Animal Spirits Podcast - The Next Big Short? (EP.91)

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

On this week's show we discuss does all the high-frequency trading at the start and end of the day matter, what trends will die off with the baby boomer generation, is Rich Dad, Poor Dad real, visualizing wealth inequality, Walmart's competition with Amazon, are banks a big short again, why did valuations get so low during the late-70s/early-80s, why does the government charge such high rates on student loan debt?, celebrating saving milestones 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

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by Y Charts. They have a new post out called The Earning Season Playbook, which highlights some of the capabilities on their platform. For instance, you can make alerts to notify you when there are big earning surprises, and you can do this for your portfolio and a lot of cool stuff in there. We will link to this on the show notes. You can get a seven-day free trial to the product, or if you mention Animal Spirits and you're a new user, you can get 20% off.

And they actually have pretty good videos in here that actually show you when you're on this site where exactly to go and how to do this. So very helpful. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Rittholt'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 investments. decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities

discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. So Bloomberg had a story this week that I can't tell if this matters or not, but they say 23% of all equities trading volume happens in the last half hour compared with 18% in 2010. And they also say all told, index and exchange traded funds, quants and option-related strategies dominate all but 10% of U.S. stock trading. So they actually broke out a chart here. that shows how much volume by each half hour of the day. So 9.30 all the way to 3.30 would be to the last half hour. And there's a huge spike in volume at the open.

So the first half hour and the last half hour of trading. My question to you is, does this really matter? For who? For most investors. Should they really care? Or I guess the other way to look at it is what can they do to avoid being taken advantage of? by these obviously algorithmic trading strategies. Well, don't place market orders at the open.

It would probably be obvious advice. I think that's like the idea just maybe don't wait into these first and last half hours. That's probably something that can conserve you well. So they actually talked about how SOCGen was trying to create a strategy to take advantage of this. So they said that they would take all, they have these products that they put on, I think using options or I don't know exactly what kind of strategy it is. but they take a longer short position on S&P futures based on where prices are relative the previous days close. If they're higher, the strategy goes long.

If they're lower, it flips short. When there's no clear trend, there's no trade. So it's a simple momentum trade, but doesn't it seem like trying to game these type of things can only end badly and the signals have to go away very quickly in these things? Yeah, I mean, maybe some of these sophisticated strategies can capitalize on this. obviously somebody at home should definitely not play this game. We get questions occasionally about are we worried about algorithmic trading and what it can do to liquidity and like a crash.

I don't think that it really matters because when there's a panic, it doesn't really matter what the liquidity is. People just get out at any price. So this stuff doesn't really bother me that much. I think the point is just don't try to be a high frequency trader because when you're trying to compete in that on those short of time frames, there are people out there that are going to be much better than you. Did you see the video of the bowling machine?

Yes. That just chucked it straight down the alley. That's what it's like competing against these high-frequency traders. Yes. Don't you think that's got to be some sort of foul, though? The ball didn't even hit the bowling alley. You just went straight into the pins. Not a bowler.

Don't know the rules. Seems like cheating to me. So in the news this week, two things are dying, one old and one new. And the new one is HQ trivia. Were you ever, did you get swept up in this mania? Never got into it. I read a few things about it, how huge it became, but I never, never did anything for me. So an article in TechCrunch, 827,000 downloads from January through June, which is still a ton of downloads, but down 92% from the 10.2 million it saw in the same time in 2018. And get this. It's peak valuation, $100 million. So this thing was a public company? Or a private company?

No. I mean, I don't think it's public. I don't think it was owned by a public company. I think it's private. Gotcha. So this thing was a fad, obviously. Yes. And then the other thing is Mad Magazine, which I did not know is owned by DC Entertainment, which owns DC Publishing. And I think that's owned by Warner Brothers, which is now owned by 18T. So they are no longer, I think they're going to still publish, but no new material. So did you ever, were you a Mad Magazine person? I know this is like, way before our time. No, but it's been around forever since the 50s probably. So I think that this was the precursor to like S&L and the onion and all that sort of satire stuff. And it has gone the way of the baby boomer. Yeah.

