PRESENTED BY ➷
Wand Shopping (for Adults)
What makes you tick?
The fun thing about getting into watches is how quickly it turns into a kind of magic. You start browsing and suddenly you’re in the horological version of Ollivanders, trying to figure out which piece is going to choose you. Maybe it’s a Cartier Santos with just the right bevels, a Moonwatch with real NASA cred, a Sea-Dweller whispering depth ratings, or a Reverso that changes faces faster than a polyjuiced imposter.
That might sound more chaotic than enchanting, but thanks to Bezel the whole process has been de-risked. Every one of Bezel's 25,000+ timepieces are screened before listing, authenticated in-house by Bezel’s team of experts, and guaranteed to be free of anything aftermarket – no Franken-Subs, no cursed objects. That makes Bezel the most joyful, trustworthy way to find the watch just for you – and to get up to 20% off before the holidays.
What we’re drinking about while talking.
➽ Global Returns
Should doing good require feeling good?
Estimates suggest charitable giving will slip again in the U.S. this year. It’s no small wonder given how squeezed many high earners feel. But as Jerusalem Demsas notes, there’s a difference between feeling financial strain and not being wealthy –and the distinction matters. Lots of high-income households feel precarious thanks to housing, healthcare, and education costs, but they’re still fabulously wealthy compared to most people in Rwanda, Bangladesh, or Guatemala, where cash donations deliver an absurd ROI. Just because your money can’t solve your problems doesn’t mean it can’t solve someone else’s.
➽ S&M&H&M
What do you call a consumer that doesn’t consume?
A new psychology study demonstrates that though exposure to social-media influencers reliably heightens fear of missing out, it actually makes people less likely to engage in conspicuous consumption. There’s a familiar word for this kind of dynamic: perversion. In Lacanian terms, “the structure of perversion, strictly speaking, is an inverted effect of fantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as an object, in his encounter with subjective division." The opposite of the pervert is the neurotic, who buys the Dyson Airwrap because that seems like the thing to do. Hard to say which is worse. Easy to say which is weirder.
➽ Indexplosions
Did responsible investors create an irresponsible market?
This week Michael Burry – the eccentric investor Michael Lewis made famous in The Big Short – went on Lewis’s podcast to discuss his bets against AI and why he expects non-tech stocks to take a beating if that bubble pops. Burry told Lewis “it would be very hard to be long stocks in the United States and protect yourself” because of the marked decline in active management. In other words, if non-tech stocks are buoyed by W-2 workers contributing to retirement accounts and buying index funds, they can also be dragged down if those contributions cease. Less stock-picking means less conviction means less differentiation between companies. Lots of us were told that funds were the responsible way to go, but Burry worries “the whole thing is just going to come down.”
➽ Honky-Wonk
Why is it perfectly fine to hate a certain kind of country?
This week, Democratic Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn lost a special-election race against Matt Van Epps – underperforming some expectations but overperforming the district’s 2020 results by +/-13 points. That’s a success, especially considering that oppo researchers had unearthing a podcast clip of Behn saying: “I hate the city, I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music, I hate all of the things that make Nashville apparently an ‘it’ city to the rest of the country.” Pundits (in New York) thought this would tank Behn’s campaign, but context matters. Yes, Behn was hating on the posses of young(ish) white women vomiting on Lower Broadway after bootscootin’ to Luke Bryan. And, yes, bagel-eating leftists hates that kind of country. But so deep-fried centrists. Both groups care about authenticity (and the Ryman) in a way that drunk bitch Kristin does not.
➽ Speed Bumps
Why isn’t flatter always faster?
At the DealBook Summit this week, Palantir CEO and self-proclaimed “arrogant prick” Alex Karp performed his usual headbanger about eliminating middle management. The tune is hugely popular with the investor class, but no more economically substantive than Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing.” As organizational theorists point out, most companies (and teams within companies) orbit experts with specialized skills whose “pace becomes the team’s pace.” Flattening an org doesn’t speed innovation because those indispensable people continue working at their own natural cadence. Karp is smart enough to know this—and also smart enough to keep playing the hits, given that Palantir has minted five billionaires on roughly $2 billion in annual revenue. Hell yeah he’s gonna perform the crowd-pleasers.
