Animal Spirits Podcast - The Meltdown (EP.16)

Episode Date: February 14, 2018

On this week's show, we discuss our thoughts on the market correction, why there's been nowhere to hide from the losses, the narratives surrounding the sell-off and 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. I hate the people who talk about it all the time, so I didn't want to be one of those people. From two guys who study the markets as a passion. Can I count on you to talk me off the ledge partner? Yes, and that's what this podcast is for. And trade for all the right reasons. That's my due diligence. I'm in. Dude, if you're in, I'm in.

A line of thinking is the higher the volatility on an asset, the higher the volatility on the opinions. so I feel like you have crazies on both sides. Here's your host of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnik. I can say that I was never driven by money. So you were trading three times leveraged ETFs for the love of the game. Exactly, man. I'm a purist. But anyway, and Ben Carlson.

This is true. I do not drink coffee. I've never been on Facebook. I've never done fantasy football. Oh, one last thing. Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holtz 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 Ritthold's wealth management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Now, today's show. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. We are recording this on Monday, Dow 24,573 o'clock. It has been a wild two-week period for stocks, Ben.

so let's just get right into it. We finally hit correction territory last week towards the end of the week. Is that correct on Friday or Thursday? I think we got there on Thursday. So the definition of a correction, I guess, as people are saying, is 10% and we've now gone in there. And to your point where you wrote about this week, it was likely one of the fastest corrections we've ever seen from all-time highs.

Yeah, let me ask you a very personal question. Hit me. When you're calculating or thinking about a correction or a bare market or any arbitrary number, do you use the intraday high or do you use closing prices? I don't think I'm traderish enough to use intraday prices. And I don't know if I have access to those. So I use closing prices. I could go either or, but I think the correct peak to trough is intraday. I only use intraday signals for my 401k. Not bad. Not bad. All right. So the S&P 500 and other stocks topped at January 26th. They made an all-time high. And then just nine days later, they fell 10%. And I'm using closing. prices. That has never, ever happened where stocks made an all-time high. I'm sorry, I used

the Dow for the study, where the Dow made an all-time high and then nine days later was 10% below where it closed. Something similar happened in 1928, where stocks made an all-time high and then closed 9% lower nine days later. So not entirely unprecedented. But I think that's one of the things that maybe made more commotion than it deserved. Like a 10% correction is very, very normal. I think the speed at which it happened, and there's a bunch of things that we're going to get to, but the speed, I think, is the primary reason why people were so so excited. This is why it's both so interesting and maddening to use historical data to inform yourself as an investor, because I think it makes sense to look back and figure out how things generally

happen and how things usually happen most of the time. But if you would use the historical playbook for figuring out this correction, you would have been completely wrong because these things usually don't happen. And it's just why investing can be so humbling, because these things that never happen seem to happen quite frequently. It's crazy. So tops are a process, bottoms are an event, which is why you typically see a sort of rounding top where it's a bunch of false rallies and the bounces become less and less severe. I don't know if severe is right word, maybe the opposite is severe. But at the bottom, you see sort of a puke, a V bottom. And this time we saw a V top. And another reason why this felt so traumatic was because if,

If you were a diversified, if you held a diversified portfolio, there was really nothing to shelter you from losses other than cash. So using closing prices from January 26th to February 9th, SMP was down 8.75%. Long bonds, which typically provide sort of crisis alpha, was down 4.37%, gold was down 2.6%. The bond index was down... That one heard you didn't it? GLD. Too soon.