So what other things are going to leave when baby boomers, the baby boomer generation sort of has their swan song? Banks. Like cold heart like brick and mortar banks. Yeah, and we'll get to that a little bit later in the show. You know what else I think is going to go away? What do you tell you? completely gone when the baby boomer generation goes away.

That is a very good observation. Do you think? Do you think anyone under the age of 55 wears whitey tides as a male? Such a funny word. Such a great word. Everyone has a dad who wears those, but there's no way that that makes the next generation. So this is not a new article. I saw somebody tweeted it this morning.

Robert Kiyosaki's company is kicking around. the idea of bankruptcy, it looks like. That's after the Market Watch profile of him called, he called himself a genius because he owns gold. What do we think? Did you ever read that book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? It was like the first money book that I read. I know a lot of people like it.

I mean, it's obviously made up. That stuff didn't happen, right? I mean... Okay. So, can somebody do bad and also do good? Yeah, I think that's fair. You know, like, think about how many people read this book and was like, oh, you know what?

This makes sense to me. I get it. And I don't know how this book is aged because, I read it when I was probably 16. Yeah. But the alleged complaints are that they owe $23 million that they're not paying and they have $400 million in revenue. So I don't know what's going on there. My guess is this guy wrote a book.

He wrote like a parable of how to think about money and it resonated with people. And then he said, all right, I'm cashing it on this. And he puts on seminars and he writes books with Donald Trump and he talks about gold. and he talks about gold and silver, and he calls for market crashes. And he just decided to cash in. I'm sure he does a lot of speaking events. See the Joel Osteen of personal finance? That sounds reasonable.

Yeah. I mean, if you ever read some of his stuff about his thoughts on the markets, and he's way, way out there. Yeah. And obviously the book is made up, but yeah, you're right. It probably helped some people get into the right mindset. But when I read it, I was thinking, okay. There's no way this happened. He made it up, which is fine. I think it's a parable. Yeah, for simple finance stuff, I would much, much, much, be more likely to recommend The Wealthy Barber.

Okay. I actually never read that one. You probably don't need to because it's like very, very basic, but it's well done. Okay. So the Federal Reserve Data website, Fred, released a new data series, which for people like us, this is... Was it manipulated? it's all manipulated right so they did the share of wealth held by different cohorts so they showed from 1989 to today i guess it was 2017 was the last reading or when i guess it was quarter q1 2019 sorry share of total wealth held by people in the top 1% is like 31% the top 90th to 99th percentile is 39% 50th to 90th percentile is like 29% and bottom the bottom 50th 50 holds about 1.3

percent of wealth. So the top 1% only hold 31% of the wealth. That sounds low. You think that's low? Well, if you think about the top, look at it this way, the top 10% holds 70% of the wealth. Okay. I guess the awful thing that stands out as the bottom 50%. Yes. And I'm guessing the fact there is that liabilities just completely overwhelm any sort of assets there. And it kind of can't It cancels it out really quickly, but they don't have any assets. Yeah, that's the point. It's all, so I'm saying anyone in that cohort who has assets is completely overwhelmed by everyone else who just has liabilities with no assets.

