What Will Perform Best in 2024? (EP.340)

26:24It was the third worst year ever for a 60-40 portfolio, the worst year ever for the bond market. It was like the seventh worst year ever for the stock market. My least favorite saying in investing is the easy money has been made. It was hard making money these past couple of years. Really hard. And think about 2023 coming into the year, 100 % consensus that we were going to have a recession. And then we had the regional bank crisis blow up. And then we had the usual stuff with the debt ceiling nonsense. And even through October, the equal weight index was down 5 % of the year. The S &P was only up 7%.

26:57And so, yeah, the last 60 days have been an incredible run. This feels like projection, though. No offense to the emailer. Are we that optimistic? Or is this person underinvested and he's projecting on us? We've been celebrating a little bit how we made it through things, but I think that's just like a more of a relief than anything. Listen, if you're worried markets are expensive, I've been saying for a long time, buy value stocks, buy small caps, buy international stocks, buy high quality, buy dividend, whatever. All that stuff is way, way cheaper than tech stocks. If you're thinking the NASDAQ 100 is expensive, sure, I'll agree with you, but everything else is not expensive by any means.

27:34The rest of the market. You know what this person needs? They need to read an old post of yours. Do you know which one they need to read? The Bob one? The Bob one. Ben wrote a post about Bob, the world's worst market timer. And all Bob did was top tick stocks throughout his entire career. He put money in when the market was at an all-time high before major drops. And how did Bob end up, Ben? Way better than expected. Still my most popular blog post. As it should be. It's the power of long-term focus, not getting distracted by the noise, Potential downsides always exist. That's why stocks go up.

28:16We don't even need to go through them because I feel like everyone knows them. But I agree. This person is right to think that I should want stocks to go nowhere for a while so I can buy them at lower prices. But I hope you've been buying. I hope you were buying for the last 18 months when stocks were down, though. I hope you kept buying. Yeah, selfishly, as somebody who's investing every two weeks, you want the market to go nowhere. Right? Like, just let me accumulate as much as possible. That's the right mindset. But then you can't have that mindset and then also be scared when the market falls.

28:46Like it's either a gift or it's not. And I view it as a gift every time it happens. Yeah. I don't think coming back from a bear market that was really nasty. I don't think that should make you obviously the downsides. We know there could be a recession. There could be. Yeah. What about the upsides? What about the risks to the upside? That's the thing. No one ever says. Here's what could go right. Yeah. This one surprised me. We put this in the compound. We had 4 ,000 votes almost. What do you think will perform best in 2024? Now it's one year. We did Bitcoin, gold, the NASDAQ, S &P, or treasuries.

29:16Bitcoin won with more than one-third of the vote. The S &P was next, then the NASDAQ, then treasuries and gold. So 34 % of people said Bitcoin would be the best performer. This surprised me, especially from our audience, which isn't like a bunch of crypto crazies. I think... Duncan, can you next time we... This show, next show, whatever. Can you put a vote in the same thing as this? Do you own Bitcoin? what percent of our audience do you think with bitcoin is it around a third i would say 40 so that's crazy the thing is i do think crypto is unlike any any asset class there is in terms of the fomo is way way worse when things are going up and the dread is 10 times worse when it's going down i think the fomo is so palpable because we've seen parabolic moves in the past you know your stocks aren't going to double in a year.

30:13And there's nothing that's tying Bitcoin to fundamentals so that it can't, like why, there's nothing stopping Bitcoin from going to 100 ,000, 150 ,000. And so just that thought in people's minds, it does weird things to your brain. Yes. There's more chasing involved and more dunking involved in crypto than any other asset class. Yeah. Fast money just wrecks our emotional stability, like financially. Yes. All right. Hey, another email. Hey guys, I absolutely love the show. Really appreciate all the content you put out. Oh, this is a good one. I was listening to today's show and want to fully endorse what you said about investor engagement following the meme stock craze.

30:52So last week, for those who missed the show, we were talking about like how more people own stocks than ever. And Ben and I were wondering, hey, maybe the Robin thing, the crazy stuff was actually good because it got people in the market and it got people to understand that the casino style of investing is not the right way. And so anyway. Yeah, whatever drew them in, they stuck around. So I want to fully endorse what you said about investor engagement following the meme stock craze. I finished medical school in the spring of 2020 and started my residency and got caught up in the Reddit Robin and Whirlwind.