Was that? Okay. The bond index was down. 1.26%. And managed futures got crushed. I see losses between 8 and 13 percent because this happened so fast. CTAs got crushed again because the speed has declined. There was really nowhere to hide. This is definitely one of those situations where they see the correlations all go to one and everything kind of pukes and falls at the same time, which for some people, like you said, speaking out against diversification, it might seem like, well, there's nowhere to hide. You should have

just been in cash. But obviously, long-term investors don't think. think diversification to work over nine or ten days. It's definitely more of a long-term thing, but it just shows you that there's always going to be periods where something completely out of whack happens and you're not going to be able to completely, you know, figure it out and totally shelter yourself and hedge every risk. And the fact that we had interest rates rising a little bit, which ding bonds, obviously. Yeah. One thing that did work quite well was a product that we had mentioned a few weeks ago. The symbol is T-A-I-L. Meb Faber's tail risk was up 4.66 percent. I don't own it, Ben, do you own that?

No, but I think we should deserve a pat on the back for mentioning that two weeks ago. We completely nailed the timing on that, right? Yeah. But yeah, that's, and you hope that your sort of crisis alpha tail risk thing works in an environment like this when volatility spikes big time and everything else sells off. If it doesn't work then, you know, when will it?

But that's pretty interesting. Did you do anything personally in your account over the past two weeks? I made a slight extra purchase in, my brokerage account that I normally wouldn't have using some cash one of the days I was kind of hoping for one of the days we'd get a bigger flash crash and see something big and that would have put some more money to work but other than that I just dutifully continue to buy periodically you know every two weeks through my paycheck and monthly in in other accounts so not many huge changes how about you I didn't I didn't do anything what did you buy last week I just I just put money into an

ETF that I have it. Name names. I put money into the, I've been using lately the Elf Architect, VMOT, trend following value momentum. That's kind of the one I use in my outside brokerage account. So I put some money in there. And just because stocks peaked a little bit one of those days. And I'm pretty sure I nailed the bottom exactly to the minute.

Maybe not. But I mean, it's, well done. Yeah, it's tough in these times because, you know, as you said, you never know when they're going to stop. And it's possible this thing's, you know, stocks are railing now. I wouldn't be surprised either way if stocks come back and we get a V bottom to really piss everyone off or if we just kind of trudge a little sideways for a while and we have another leg lower. I really don't know what's going to happen. The thing is I did a lot

of work this past week. I'm writing a piece for Bloomberg on some of the historical corrections that happen outside of the normal ones people look to. And most of the time, there really isn't a reason. The best reason is usually stocks went up a lot and so now they need to take a breather and go back down. And that's usually the best reason there is. So there was, I found three different bear markets, one in the 40s and two in the 60s, that basically had zero reason for happening. One of them was in 1946 when stocks fell almost 27 percent. And that was right after World War II, which surprisingly stocks rallied during World War II. And this was almost like a fall after that rally. Oh, what they call that a peace scare, I think. Oh, yeah, they could. Yeah, they were worried that

productivity was going to go down and there wasn't going to as much growth because the war stopped. The other one was in 1962, which was another close to 27% correction. And they actually had a flash crash then, too, which stocks... Wasn't that the Cuban Missile Crisis? Well, that actually was the end of the fall. The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the end of the bare market. And so they tried to blame this one in Kennedy. I actually found this piece from the Federal Reserve from like 1967 going through all these old bare markets and trying to give reasons to them.

and even at the time they couldn't figure it out. And so in 1962, like May 29th, the Dow fell 5.7%. So it had a flash crash kind of before that was even in the lexicon, which is interesting because now you hear all the reasons, and you can correct me if I miss some, but the reasons people said stocks fell this time were because machines, algos, ETFs, ETNs, VIX products, risk parity. Did I miss anything? Super Bowl indicator.