I don't know. What else? I don't know what to make of these numbers sometimes. You can see some changes since the 90s and the biggest change is probably like an increase for the top 1% and a decrease for the bottom 50, but it's not a huge decrease. but I don't I just well maybe is this is this sort of the middle class disappearing because 50th to 90th went from about 40% down to 28% yeah that's probably a good way to look at it that there's just continues to be this bifurcation between the very top and the very bottom yeah this is this is a pretty depressing chart um so there was a big article out from vox about what's going on with Walmart and their e-commerce and they have revenue of around 20 mean $22 billion, but they're projecting losses of a billion dollars. And that sort of losses is only reserved for companies like Amazon. But you know what's interesting. So we'll get to some

the numbers in a second, but this paints a pretty bleak picture of what's going on to their e-commerce division. But the company, at least the stock, looks fantastic. Are we talking technical analysis? Fantastic. Well, I'm just calling it is, it is what, listen, it is what it is. Okay. So, I mean, obviously Amazon basically forced them into a money-losing proposition. Like, they had to do this. So Amazon accounts for 38% of online retail. Walmart is just 4.7%. And inside of Walmart, their e-commerce represents just 5% of the entire U.S. business. So what Walmart did recently was they announced a push to offer free next day shipping on up to 220,000 items with no membership fee. And then Amazon said, okay, prime members, you get one day shipping. And you asked me a few weeks ago

if I was getting one day shipping. Right. And I just noticed that I ordered socks, they were there the next day. And you know what? Let me give a plug. Under Armour socks, fantastic. Okay. I guess I never really do name brand socks.

I'm not a brand snob like you, so. I'm not a brand snob either, but I am a company. You like them? Okay. And you know what? Let's get into that if you're brand snob shaming me. Okay. So you wrote a piece about cars.

Yes. And then you stuff. You sub-blogged me. I did, but I really didn't, but I kind of did. I know. Because you weren't spend shaming people, but there are so many articles about this person makes that and just all this sort of shit. And we're all guilty of it because I see people with nice cars and like where the car doesn't match the house. You know, it's like a reasonable house, whatever, 15 hundred square feet and they drive like a Maserati.

Yes. And it's just like, wait, what? And you can't help but think to yourself, you know, we're always counting other people's money. I think it's just like human nature. But the explosion of articles has just reached a boiling point. And unfortunately, I think it's just going to keep getting hotter. Yes. My point was just if you're having trouble saving money and you also drive a really nice car,

like that's one place that's just staring you in the face in your budget for an easy place to cut back that you could save a few hundred dollars a month that could be then rolled right into saving. So that was kind of my point. I guess my point was like it's just it's so tiring seeing people with money tell other people what they should do. Like Susie Ormond said you need $5 million to retire. And Kevin O'Leary is saying don't get a $3 cup of coffee, but he spends $30 on a haircut and he's freaking bald. Yeah. Yes. Those are. Or $300 on a haircut or whatever it is. Like get out of here. Yes. Honestly, at that stage, those people should just stick to motivational quotes. Like that's what they're there for, right? Post an Instagram picture with a sunset and if someone walking in beach and a quote by Einstein or something. And like, that should be your lane at that point

because you're so out of touch that it doesn't even, it doesn't even register anymore. So, all right. Earlier you spoke about what might go away with, with boomers. So our big, our bank's a big short again. And now listen, also I will say, technically they look good here. So this is not a short term call. Okay. Is this your next trade? there was an article in the journal, open a checking account at Citigroup and you may get a free Costco membership and a subscription to Amazon Prime

and several months of Hulu or Spotify. It seems as if the rewards for banks are getting bigger and bigger because they must make up for it in other places. Like they're just scrambling for ideas and I wonder if FinTech and companies like Venmo and PayPal or I guess,

does PayPal own Venmo? I think they do. I'm not sure. Sure. But if these companies are just... I think the biggest misstep banks are making is the stuff that we talk about with the savings accounts. I don't know why they've decided to... Like, I feel like there could be a huge exodus. Well, maybe not an exodus of older people, but young people, all young people are going to go into these online banks. And maybe that's why Goldman is one of the

smarter ones that actually is getting ahead of this. You're absolutely right. And there's numbers to back you up. According to the article, just 4% of Americans switch our primary bank accounts last year, right? Inertia. That's why there's, what, $9 trillion in these low interest accounts? Right. But for people under 40, that rate jumped to 9%. So younger people, anti-boomers, are quicker to switch. So, like, I mean, eventually Robin Hood or something like that is going to have an interest-bearing checking account in a decently high online savings account. One of these, one of them is going to figure it. Maybe it is golden since they changed to a bank back in the crisis or whatever.