31:25I made like$10 on a couple option calls and lost a couple hundred on crypto and bad stock picks. Then in the spring of 2021, someone mysteriously sent me a copy of The Psychology of Money. Shout out to Morgan. I absolutely love the book. and not long after I got hooked on your podcast. Since then, I've gotten big on the Boglehead philosophy and other responsible investing practices. Needless to say, I learned my lesson quickly and all things considered relatively painlessly. TLDR, I'm glad I made these mistakes earlier in my career. And with relatively little money, it set me up for a much better future.

31:51How about that? Paying the market tuition, right? Yeah, not everyone becomes a crazy gambler because they make a few option bets. That's pretty good. How about that? So another listener email, This guy wrote a post about leveraged ETFs. I think we were talking about like there's a four times one coming out. Yes. QQQQ. Oh, the quad Qs. Oh, no, no. Sorry. It's XXXX. Okay. Duncan wants the quad Q. So these are – we've spoken like just a billion times. Even with direction, Ed has said like as emphatically as he can that these are trading vehicles. but somehow there's still always new investors that have to learn the lesson the hard way.

32:34So this person did wrote a post and he said, he showed the performance over a four month period. And these are real world examples. So there was an index that gained 2 % over a four month period. The 2X ETF lost 6%. The 2X inverse ETF lost 25%. Example number two, where the index gained 8%. The 3X ETF lost 53%, and the 3X inverse ETF lost 90%. Whoa. Point is - The volatility just crushing you. The volatility crushes you. It is not linear. If something's up 30 % over a year, you're not going to be up 60 % in a 2X or 90 % in a 3X. It just doesn't work that way. People that are emailing us, well, I have the risk tolerance.

33:19It's not what you think it is. These products are not meant to be bought and held. They're just not. Right. Even if the returns can be good in certain years, there are periods where you could get crushed in these things. If you really want to use leverage, just use longer dated options. These are not the vehicles for that. That's fair. All right. Last year, a recession or this year really was consensus. So this chart was going around. This is from Financial Times. It was published last year, and they polled these people in 2022. 85 % of economists predicted a recession in 2023. It really was about as consensus as you could get.

33:58This other chart from Charter looked for Google searches for U.S. recession. Now look at 2008, huge spike. 2020, huge spike. 2022 was bigger than both of those. Not even close. So it really, really was. getting back to our point about like this year if if we do sound optimistic fine okay guilty we've been through a lot we should celebrate it doesn't mean you spike the football and you ignore risk and you go all in but we've been through shit like it's okay to be to celebrate a little bit yeah so my my favorite stat since 2010 the u.s economy has been in recession one percent of the time since 2010 we've been in a recession for two months and how many of those months how many of that time how much of that 99 of the time were people predicting a recession most of it probably remember double dip recessions after the financial crisis were a thing then in 2011 with the european crisis that like the euro was going under and the european union is done 2018 people thought we might be going into recession because there was a bit i think I think it's rational irrationality to be always worried about a bear market because they're so damaging and devastating, not even just psychologically.

35:16If you get a 55 % bear market, that means that years of gains are wiped out. Right. I think the 2008 crisis brought us back to 1996 or something. Yeah, dude. dude. So it's, it's how we're wired to be, to be looking out for things like this, because they really are. They're not just like, Oh, no big deal. 20%. Yeah. 20%. No big deal. The big ones are a big deal. So you, you mentioned the recession piece that we, this one was flying around too. The U S has gone through 34 recessions since 1957. This is a great chart. We both talked about this before too. Pink lines are recession, blue lines are expansion.

35:57and you can see pre-Great Depression, more or less, from the Great Depression before the 1930s and before, there was recessions all the time. And now they are way fewer and far between. It just doesn't happen. I think the number I looked at it, I don't know, we have one every three years or something in the past. And now it just doesn't happen very often. I think there's a few reasons. One of them is just that the U.S. economy, we used to be an emerging market, more or less. We were on the gold standard, which is way less flexible than our current system. I know people say, oh, printing money.

