Tyson with Joe Rogan. Did you hear this into that?

No, any good? Yeah, it was good. Mike Tyson also has never had a cup of coffee. Oh, all right. How about that? And we both like to use that quote whenever the market's falling. So let's go through our top 10. You will go first and we will see where we differ.

Okay, so I gave my top through already. Shawshank, you have to include that on any list. Dumb and Dumber and Swingers. I also came up with Goodfellas. Has to be on the list. Hold on. So I'm just seeing where we overlap. All right.

So Shawshank, you said, dumb and dumber. And what was the next one? After Swingers. Good fellas. Definitely on there. I included Forrest Gump. I don't think Forrest Gump has aged well, but just for that time, that has to be one of the best movies of the 90s. I also have Braveheart on here. That's one of the best battle scene movies in history, I think. I think Silence of the Lambs is highly underrated. So that would be my top seven. Now, that was my tier one of movies. Now, that was my tier two that's about 20 deep. Stop. You have three left. It's really hard. So you have three left. Got to put days and confused on there. That's like one of my favorite all time. Usual suspects is probably the greatest ending in movie history. And then I, One more. It's tough, man. I'll put Big Lobowski on there, just for the fact that it's so rewatchable. So we have one, two, three, four, five, six overlap.

Which ones did you not have? Here's what I did not have. Only one of yours was even close for me. I did not have Braveheart, swingers, dazed, and confused, usual suspects. And usual suspects was close. The other three were not. Here's where I had that different from you. I have Pulp Fiction.

Fair. Fargo. Okay. That was on my tier two list. Terminator two. Top ten? That was pretty good. All right.

Okay. I just thought it was an iconic action movie. That's true. I mean, the special effects were far of anything at the time. And then the last one that I have that you didn't was Goodwill hunting. Good one. And so our overlap was Shawshank, Forrest, Gump, Lebowski, Dumb and Dumbus, Silence of the Lambs and Goodfellas. So, listen to the ones we missed.

This could be another best top ten list. So Fight Club, 7, American Beauty, Heat, Groundhog Day. You said Goodwill Hunting. I was going to say that. Sixth Sense, office space, a few good men. There's a lot. Yeah. I almost included my cousin Vinnie.

Not even kidding. Oh, classic. Yeah. Something about Mary. There's a lot of them. That was an idea. Oh, wow. It's crazy, right?

All right. Last week, you tweeted something about, like, things that you don't understand what's going on. Yes. And one of them was MMT. And this has been sort of in the background, but the drumbeat has got a louder and louder and louder. And I don't think it's like funny to be ignorant on stuff, but I really don't know what this is. It's basically... I saw something like about Ben Hunt wrote something about it. And I haven't read it yet, but I'm going to. But it's like about like the gigantic deficit is actually not a bad thing. I was only half kidding. But read Colin Roche's blog for the last seven years and you kind of understand what it is. Okay. Oh, okay. I got it. It's just kind of way to think of the monetary. system through how it actually functions instead of like an ideological economic theory. Got it. Okay. And then one of the other things that you tweeted about was fire. And that was

like 2017. I don't remember that. Do you? The fire festival? Yeah. That was the jaw rule thing. Did you watch the document? I didn't watch it yet. So I did watch. You did watch or you didn't? I didn't yet. Okay. So I did. And I felt like I was living under a rock watching it because how did I, or maybe I just don't remember it. But I'm pretty sure I didn't know what it was. Okay. It blew up on Twitter pretty good when it happened. I do remember that. I'm sure I made some jaw rule jokes at the time. Okay. So anyway, we watched the Netflix one and the kid is just a total dirtbag. He was basically just ripping people off and I guess maybe he thought that he could pull this off, but it was apparent early on that he couldn't. And he was definitely scamming people. But it's

worth watching. It was pretty good. I think that fraud is like the hot theme lately between bad blood and the billion dollar whale and this thing. Let's skip the listener questions for this week and just give one listener email of the week. So this is my favorite email we got. So it says, so I'm drunk waiting for the bus and listening to your guys podcast. I did not. see this as it came in. There's been too much negativity on seasonality. I'll have you know there's a seasonality ETF in Canada that's gone up and up over the years. And this is verbatim. Thought I would settle the record straight on that. Love Jaws with two Zs. Was that his name? I don't know. I guess so. Thank you, Jaws. I just love the fact that we have a listener emailing us while they're listening

drunk and defending seasonality. All right, what else do you get for more recent recommendations? Okay. So I was reminded of watching the fire thing. So it took place in the Bahamas. And I had a flashback. When I was unemployed from 2010 and 2011, I was applying at some weird places. And one of the places that I applied to was the Bermuda Monetary Authority, which is basically like Bermuda Central Bank. Okay. For what job? I don't remember. I don't think I heard back. MMT expert. Yes, exactly. I just had a flashback. I was like, huh. All right, more recommendations. Just I guess the Bogle book was good. Yeah. If you want to read just one, I would recommend Clash of the Cultures. Yeah. Although stay the course was good as well. So I watched a few movies this weekend. Bad Times at the

El Royale was this movie with Jeff Bridges, John Hammond, Dakota Johnson, and Chris Hemsworth. Never heard of it. It felt like a Tarantino movie in a lot of ways. It was all these people at a hotel in like late 1960s and they all had kind of a backstory and you didn't know what was really going on. And they're all a bunch of criminals and it all kind of came out. And I thought it was pretty good. It was kind of a fun movie. Probably 20 minutes too long, but I liked that one. And I saw that mid-90s movie by Jonah Hill. It was this first movie directed. Oh, I wanted to see that. It got like critically acclaimed. It was okay. I'll say that. It was one of those movies that felt really authentic and these kids were very believable as like

group of 90s skater kids but that was kind of it was like oh they're believable the story wasn't that great oh that's disappointing i like joan hill a lot it was interesting and a couple of the kids were really good actors that you'd never heard before seen but i was expecting more based on like the critical acclaim it got so that's all i'll say by the way i think that i should point out the reason why i'm in this hat and sweatshress because i can't feel my fingers it's absolutely freezing in my office okay that's good to know all right send us an email animal spirits pod at gmail.com and thanks we'll talk to you next week Thank you.