➺ January 15, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. Over the last few days my iPhone has had an “SOS” at the top thanks to the big Verizon outage. This has provided me the chance to put the phone down and served as a reminder – not that screentime is bad or whatever, but that there’s a difference between unplugging and getting unplugged.

The former feels virtuous. The latter feels like when you were a kid and the power went out. I’ll take the latter every time. – AB

➺ Until You Get Punched in the Face: This is your last chance for non-members to participate in our Financial Planning Survey and receive the results, which show some wild correlations.

➺ On That Note: Shoutout to those of you who already signed up for a free 30-minute financial planning session with Domain Money. I sincerely hope it’s helping.

A Therapist for Your Money

Most people think they understand their relationship with money:

“I’m bad at investing.”
“I’m not much of a planner.”
“I’m kinda cheap.”

These are stories – usually designed to avoid the discomfort of looking closer. But financial planning doesn’t have to hurt. Domain Money’s CFP® professionals can analyze your numbers and replace those personal myths with:

• clear frameworks
• real strategies
• dashboards tied to attainable goals

It’s money therapy without the couch and you can start with a free 30-minute strategy session. Sign up today.

The “FINANCIAL PLANNING SURVEY” is an attempt to understand how members of the Oat Milk Elite engage (or don’t) in short- and long-term financial planning. Full results will be shared with Upper Middle Research members and those that complete the survey.

What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Sugar Lows
Why is Sydney Sweeney dressed like a sexy chipmunk?
The trailer for S3 of Sam Levinson’s Dawson’s Creek porn parody Euphoria dropped yesterday, signaling a subtle shift in focus from high schoolers dressed like sex workers to sex workers dressed like high schoolers. It’s the logical evolution of a show that has always been about sexual capital (and Sydney Sweeney’s décolletage). Earlier seasons focused on the exchange of sexual and social capital; the coming one will focus on the exchange of sexual and financial capital, following Hunter Schaefer’s character into a sugar-daddy sitch and Sweeney onto an OnlyFans-esque platform.

The pivot is timely. As always occurs when wealth gaps widen, America has seen a sharp uptick in sex work – or pseudo-sex work – among middle- and upper-middle-class young people searching for a stability that kind of labor rarely provides. The empowering language of sexual entrepreneurship often treats sex and money as equivalent currencies with a stable exchange rate. They’re not. Money is alienable and capped in risk; sexual capital is embodied and depreciates through use. The rhetoric of “mutual benefit” obscures a deeply uneven exchange that rarely works out for anyone except not in the Euphoria cast¹.

TASTE ➽ Pawlenciaga
Why does Bergdorf’s matter?
This Saks Group, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman, declared bankruptcy this week as former CEO Richard Baker’s experiment in scaling luxury-oriented brick-and-mortar comes to an ignominious end (the biz owes Jimmy Choo $33.3 million). The stores won’t shutter, but their future is less than bright, which is a huge bummer. Say what you will of his business acumen, Baker’s version of luxury, which centered personal world-building, was far more compelling than the version pushed by premium mediocre retailers like COS and Aritzia focus on brand world-building. Bergdorf’s aversion to middlebrow conformity is best captured by two store policies, one written and one not. The written one: Bergdorf’s allows dogs. The unwritten one: Bergdorf’s (extremely attractive) sales associates hand out dog treats and scritches. This isn’t a weird, New-York-coded quirk; it’s core to an ethos that prioritizes expression over legible signaling. The good people at Bergdorf’s understand that your clothes should match your dog. If they don’t, you’re probably shopping in the wrong place.

MONEY ➽ Secure the Bag
Why is high-end vintage about to be under threat?
Luxus, the venture-backed “luxury investment” startup, has unveiled what Forbes is catchily – and inaccurately – calling the world's first "Hermès-dedicated investment fund.” It’s a compelling pitch, given the success of Masterworks, which has delivered strong returns by selling partial ownership stakes in blue-chip art. But Luxus isn’t playing a long game. Instead, the “fund” buys and authenticates handbags on the secondary market and quickly resells them at a markup. With an average holding period of just 43 days and touted returns of 34%, it’s effectively a high-end vintage dealer open to outside capital. The “fund” wrapper is branding, designed to increase the multiple ahead of an eventual sale.

That doesn’t make Luxus uninteresting. It’s a sharp business that highlights the value of in-house authentication and the extraordinary cultural and price power of the Birkin. More broadly, it points toward a future where vintage and antique markets are absorbed by similar “funds,” many of which will likely verticalize into e-commerce (like our buddies at Bezel).

Want to earn up to $200-an-hour for your insights, get three free months of Upper Middle member-only content, and get a discount on annual membership. Join Upper Middle Research, our professional research platform.

Compliance isn’t virtue.

FOnly an unreasonable person would walk onto a tennis court having never held a racquet and expect to win a rally. Maybe they’d return serve once or twice – that’s possible – but most shots are going long or into the net. Most people are, as it turns out, bad at skills they don’t practice. 

We don’t practice protesting. We don’t practice confrontation. We don’t practice resistance. Those are skills many of us may need in coming weeks and months. So how are we – white-collar Americans fluent in institutional norms and conditioned to obey unwritten, unenforced rules – going to practice? Who is going to coach us?

A French philosopher with a taste for leather and psychedelics. A German-Belgian conceptual artist with a PhD in agricultural science.

Michel Foucault’s basic point in Discipline and Punish – once you strip out the Eye of Sauron panoptopical architecture mishigas – is that visibility produces reflexivity which produces anticipatory compliance, which is internalized as character. We don’t just obey the laws being enforced, we obey the expectations of those doing the enforcement. This is doubly true for professionals and elites accustomed to being on the side of power (if not wielding it). Our behavior isn’t just about avoiding real consequences, it’s about avoiding entering the uncomfortable space between what is expected and what is enforceable. As it turns out, that space is really big – like… so big it encompasses most possible human behaviors. 