36:31Yeah, sure. Of course the U.S. didn't go into recession. We printed trillions of dollars. Guess what? That's worth it to me. I'm happy to take that tradeoff. We didn't go into recession. I don't care. We printed trillions of dollars to make it happen. That's a good thing. Yeah, but our grandkids. Yeah, guess what? They're going to print a lot of money too. I thought economic stability was supposed to lead to instability. That is true. The other thing is the creation of the Fed helped a lot here. So it's a lot of different things. But again, I think that I take this as good news. Ben, you said, I don't know if you Slack this or whatever.

37:07You said, I swear the comment section is getting nicer lately. Vibes are back. I can't, go ahead. Are the comments nice? Really? I sent you a few. There was some, someone in one of the comments said, this is Michael's best show ever. Michael was on it today or something. Watch, you're going to get killed in the comments this week. No, but I said a lot of people in the comments are good. I said the vibes are back. People are being nice. And the comment section is - What if it's just seasonal? What if it's seasonal? People are feeling, you know, it's Christmas time. It could be. But yeah, I still read the YouTube comments.

37:38You don't do it. You know why? I'm perfectly thrilled to be in a place in my life where we have a comment section. Speaking of Christmas, I heard the word like Secret Santa or whatever. I don't know why it brought me back to, uh, 2011, 2011. So last week, this all, this all tied to like my comment last week about how I, how I felt rich five years ago, just having, just not having to worry about money, like really, truly worried to the point that my eye was twitching to me that I was equating like comfortable and rich as the same thing to me and how I'm grateful to have a comment section. In 2011, I was at a secret Santa party.

38:23Here was my, with my coworkers. I don't know if I ever told this story, but I probably told this to you. I was a temp at Citibank. My aunt got me a job there, which I was thrilled to have because I was unemployed. You know what I was doing? You know, the like employee training videos of like just how to behave in the workplace, whatever. Sexual harassment. Just all of that sort of stuff. I was watching those videos and making sure, I had like a checklist to make sure that the videos actually contained the information that the company wanted them to have. And I was at a secret Santa party with like the people in that group.

39:07Kind of seems like AI takes that job over now, right? Totally. But it was just, it was just, what am I actually doing? How is this my life? And now I've got people in the comment section watching our YouTube show. So it's all great. I am beyond grateful that people are watching our show. But that being said, and people could dunk. It's fine, but I don't need to say it, right? I don't want to see people being mean. My summary of you saying, I feel richer than ever last week is the Nick Murray comment. My favorite quote from Nick Murray is, if you're still worried, you aren't wealthy. And he says, that's true for any amount of money you have.

39:42So regardless of what your net worth is, your portfolio, if you aren't worried that much about money, you're wealthy. And I love that take. Yeah, that's how I feel. I think anybody would objectively have seen my bank account or my assets and be like, dude, you're not rich. Because we know people with multiple, multiple millions of dollars who are worried all the time. And I don't think you can look at that as a rich life. I'm pretty positive. If you care about money that much. Yeah, I'm pretty positive that if you never struggle to make money, you feel a lot differently about it. So I can't imagine having millions of dollars and not feeling financially secure for myself personally.

40:22I understand how people get there, but not for me. I'm built different. All right. Joe Wiesenthal had tweeted a chart about how Square now has a payroll index growth tracker. And this was the big worry coming into 2023, a legitimate worry that we really, we couldn't know until we found out, was average hourly earnings, the wage spiral, right? Which always seems funny to me that people were worried wages were going to grow too fast. I get the economic reasoning behind that worry, but it's always funny to me like, geez, we can't have people making more money. That's going to be awful. Yeah, but you understand.

41:03Yes. Anyway, I mean, it's hard to say this is the one out of all the components, but this is a big one. And average hourly earnings, the growth is going in the right direction, which is down. And anecdotally, you don't hear as many of the crazy stories about the fast food places with huge signs saying we need$25 workers or whatever. That stuff seems to have abated. Yeah. Why does Square have economic data now? Everyone does? Do they do payroll stuff? Well, yeah. Well, I mean, it's payments. So I don't know. All right. Moving on. Crypto. Matt Hogan tweeted, these new S &P stablecoin reports are pretty good, to be honest.