Yeah, interest rates, wages, inflation. but people always want to put a good narrative to these things, but when something happens this fast, there's no way that you can just put a reason on it and make it nice and clean like that. Yeah, I generally agree with you, but I actually think that there was, like, I think that the reason why stocks initially fell, I do believe that it was because interest rates were rising and the wage number that came out on Friday. Now, why did they fall so fast? I think that's just people being people, and there were some crazy numbers about how fast money came out of the market. And again, I think one of the biggest reasons is because the speed at which has happened,

so Bloomberg had a few good statistics on this, that RSI, which is basically a momentum indicator, and we'll link in the show notes about how exactly that's calculated. I don't think that's quite important, had its biggest decline of all time. So RSI was overbought for a long time and it just absolutely cratered. And so with that... And this is going back to like the 1920s they looked at this. Yeah. So with that, the S&P 500 Spider ETF, SPY, suffered a record $23.6 billion outflow last week, which is around 8% of the total funds assets. That's a lot of money. That's impossible. These are passive investors in that fund. I don't think that's probably. Zing! Yeah. Which is another reason to look at

When people talk about the growth of indexing an ETFs and say that it's passive investors, that's so stupid because there are so many traders and Johnny come lately and these things. It's just, it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, B Spoke had another one that we'll link to where they use a 50-day moving average and they're looking at overbought and oversold conditions based on standard deviations above how far and below they are. And this thing went from extremely overbought to extremely oversold in just a few days. So it was certainly a 10% decline is very, very, very normal.

I think the speed, which I keep saying, just threw people off. Yeah, the chart is pretty crazy. I mean, just slowly, slowly up and then whoosh down. And it is kind of what the escalator up, the elevator down. Is that what they say? Yeah. In 1987, when the DAO fell 22.6%. And side note, on Tuesday, October 20th, the Dow fell below Monday's low.

Imagine what Twitter would have been like. During 1987? Yeah, on the Tuesday after the down 22% day, stocks were down quite significantly lower than Monday's low. Well, at the time, people were predicting a great depression from that. They thought they were heading for a depression because of the stock market. So anyway, the New York Times wrote something, obviously, every publication wrote many things. And one of the things that they said was, quote, democratic leaders in Congress blamed the administration's policies and urged the president to accept a deficit reduction package that would include tax increases. I quote.

Well, it wasn't Greenspan, the one who came to the rescue and lowered rates? And we talked about this, too. It's anytime you do these historical analogies, it's never perfect because we talk about this weekend. In 1987, interest rates on the 10 year went to 10% leading up to that crash. Can you imagine how happy people would be with 10% interest? I mean, you talked about people are spooked by interest rates. Imagine going back to the 80s or 90s and telling someone that the market is spooked

because rates rose a little below 3%. It sounds so asked, like they would. have thought you were crazy for saying rates are that low. And obviously, that's just, it's all a relative world. Yeah, that is a very good point. So do you believe that stock sold off on Friday because of inflation fears and rates rising, or do you think that's just complete bullshit? I think investors a lot of times look for a reason to sell. They've had a ton of gains, and sometimes people need an excuse to panic. And it's so stupid, but take profits, right? I think sometimes investors just want to do that. And then it just kind of snowballs and cascades and people find

reasons. And I just think that trying to figure out one reason for all of this. I mean, do you really think all the investors out there hitting the sell button are looking at the wage data going, oh, geez, wages are rising. I know what that means. X, Y, Z will happen. Like, I don't, I just don't buy the fact that people actually look at that. I feel like there's a few thousand of us in the financial industry that look at that stuff and try to make sense of it. But I don't think that investors who are piling out of SPY are looking at wage and inflation data. All right. So if it's not the humans making these decisions, are you blaming the machines? No, no, I'm saying it is the humans.

That's why it happens because of the human element. But I'm saying these humans aren't rational, you know, totally informed agents that are making these decisions because they've put it in their discounted cash flow model and interest rates have risen. So that means the future value of expected payouts is going to, whatever. So I think it is humans. And obviously the machines maybe could make things a little more hairy in the meantime, but it's humans that are putting the inputs into these machines too.