Judith Butler had it right: “Norms operate not only to restrain behavior, but to produce the field of possible appearance.” Authority governs less by punishment than through expectations. Flouting expectations is the best way to practice the groundstrokes of resistance. If that sounds conceptually abstract, don’t worry. In practice it’s as simple as playing games. 

Book of Games (“Spielebuch”) by Carsten Höller – the dude who installed metal slides in the Tate Modern – is compendium of activities outside of the bounds of normal human behavior that range from the slightly whimsical (“Scratch yourself in a public place so conspicuously that other people start to feel itchy”) to the deeply odd (“Appear in the guise of Jehovah’s Witnesses and babble complete nonsense”). A compendium of equipment-free activities, the book functions incredibly well as a set of drills for people who want to practice violating expectations without harming or humiliating others.

Consider this example: Raise your hand to attract attention like a child at school, with your index finger pointing upward. Look invitingly at the other person, inviting them to invite you to talk.

Do it to a cop or a security guard then ask for the time.

Consider this example: When a stranger looks you in the eye, wink at her. Wink so often that it might be either an intentional act of a nervous tic. Inconspicuously watch the stranger until she looks your way once more. Wink again.

Again: Cop. Security guard. Anyone in an enforcement role².

Nothing here is mean-spirited much less illegal. These games – practices, really – are simply unexpected. Raise your hand or wink and you’ll feel the discomfort of violating expectations. Do it enough and you feel it less. Eventually, you start to get comfortable in that space. You learn where the lines are. You learn not only to serve, but to rally. 

Then you start to learn about who and what is on the other side of the net. As Aussie cultural theorist Sara Ahmed puts it, “We learn about institutions from the wear and tear of coming up against them.” (Spoiler: Most cops laugh. Some don’t.)

The people who get really good cease to explain or justify. The space between expectation and enforcement becomes their home court. Abbie Hoffman was like this³. So was Bartleby the Scrivener. So was Henry David Thoreau, who not only wrote Civil Disobedience, but was one of the rudest men in Concord, Massachusetts circa 1849.

Not ready for all that? No problem. Start with an even simpler Höller game. “For a fixed period, do not utter the words ‘thank you.’ In order not to appear rude or badly brought up, convey your thanks through glances and gestures or use other ways of conveying gratitude.” Get off script. Stretch a bit.

Winking at cops isn’t about taunting authority. It isn’t even about cops, many of whom are perfectly lovely human beings. It’s about training yourself not to give away power to those who would take it from you. This is particularly difficult for educated, accomplished people who have spent the bulk of their lives benefiting from anticipatory compliance, often in the guise of professionalism. That’s why practices is required. A population that reflexively adheres to expectations is easy to subdue. Those kinds of people watch the ball bounce by.

By all means, reading about tennis. Read about the matches we’re seeing break out across the country. Just understand that reading about tennis won’t teach you to hit a ball, much less win a rally. You gotta practice.

Enjoying Upper Middle? Please share with your friends. Refer new readers and we’ll send you a t-shirt like hers (and an obscene thank you note). Use your personal referral link.

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,

I’ve read that making investment decisions based on headlines can be a bad idea. True dat?

Curious in Cairo, Illinois

Dear Curious,

True dat, indeed. The biggest problem with headlines is that most are bad (“Peace Breaks Out!!” is seldom seen) and likely to reduce your stock allocation. Also, headlines are often late. Once the Times or Journal has recognized a trend, the implicated stock may have doubled. Yes, the stock could be another Nvidia – but it could also be Krispy Kreme.

Occasionally, though, headlines can make you money. I bought Perimeter Solutions (PRM) four years ago at $9 because it had a monopoly on the fire retardant used to suppress wildfires. By November 2023, the stock had crumbled to $2.79. Then the stock rebounded, hitting $15.96 on August 5, 2025. The next day, the Times ran a piece headlined “How One Company Retained a Monopoly on U.S. Fire Retardant.” It was not a favorable article. It didn’t use the terms “brass knuckles” and “relentless testicular compression,” but it might as well have.

”Fuck favorable,” my investor brain said. “Welcome to the NFL.”

I bought more. The stock has nearly doubled since. The moral of the story: If the Times runs a piece declaring a company an unconscionable monopoly⁴, consider buying.

Thirty-six years ago, my sense of justice caused me to ignore the headlines that basically said, “Here’s Some Money.” Apple had accused Microsoft of stealing its UX and a judge ruled that, on 179 of 189 counts, Apple had no case. “The judge was wrong,” my conscience said. “Apple was robbed!”

In the ensuing decade, Microsoft rose over 100-fold. Eventually, Apple almost went bankrupt. Although those outcomes weren’t completely predictable, they were directionally obvious. 

“You’re a schmuck,” said reality as peace broke out..

Sincerely,
Mr. Market

[2] Obviously, it warrants saying that situations vary. If you’re Black or or obviously Latin, you might not want to wink at cops. You also might not need to. You’re probably much better operating in the space between expectations and enforcement than your white friends. Congrats, I guess?

[3] Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago Seven was just awful. Someone should do a real Hoffman biopic. Next Safdie bros project?

[4] Who wants to give Palantir money?

Investment advisory services are offered by Domain Money Advisors LLC (Domain Money), a registered investment adviser with the SEC. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Upper Middle received a one time partnership fee and thus has an interest to promote Domain Money's services.