I don't think this is necessarily going to happen, but what if Amazon or Google gets into financial services? That'd be great. I would totally sign up for their stuff probably because I'm sure that they would do it much better and make things more efficient as well. So moving on, Tadas, Visconta, our colleague who runs a blog, Abnormal Returns, did a post where he collected a bunch of people's opinions

on Is Value Dead? And there was an article or a post from Vanguard looking at different factor returns in different environments. And one of the conclusions, and we'll look to us on the show notes, is that value does exceptionally well in bare markets. The other one I've seen, Bernstein originally wrote about this, was that value actually does better in higher inflation environments. And the fact that we've had low inflation has been something that has hurt value stocks. So this has been like the perfect storm for value not working. Yeah, I think it, yeah, I mean, that's always a anytime.

something doesn't work. You want to have a perfect storm go against you, I suppose. But maybe it's just these things are cyclical and value worked for a really long time. And now it's not. So definitely blog posts of the year. And I don't even know if you could call this thing a blog post, what Jesse Livermore did. This basically asked and answered all the big questions at finance. It was, I think this took me two hours to read. I did it on an airplane ride. Yeah, it was a long one. So, I mean, there's so many good things in here. But one chart that stood out to me was valuation versus return over time horizons. And it seems to be that valuations don't matter in the short run or in the really long run. And there's sort of a sweet spot that,

and looking on different valuation metrics, the sweet spot is around 10 to 12 years. Well, the other part I liked about it was how inflation kind of explains some of history's really low valuations. And some people say like, well, if we ever get back to the 1980 valuation level, like that can't really happen again unless inflation interest rates go bananas. And so, like, it's a good explainer as to how valuations have shifted over the years. And they're not just the static thing. They depend on the environment. Yeah.

Yeah, good point. Question for you. Okay. There's an article in financial planning. Low volatility funds have taken in nearly $12 billion more than double that of any other factor this year. So the question is, is, is it? Is this just performance chasing, or do you think it's possible that low-val as a concept is a very, very easy sell to clients, especially given where we are in this quote-unquote cycle? Yeah, maybe a little of both.

So we talked to Invesco a couple weeks ago about there on our talk about your book about factor investing and how I thought low-val is one of the most misunderstood ones. And maybe it's kind of having its day in the sun where it's becoming more understood and people can explain it a little better. And if you want to take some risk, maybe you should do it in the low volatility variety going forward if you're worried about what happens in stocks. And your point in that interview with Vincent was, well, what are you going to lose 3% less than the overall market? Is that really going to help you in a 40% bear or whatever? But the point remains, I think there are probably, like, couldn't low vol be a great selling point to baby boomers that are retiring? Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense to me. So we've been speaking a lot about student loans lately. It's sort of a hard topic to

avoid, given that it's been in the news so much with the potential Democratic candidates in 2020. And we asked a question, like, so we showed a chart last week that showed student loan debt exploding and what has driven that. So it was a law under the Obama administration. Isn't it, isn't it great how we put the stuff out there and we say, we have no idea why this is a case, and we get 10 people that tell us exactly what the reasoning for it. Fantastic. So the idea was basically to cut out the middlemen. Another reason why banks might be another big short. So they projected that it would save $68 billion over the next 11 years. And I guess the lending institutions use this as like a free money backstop. But a question is,

why are rates, let's see. So in 2011, it said that the loans will be lent to students at 6.8% interest. Why is that the case? Why are rates so high? That's the thing that I don't get. It sounds, and so our colleague Bill Sweet did like a 20 thread tweet to throw him on this. I'm sorry, let me just put this quote on here real quick. It said money, so this is an article from Huffington Post and we'll put all this in the show notes.