So it's one way or another. the humans are. It's a human element that makes these things happen. And after the 1970s through 74 bear market, there was a 50% decline or close to it. Investors pulled money out of equity mutual funds for 21 straight quarters, from 1975, I think, until 1981. So to your point, we're fully capable of sending stocks lower ourselves without blaming the machines. Yes. And that was before index funds and all this other stuff. And so let's say for, let's say we don't get the V bottom this time and we get into technical definition of a bare market and we fall 20%. How bad do people freak out here? Well, considering that 8% of

SPY was ripped out of the fund in in nine days, I don't know. Maybe people are going to be people. Yeah, no, it's true. It's always, it's always impossible to guess, I suppose. You and I are, again, not that what we sort of say half seriously affects how we allocate our own money. But I think that we were pretty optimistic about this correction and the future of the market. Like we were saying, we wouldn't be surprised if we see new all-time highs this year. And again, we take what we say with a huge grain of salt. But like this seems to be the best thing that could have happened is that people have reminded, oh shit, this is what risk looks like. Maybe I had too much money in stocks. Maybe I should, you know, reassess my true risk

tolerance. But the fact that this correction came in the context of a massive bull market with very good economic data. And of course, we both know that the market will turn probably before the economic data shows itself. But there's no recessionary signals anywhere. Like, this is great. I would, if we have a 20% decline in the context of a bull market to sort of reset and keep people in check, that's a beautiful thing. I took a look for Bloomberg last week at all the bear markets and corrections going back to 1950. So anything that was a double digit, you know, or 10% or worse. And there's been 34 corrections or bare markets in that time. 22 of them took place outside of a recession. So yeah, sometimes a recession is probably a good

indicator that stocks are going to sell off pretty hard, but it doesn't always have to be that way. And sometimes these things just happen. And if stocks went up forever, then guess what? You're not going to get a premium on them because there would be too much money flowing into them and then they would have to crash. So it's kind of a circular reasoning where stocks just can't go up forever on a straight line. It's got to be volatile, and that's where the risk premium comes from. So what do you think about the fact that so many young investors have never seen a bear market? Do you think that makes them any more susceptible to bad behavior, or you think that's just a story? I honestly think people who are going to panic are going to panic either way. So they had a graph

in Bloomberg this week, and they said that more than half of all fund managers have nine years of experience or less. And I think we've talked about this before, but there's a huge difference between experience and expertise because how many older investors do you know that have been scarred by their previous experience in the market, whether it was inflation in the 70s or a huge bull market in the 80s and 90s or high interest rates or low interest rates or whatever it is that has shaped their views and they can never get away from that viewpoint. So I think people who are going to panic will panic regardless of their experience in the

markets and sometimes experience as a good teacher, but a lot of times it can also be a really terrible teacher, so I don't really put much stock into that. Yeah, the New York Times had an article about millennials, and they said Mario 27 ducked into a restroom to check his cryptocurrency and stock holdings on Monday and felt a punch to the gut. Then a growing rush of anxiety and nausea. His $33,000 stock portfolio had plummeted by more than 40% to $19,000 in value before swelling back to $24,000 on Wednesday. He said, quote, I'm aware of the risks, but I never expected this rapid and severe drop. It looks like the down payment for an apartment I've been buying will have to wait.

He obviously did not pay attention to Animal Spirits last week where we talked about. Do not have your down payment sitting in stocks. Yep. He learned his lesson the hard way. But I think that people need to experience the pain for themselves because, you know, it's one thing to, even if you're a market, you know, fan of market history, it's one thing to read. It's a much another thing to, a much different thing to experience it. but I also don't think that experience necessarily prepares you for the next event. No, because, again, they don't always look the same.

And I've gotten a few text messages from like old college and high school friends in the past few weeks who I never hear from about the markets. And now they're all saying what is going on, what is happening. And it is just funny how that changes. And trying to like coach them off the ledge and say like, and this guy, you know, he said he's got $33,000 in a stock portfolio, but he's only 27. And so it's like, we've talked about this before. But, you know, lose that money now before you have a much larger balance and take these pain now.