➽ Also… Also… how to eat at a restaurant ➺ Like a Ken Burns doc, but for hating boomers ➺ King Charles still has weirdly good taste ➺ New genre: housing crisis horror ➺ There was a Main Street bubble too.
The “WATCHING WATCHES SURVEY” is an attempt to understand what watches mean and who wears what type. Full results will be shared with Upper Middle Research members and those that complete the survey.
❦ MR. MARKET ❦
Mr. Market is Andrew Feinberg, a retired hedge fund manager who has beaten the S&P 500 for the last 30 years. He is the author/co-author of four books on personal finance.
Dear Mr. Market,
In a response to a recent investing survey, many of Upper Middle’s highest-earning readers told us they are incompetent investors or, even worse, that they don’t know how their investments are performing. Is that normal? Should they feel deep shame?
Confused Newsletteditor in Connecticut
Dear Confused/Andrew,
People who are highly competent and successful at work often don’t feel that competence is transferable to investing. That’s not troubling. The number of respondents who didn’t know how their portfolios performed in the last year was.
It’s a common blind spot, but it can be a killer because if you don’t know how you’re doing you’re unlikely to change what you’re doing that isn’t working. Also, studies have long shown that a head-in-the-sand approach does not work. (Thanks underpaid academic economists!)
Unfortunately, the problem of not knowing about performance is probably worse than the numbers suggest because there’s knowing and then there’s knowing. Not digging into the data allows investors to lie to themselves. And most do. One study found that 88% of individual investors engage in some form of faulty mental accounting, whether that’s taking mulligans on meme stock fiascos or simply rounding up. If your readers only kinda know how their money is doing, it’s a safe bet they won’t be happily surprised.
I’m a math guy, and I think all of your competent readers need to do some simple math. Look at your brokerage or adviser statements and see how you’ve been doing versus the S&P 500. There may be no problem at all. Then again, if you’ve been trailing the market by 3% a year for a long time, you might want to stop picking individual stocks, fire your adviser, or both. Or, for God’s sake, stop holding cash. The average investor is 17.5% in cash, which means she trails the market by 1.2% a year every year because of the cash alone.
Naturally, readers who don’t know how they’re doing will be nervous about finding out. And the numbers may be a jolt. But this is not a do-I-really-want-to-know-if-my-spouse-is-having-an-affair-with-her-trainer situation. Once an investor knows she’s making 4% a year, it’s relatively easy for her to turn things around. If your investing life needs a radical overhaul, then today is the best day to start.
Mr. Market
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CLASS NOTES ❧ Dept. of Deference
Lizzy Livne plans to get rich saving the “micro-irresponsible” from themselves.
The current bumper crop of personal-infrastructure startups offering concierge-adjacent services is fertilized by a simple insight: Many professionals have traded too much of their time for money and now want to trade some money for time. There are plenty of AI-fluent opportunists ready to make that deal. What makes Lizzy Livne, the founder of Quiet Lux, stands out in that group is that the former IDF combat soldier and venture capitalist treats the requests her clients text her like mini-missions. She’s run more than 2,500. Livne deploys the odd lifestyle koan in service of marketing, but she’s a grinder. For $7,500 a year (after a $500 trial month), Livne and her team mobilize on behalf of people who are taking care of business but not, in any meaningful way, taking care of themselves.
Upper Middle spoke with Livne about what $7,500 worth of “personal hospitality” actually buys – and why large concierge often don’t understand what clients want.
When it comes to start ups, the most interesting question is always the same: Why are you, a person who could be other stuff, doing this?
On a professional level, I’m extremely together. On a personal level, less so. My friends call me “micro-irresponsible.” I think those two things are related. Your ability to worry is a resource and it gets depleted. I deplete that resource at work and don’t have any concern left for my personal life. That translates into, like, ‘Oops, I haven't seen a doctor in five years.’ This is a product for people who have a similar problem.
Who are those people and, let’s be direct about it, how rich are they?
I target dual-income households around New York City in which both partners have careers they care a lot about. When there’s no predetermined captain of the family on the domestic front, the chaos gets unmanageable. It’s less about identifying super wealthy people than thinking about how value works within a household.
I should add that I predominantly sell to women, who are tough. Women tend to be better educated consumers and many also feel pressure to take charge at home.