Money for the program will come from the U.S. Treasury, which will lend it to the education department at 2.8% interest. The money will then be lent to the students at 6.8%. Eliminating the middlemen will allow the education department to keep its 4% spread as profit. So the education department should wipe out all these loans. It's not the American taxpayer. Yeah, it sounds like this is sort of a law of unintended consequences where this went wrong, but I agree with you. I don't still see why do they need to have such a high spread. It doesn't make any sense why they are trying to make money off of, like that's, shouldn't that be the first step in this thing? Before we go wipe it all out, let's just drop everyone's rates to as low as we can't. I mean, I don't, why can't they

just, you know, hit a button and do that right away? And if they're keeping the 4%, why don't they make this an ETF and let investors get some yield? Because we've, yeah, exactly. We've seen these stories of people that pay like a minimum amount and some of them don't realize that they're paying like, they're not even paying down any principal. And so after 10 or 20 years, their balance is not much smaller than it was when they started. It's like, if you wipe out the interest on that in a lot of ways that takes care of these problems where we have these outlier events in this stuff. So sticking with the idea that we have great listeners who send us these things, somebody sent us this. And we've said many times maybe to listeners' detriment

that, oh, the average balance isn't that much, right? The average balance is a manageable $25,000 or whatever the number is. So somebody wrote to us, it's true that having $30 to $50,000 isn't much and in theory should be able to be paid down. But with, the rise of income-driven repayment plans, many people are paying less than their interests are cruel. This is the negative amortization problem. I talk to people regularly who say some version of, I keep paying every month and my balance goes nowhere. I've seen plenty of cases where people were steered into an income-driven plan, not knowing what it would do to their long-term total repayment costs, and by the time they changed course, end up having to pay way more than

they ever took out. This is bad. He said, worst example was a case where a coped had a total of 160 were on income-driven plans because they each made $50,000 per year. Over about seven years, their incomes have risen substantially. And despite paying $1,800 a month for the last three years, their balances had grown so much to $220K that the $1,800 were still barely covering interest. Yeah, this, out. And obviously, the higher interest rate is the problem there.

And obviously, maybe not understanding these payment terms here and how they set it up. But that's kind of crazy that this is. is even allowed. Why would they even allow people to do this? Don't know. So a few weeks ago, everybody was talking about the inverted yield curve. And it sort of went away because I guess stocks regained all-time highs and all was copacetic. But odds stats tweeted a chart. As B-spoke Invest pointed out, the 10-year three-month yield curve has now been inverted for 30 straight days. And he shows where this happened on the chart previously. Take a look.

Peak and peak. Yeah. This happens. in 2000 and in 07. All right. So it was been nice knowing you. Two weeks ago, I made the comment that life hacks are bullshit, but there was that really cool video showing like peeling basil and shrimp and taking pineapple apart. So I tried that pineapple hack. Didn't work.

Total disaster. Yeah. I seen one about taking off the shell of a hard boiled leg. And there's this video of it where you like, you somehow blow on it to get it off. a little hole and blow, and it perfectly comes off on the video, and I tried it. Didn't work at all. Was that a magic pineapple? Yeah, I don't. So maybe the problem is you have to put your 10,000 hours before you get to the Life Act stage. So Tom Sarah Vegas from Bloomberg had an amazing chart, amazing chart. So a few weeks ago, we were talking about hedge funds and should they be

available to the public because there are so many products that are just destined to burn investors money, like a lot of the three-time levered ETFs. And so what he showed, was current assets versus lifetime flows. So the top cash burning ETF sponsors. And the worst defendant on this list was ProShares. Not near the worst was Direction, which is synonymous with these ETFs. I was pretty surprised by that. So it says Pro Shares has $31 billion in current assets, but $55 billion in lifetime flows,

meaning investors have lost $24 billion in these funds. So these are the double, triple levered ETFs. Is that the problem? Yeah, I guess I just thought this direction was the biggest, but not even close. Okay. Who do you think is trading these things?