And you have so many years and decades ahead of you to save and invest. This is a good thing for young investors. They should pray for a bear market. Friday morning, I got an email a screenshot text from a friend of mine saying that he can't log on to his 401k. And we never, ever, ever talk about the market. And that should have been good for a bottom. So we actually got a listener question about this. And he said, hey, a bunch of the major online brokerage houses went down last week.

And I think it was Fidelity. And I know a couple of the Robo Advisers had a hard time, betterment and wealth front. And they kind of said, what are your thoughts on this? Like, how does this change client behavior? So what do you think, if anything, that means? Yeah. So, yeah, actually, I did do something last week. I bought some stocks for my sister.

She had a little bit of extra cash. And TD Ameritrade, I couldn't get on. Yeah. The thing is, I'm sure most people logging on and probably checking their balances or probably hitting the sell button. but it is kind of staying for those people who actually wanted to do something good and buy in sort of a quick panic. But there was a story in Bloomberg last week about Robin Hood and Wealthfront saying it's just the other thing, the only, it always comes back to, are we worried about these places not being there to hold their customers' hands when things go wrong? And then they log on, they can't get onto the website.

So what does that, what does that do to their psyche? Does that cause them to want to panic more? Are they less, do they lose trust in their institution? if you if you want to control your own destiny get an e-trade account right like i don't think you go to betterment or wealth front because you want to make allocations decisions you go there because you don't want to deal with this i actually i actually think it's a good thing if people can't log on to their account when this stuff is happening again unless you're trying to buy or something because look watching your account value go down on days like that is is usually unhealthy

behavior it's not going to help you we have one percent of people but logging on or trying to buy. That's a good question. I'm guessing it's a small percentage, but yeah, it would be nice for those people who want to, but most people are either looking at their value or probably selling. No, it's interesting for my own behavior. So I told you that I check my account every day, which I have stopped doing. Did you in the last 10 days? No, I haven't. Okay. And why do you think that is? Because I'm not selling. So I don't need to see that negative reinforcement. Okay. So you're actually trying to take steps to correct that behavior and not look as much anymore.

I lied on this morning. Okay. You had to look. Yeah. See what the damage was. Yeah. I mean, most of the time, I think from as closely as we follow this stuff, I think you can get a good idea about, you know, how far things have fallen. But it's kind of the same way if you're, as things are going up, if you're not paying attention, you get a pleasant surprise by, you know, how far things have grown.

So I guess it works both ways. I think one of the biggest stories, though, and we mentioned this earlier, but. let's just dive in a little bit deeper. One of the biggest stories was the supposedly non-correlated asset classes or securities or strategies that you would invest in. So it's conceivable and there's no way of knowing that interest rate rising and bond prices lowering sparked the sell-off. But what do you make of managed futures and CMTs getting their bells rung? Well, that's a tough. I've written about this strategy a lot of the years because that was this, this was this huge, this is probably the best performing asset class, you know, overall or strategy in 2008. It was up on average

like 10 to 15 percent while the stocks were down 40, depending on where you look in the globe, you know, 35 to 40, whatever. And so tons of money rushed into these things following the crisis because we're going to have a double-dip procession and things are going to happen again. And these things provided, quote-unquote, crisis alpha. And now in the past, since then, 2009 to 2017, you know, I think managed futures on average as a whole had like a 10% total return. So they did nothing for almost a decade. The hope was next time that things go wrong, these things will again show that prove they're where. The problem is these things follow trends and the trends that they've been following have in stocks. And when stocks fall

this quickly, they don't have enough time to reverse course. So you shared some stats with me. You looked at the top of what, five or six biggest managed futures funds and they're all down, what, 8 to 10%. Yeah, I think the worst one that's always 13%. So I don't necessarily think this is like we're not blaming the managed futures. It's just the nature of the strategy. This move happens so fast. I think from a behavioral point of view, it's just this is tough for people that have

been allocated to those funds hoping for some crisis alpha and this happened so fast and they didn't have time to respond now. If we do see a actual trend change and however you measure, it doesn't really matter. But if we do say a sustained bare market that lasts over 18 to 24 months instead of like intraday, I would tend to think that these funds are going to do pretty well. Yeah, in a longer term bare market, that would be the hope. And I think it's easy to focus on the short term when these types of booths happen. You kind of have to.