So that's almost half of the money that has come into them has been just lit on fire, it looks like. Well, I just want to make the point that this is absolute dollars. It's not like a percentage of flows or anything. But who is trading these? Honestly, I think it's just day traders.

Like, I don't necessarily think that it's big money doing this, do you? I mean, I got to imagine sometimes there's hedge funds that try to use this stuff for short-term positions, but. Yeah, to like hedge short term positions. I don't know. Okay. Listen, it wasn't me. All right. Not anymore. So a good marketing thing that I saw. So that shirt that I bought on Instagram a few weeks ago, that doesn't quite fit my body. Yeah. So I tried to return it. It was $29.

So they said, if I just get something else from the store, they'll give me a $10 bonus. They'll give me $38. So I said, you know what? No thanks. I'm just going to return it. So I clicked return. And then there's a $10 handling fee. So I only get $18 back. So I'm like, all right, you know what? Fine. I'll just buy something at the store. But there's nothing that's like in between $29 and $39. $39. It's like $29 or $65. So they got you. So now I'm just stuck with this shirt. Do you want it? I might fit you very nicely. We'll try to our next meetup. All right. Matt Levine. He's the John Oliver. of finance. That's a good way to look at it of Bloomberg. He wrote a post about good investors make investing harder. Okay. And it perfectly summarized the current environment of passive money leaving and it's just getting harder on active managers who set the prices and we're all free riding. It's still early in the month so I can actually read this article on my Bloomberg free article list limit, so I'm good to go. I just finished my last free one today.

All right. I have seven free remaining. Did you see this article about a crypto? derivative market? No, hit me with it. Now, admittedly, this is, it's very, it's a tiny market, so it doesn't really matter, but it's just hilarious. GSR, a crypto currency trading firm led by former Goldman Sachs commodity traders, so they're structured products in Bitcoin, obviously. These include variant swaps, which pay out for their buyers of Bitcoin's volatility increases, and binary options, which pay out either a fixed sum or nothing, depending on whether Bitcoin trades above or below a specified price. I don't, especially when it gets down to like retail level. I mean, has there ever been a structured product?

that's worked for someone. The issuers. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I'm sure there have been, and maybe I'm off here because I'm not well-versed in these things, but we used to look at these all the time at the endowment I looked at, and they all seem so complex and difficult to understand, and the prospectuses are 200 pages. I just can't imagine that these things ever really work out for anyone the way that they

assume they would. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they are structured for a specific market event. and if that event doesn't occur or that scenario doesn't occur these things are not going to work out for you that's my theory did you listen to

so you've been paying attention to all the basketball stuff yes it's pretty wild the league has turned upside down and 2019 is what seems like going to be I guess the 2020 season is going to be the most

anticipated one in a long long time don't you think whenever they have their next bargaining power the bright steel or whatever comes up between the owners and the players the owners are going to get really mad and say, like, we can't have this anymore. Like, if you were a small team owner, you've probably made a lot of money on the value of

your team, but would you be really happy with the way things are going and the fact that these players can just go wherever they want, whenever they want? I don't think there's any putting the toothpaste back in the tube on this one. So Jared Dudley, Journeyman, now on the Lakers, was on the Wodge podcast, and he said something along the lines. Like, I already made my money. So I checked it out. He's made $57 million in his career. Not bad.

57 million. And also, so Woj is like this massive brand now. He has three and a half million followers on Twitter. I was trying to, I said the other day, if he was a hedge fund manager, how much would his tweets move the market? Five or 10 percent? Any time he puts out something huge? So I was wondering, like, is the value of him accruing to him and his brand or to ESPN?

Like, what value do they get out of having him under their? umbrella. I don't get it either just the fact that they have him. Right. Does it matter if he's with Yahoo or ESPN? I don't think so. I don't really care. I'm not going to tune into ESPN to watch him. Right. So I read a book this week called Blockbusters. Hitmaking, risk taking in the big business of entertainment. Patrick O'Shaughnessy recommended it. And it's all about how the entertainment business works, how brands work, how basically this woe stuff. And it was very interesting. One tidbit in the book that is totally relevant, but just time. given the show. So Maria Sharpova's parents moved out of Russia or where she was living because

of the Chernobyl disaster. Oh, really? And where they moved, I think she happened to see or Martina and Evertilova saw her and made an introduction or something, something, something. Wow, that's pretty crazy. And now she sells candy and makes millions of dollars. Yes. Oh, last thing. You wrote in your spend shaming post that they're probably more wealthy people driving Honda than a Mercedes. And I think I actually saw that stat recently. That's a true thing. I just kind of made it up. But doesn't it, don't you think it makes sense? Maybe I saw it in your blog post that I'm making it up that I saw it. But I really do think I saw it. And yes, I do think it makes sense. I mean, that's like the, if you've read the millionaire next door, you like, they go through

the kind of cars they drive and they usually don't typically drive luxury cars. And obviously the super ultra rich, they can probably drive whatever they want and be fine. But I think the the regular millionaire next door probably doesn't always have a luxury car like you would think. All right. Anything else before some listener questions? Oh, let's go to it. All right. I was wondering if either of you have any weird personal savings milestones or recognize them.

Not the usual like $100,000 in retirement accounts, but something like you now currently save more per year than you spend or your retirement accounts are worth more than your remaining mortgage principle. Please tell me I'm not the only who does this. This is, there's not really a question. Well, they're asking, are there any savings milestones that we read? recognize. No. So I would say, I don't, there's nothing weird that I, I would say the one thing that I think people should strive for is just save more money than you saved the year prior. I think that's a really worthy goal. Either up your spending rate or, sorry, your savings rate and or up increase the absolute amount of money that you're saving each year. I think that's a really

worthy goal that people could. I think that most people don't really have a grip on exactly how which are saving. Like, I know that I don't, but my savings is automatic. So I guess I don't, so it's like out of sight, out of mind. But I couldn't tell you like exactly how much I was saving a month. I think it's, yeah, I think it's probably a moving target for people too. They hit, like, there's certain amounts that you save that five year, 10 years ago, you would have thought would would have been insane. And now you're like, well, I need to save more. So I think it's for most people, it's probably a moving target. And so it's probably hard to sit back and until you got to that certain point where you're totally off the grid and you have the FU money, then there's

always more to be saved, I think, for those people. All right. I can't tell if this is a real, this is real or fake, but I wanted to see if you guys had a hot take on this. Should I, A, attend the wealth stack conference and actually learn about financial advisory of services and the tech available, or B, attend a golf. Wait, wait, wait. He did say thanks for the $100 code off.

Oh, thanks for the $100 code off, which we had last week. And we will link to that in the show notes, $100 off wealth stack. Or instead of attending wealth stack. attend a golf tournament for a really good cause hosted by my warehouse firm where I currently hate working at a really nice golf course and have a chance to bring a new business. A will help my career long term and solidify my desire to move to the RIA side, but B, could, but not guaranteed, help my current job by bringing in new assets. Well, that's not going to happen.