But, I mean, you can't judge a strategy over 10 days unless it completely blows up. And so I think with any of this stuff, whether they're talking about bonds or gold or tailor-risk strategies or managed futures, I think you have to give it a little more time for things to play out and you don't judge your investment performance on 10-day period or something. Yep. So managed features are technically a hedge fund strategy, if you will, and a lot of the bigger ones charge a premium for their fees. And a lot of them, there are now some ETFs and mutual funds in the space, which is kind of

nice, but the majority of the bigger ones still charged $2.20 in the hedge fund structure. And so there was an article in Bloomberg last week, a really good one that. that basically said, what are, what are the big hedge fund fees pay for? So they tried to break out, and it's kind of tough because a lot of these places don't exactly open their books for everyone to see, but they tried to break out how, how much of what investors are paying in hedge fund fees and that 2% management fee, you know, go to actual operations of running the business and making investment decisions versus marketing. And there was actually a lawsuit by some clients against J.P. Morgan. And the lawyer basically said, you know,

To quote him, contrary to what the clients generally believe, half the fees they're paying are not going to investment geniuses, but marketing. So they found, for a lot of these funds they looked at, basically half of the fees that are going to hedge funds are paid for paying for shelf space at different places to get investors and marketing fees and sales, which just sort of boggle. I guess it makes sense intuitively that that's how these things work, but it sort of boggled my mind that they were saying it was half the fees go to that stuff. Wow. So I just don't know how the large pensions and dominance foundations can continue to put so much money into this space without having a revolt for when they see statistics like this. I think that it's just, it's, it's been such a long bull market that I think that they would just feel such a huge sense of regret if they were to do anything about it now, like change their allocation. Yeah, it is hard for them. And yeah, and they're, I mean, they talk about the returns.

obviously, which has been covered extensively, you know, elsewhere where hedge funds have done terribly. What do you think they can do? I mean, could they literally demand that a fund lowers its fees? Because the best performers will just say no. Like, go somewhere else. Right. What's surprising to me is that there's so many other also Rans that are able, I mean, there's 10 or 11,000 hedge funds these days. It's just, it's amazing to me that there are that many that still exist that are able to, in the reason, I guess one of the reasons they still do exist is because they pay so much for their marketing and sales and they are able to get in front of people and i've said this before when i would get in hedge funds meeting in the past it was

impossible to not be completely wowed by these people they did have the best sales and marketing people of any you know hedge funds and private equity probably were very similar like their presentation materials are amazing other people are sort of charismatic and speak well and they have a good narrative and it's really hard to turn that down you get in that room with them and sit face to face because they are so persuasive. How long did it take you when you were back at your office for the fantasy or the awe to like sort of wear off? And you were like, whoa, I just, I was just like under their spell for a minute. Towards the end of it, I was going into it thinking I'm not going to be wild by these people. And it's really hard, especially when you get in front of like the portfolio managers,

the people who have started these businesses a lot of times. And they're really, you know, the making the big decisions. They really are good at what they do. They're, they're, they're highly educated, everything that they make you sound like they have the most unique investment strategy in the world, even though there's probably 85 other funds doing the exact same thing. And it's hard not to get into that spell, which is, you know, another thing about this, this idea of why storytelling is so important, sales is so important in this business because that's what it comes down to a lot of times. So, but yeah, the numbers really sort of surprised me. It's pretty interesting. So I guess that's enough on the markets. You're getting