Yeah, well, I think we're probably a little biased here in that we'd probably say wealth tech, but I mean, I think this kind of comes down to like how serious this person is about moving to the other side of the business. Because if you're going to constantly go to the golf tournaments and try to raise cash instead of figuring out how to move out of that side of the business that you hate working in, then it's probably never going to happen for you. Yes. And wealth stack is a great way to rub elbows with a lot of heavy hitters in the industry. All right. So who do we got for speakers? I got the list here. Top of the page. Michael Batnik, director of research, rich holds wealth management. So we got Danny Faba, who's the director of

innovation at TD Ameritrade, Alison Schrager, who's a book that we've both recommended here. She's going to be doing a talk on her book, Doug Bonaparte, who is a head guy and one of the guys on Fintuit, Justin Costelli, Joe Duran, who is a CEO and founder of United Capital, which is just bought by Goldman. So I'm really excited about that. Our friend Dan Egan, who is at Betterment, Patrick O'Shaughnessy is going to be given a great presentation that we're kind of having an idea on, which is sort of surprise and really cool. Peter Malook, who's ahead of creative planning, Cheryl Penny at Dynasty Financial Partners, who was just on the Michael Kitsy's podcast not too long ago. And it's probably one of the biggest baller. in all of wealth management that not many people know about. I could go down the list. There's many more people here. But there's a lot of really heavy hitters in the wealth manager space. And I think in the past, a lot of conferences hit on big, like investment people,

like macro ideas and huge hedge fund and private equity people. And those things usually don't get you much. And a lot of those people you can probably listen to on a podcast anyway these days. But these people are all. Kyle Bass will not be speaking. No. We won't be hearing his. Maybe he could talk about the big short for banks,

which you could, you know, sort of help on to. It's a longer-term play. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. If this person really needs money, go to the golf tournament. But if you really want to change, sure, come to the conference and talk to us. All right. Any recommendations?

Well, that Blockbuster's book that I just mentioned had some good stuff in there. Econ Talker with Russ Roberts had a really interesting interview with a doctor, Adam Seifu. And he asked a great question. Should evidence come with an expiration date? I thought there were a lot of obvious parallels to invest in with that. that. So that was good. I'd recommend that one. Okay, I read it. I kind of finished in the last few weeks, a couple books on happiness. So one of them is how will you measure your life? What? Do you need an intervention? No, I'm good. A lot of times I don't really like

reading these books because I feel like a lot of times it's, it's from really successful people that are trying to tell you how they achieved happiness. But I kind of like hearing examples from other people. So Clayton Christensen wrote this book called How Will You Measure your Life? And a few people actually recommended this one. And he kind of told that I think he did a commencement speech at a university and he turned it into a book. And he actually, he's the business professor from Harvard who writes a lot about disruption. And he kind of talked about like happiness in your career and your life through the lens of disruption in businesses. It's actually kind of an interesting way to look at it. And then I also finished the algebra of happiness by Scott Galloway, which was, which was very good

because he is so just blatantly honest about seemingly everything. And so I thought that was, he some good. That was definitely a good one for people who are just getting out of college, which is kind of the audience he was looking for. He's also the head coach of the Nick's Summer League. I don't know if you knew that. Is that what he looks like? Google Jeb Bushler. Okay. Okay. He was a player, right? Of Chicago Bulls. Are you really watching Nick's Summer League games? Yes. Oh, pathetic. Sorry, I mean the Knicks, not you. Yeah. Okay, so halfway through the second season of Big Little Lies, did you ever get into that show? Nope. I liked the first season. It was really good. The second season, if you haven't started yet, I'm going to keep watching, but

it's a bunch of really good actors and actresses and good performances, but there's been like one good episode, and it's just kind of boring. And I think it was one of those shows that should have been a one season deal, and they should have not done another one, I think. I could be proven wrong. Did you watch Dead to me? Yes, I did like that one. So Robin watched like three episodes, and I caught in, I hopped in for the fourth and fifth, and then she just finished the rest without me. I thought it was okay. It was pretty good.

Yeah, it was decent, not great. Like, if you need something, it was, I thought it was a pretty entertaining one. It was pretty good. So, that's the Aggie, I got nothing else. I didn't do much TV watching a reading over the holiday weekend. And, all right, anything else we got good today. That's it. All right.

Send us an email, Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com. Check both of our websites. We'll have a code for $100 off a wealth stack, and we'll talk to you next week. Thank you.