recommendations this week? Yeah, this is sort of funny. So I'm reading this on my Kindle. I'm reading deep work by Cal Newport. And there's a lot of really good stuff in there how easily distracted we are and how important it is to really dedicate time and, you know, undivided time into what we're doing. And the irony of that is that I'm like reading this book on my phone and checking Twitter. Yeah, checking Twitter every 10 minutes. I don't know that I can, be a deep worker because I am just so easily distracted and it works for me. I could, there's a ton of room for improvement, but I'm not sure if some of us are just, you know, wired differently for different types of work. When you were writing your book, did you ever do anything where you

shut everything off and just wrote or were you constantly multitasking and doing other stuff when you're writing? Yes and no. I would go to coffee shops a lot or come into the office to write on weekends, but I usually had like some sort of distraction. I'm really not good at turning everything off and just bearing my head in a book. Yeah, I read this book, too. I'm not one of these people that could just go into a cabin for a week and put my head down and write for 12 hours a day or do whatever you need to do. That's not me.

I find, I'm sure it probably doesn't help with efficiency, but I'm more of a multitasker, too. And I watched two movies on Netflix. One was Cloverfield Paradox, and I saw people giving it bad reviews, but for some reason I needed to see just how bad it was, and I can confirm that it was putrid. That's too bad because I was.

I loved the first one. Okay. So it was just terrible, huh? Yeah, it was really bad thing. Yeah. I'm glad you fell on the sword for that one. I have like a high tolerance for bad movies. Like I loved Alien versus Predator.

As long as it's like a few cool action scenes like I'm good. This gave me nothing. Okay. All right. Good. Well, I'm glad I don't have to watch it now. And I watched with my wife, we watched the ritual, which is a horror movie on Netflix. Okay.

And it was like, it was definitely not worth watching, but it's kind of funny. My wife goes onto Google and reads the entire story before. So she won't be scared? So she won't get scared. Okay. And we both scare very easily. So we're like, we're watching with like our hands of our eyes. It was okay. It wasn't great. It wasn't terrible. Okay. I saw one of the more entertaining movies I've seen in a while this weekend. We watched American Made with Tom Cruise. Have you seen this one? So it's actually based loosely on a true story. I'm sure they embellish like they do with all movies that based on a true story. But Tom Cruise, who is in his full T.C. mood. I'm a huge Tom Cruise fan. Hold on. TC mode? Yeah, TC, Tom Cruise. No? Anyway.

Do not edit that out. Of course. Hey, I'm a big Tom Cruise fan. I don't really practice the Scientology stuff, but in the movies. So this is about a guy in like the 70s and 80s who got caught up in the basically flying back and forth drugs for the drug cartel, like Escobar. But he was also part-timing it working with the CIA and dropping off guns in Latin America, it's one of these stories where it's hard to believe that any of it is true. It was so bonkers, and it was really entertaining. If you're seeing the movie Blow with Johnny Depp, great movie. Kind of like that, but I think this was actually better, surprisingly. Give it a try. I think this was like Blow, but a

little better. So it was one of the more entertaining ones I've seen in a while, and the whole story was just bonkers to me that had actually happened, even though, again, it was probably embellished a little bit. And I've been reading the book, Thinking and Betts, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Andy Duke, who is a former professional poker player. Great book on figuring out how to make better decisions and the way that she frames making decisions and she uses poker as like the guidelines behind it in terms of like the idea of making bets and not having all the certainty. This is one of the better books I've read in a while. Our podcast with Ted Cydies is really good. Speaking of podcasts, I don't know.

know if you listen to Barry's interview with Jack Devine. He was like the head of the international CIA. I don't know. That's probably not a department, but something like that. He was hugely influential on the CIA, and it was really, really good. He was involved in driving the Russians out of Afghanistan and by taking down Escobar. It was really good. Oh, wow. In my queue. Okay. Yeah, since I just watched the CIA movie, I will listen to this week. Good stuff. Okay. So next week, Bear Market or Rally from here? Well, you already are pretty well off the lows. Oh, man. We'll let you know next week.

Yeah, sounds good. All right. Thanks everyone for listening.