41:47Crypto won't love the downrating of Tether and Die. But if you read through the actual reports and view it from a US-based institutional perspective, the analysis is reasonable. Here's the point. Regardless, it's great to see mainstream research increasing. Another sign we're entering the mainstream era of crypto, the mainstreaming of crypto continues. So I was thinking about how people often say Bitcoin doesn't do anything, which is, I guess, which is fair. Like I use Venmo. What do I need? I don't need Bitcoin for it. I don't use it. What's the use case? Show me the use case. You know what it does?

42:20It works. And maybe that's enough. Like it does exactly what it said it was going to do. The network never goes down. As far as I know, payments work. It works. Right. You could do it to transfer a bunch of stuff, but people just don't do that because they don't want to. But it works. That's what it does. It works. And maybe that's all it does. Maybe that's enough. I'm not throwing shade at Matt here. Two things that I've never typed in my life, TBH and IMO. I just, I can't do it. I feel like, you know, the, the, the Leo meme where he's kind of sipping on whatever, and he's looking all high and mighty.

43:00I feel that's the Leo from Django where he's kind of all dressed up fancy. That's how I would feel if I tweeted or if I wrote TBH or IMO. Kind of like, I don't know. It's just personal preference. I just can't do it. I hear what you're saying. I find neither of them to be. You're too sensitive. I am. I still don't use emojis. I just can't. How do you live? I don't know. I can't do it. Occasionally, like a thumbs up or something. I can't do it. I just don't do emojis. I think I was, it just, it missed me. So, but you're comfortable saying, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, LOL, I'll use. Sure. All right. Real estate?

43:43Yep. Let's talk about it. Activity is coming back. Redfin has seen double digit annual increase in homeowners contacting real estate agents for selling their homes this week. New sale listings up 9 % from a year ago. the biggest annual increase since July 2021. The uptick is partly due to falling rates, with homeowners feeling less locked in by rates in the 3 % to 4 % range. It's happening. Activity certainly bottomed in the real estate market, I think. I'm not saying it's going to come screaming higher. It could, but I think the housing recession is over. Oh, no, it will come screaming higher.

44:14Activity is going to explode. If interest rates stabilize in the 6 % range or whatever, activity is going to explode. Someone sent, Joe Cassandra sent me this tweet. I wrote something about housing last week. He said, I brought a primary house two weeks ago for a family of six during the worst time to buy a house. Our mortgage payment tripled, ouch, and the rate is above 8%, LOL. Also sent out 4 ,000 letters to find a house. Ended up being a waste of time. Ask me anything. Guy literally top-ticked mortgage markets, mortgage rates. I asked him when he's going to refinance. At this point, do you wait to 5 %?

44:49Refinancing is a pain in the ass. It is. I mean, obviously worth it, but it should be easier. Especially, actually, I refinanced probably a year or two after I bought my house. And I couldn't believe all the hoops that I had to jump through. I'm like, you just saw all of this. Why are you asking me for my wife's work information in 20 - We did complain a lot about it. Yeah. My whole thing is, if I got my original mortgage with you, you already got that information. Right? I should be able to just prove that a lot of it hasn't changed. I think I refinanced twice during the pandemic. I think I did twice within a 12-month period.

45:29Ben, somebody sent us this kind of wild. There's free land in the Midwest. Have you heard about this? No, explain it. Now, this is rural. They're not even towns. I mean, the population for these places. So I just screenshotted the towns in Kansas where you can get free land. Population, 1 ,300, 680, 900, 1 ,300, 1 ,900, 700. I think this is actually the plot from Far and Away with Tom Cruise and Cole Kidman. Remember where you just put a flag down? Dude, I don't know why. What year was that? I'm positive. I'm positive. I saw that in the theater. I remember the boxing scene. Was that in the beginning?

46:11That's towards the end. Yeah, he's a bare knuckle boxer, yes. What year was that? What was my dad thinking? Why did I see that movie? Early to mid-90s. Dude, I was seven years old. Why did I go to that movie? Our kids are seven. Can you imagine taking your kids to see Far and Away? Yeah, that's true. People don't worry about that stuff as much back then. What the hell? A young man, here's the description. A young man leaves Ireland with his landlord's daughter after some trouble with their father and they dream of owning land at the big giveaway in Oklahoma. Yeah, great movie for a seven-year-old.

46:49All right. Unbelievable. So small towns trying to get people to come to them. Is that the idea? But, okay, lots ranging from 12 ,000 to 36 ,000 square feet. Here are the requirements. You have to build a home within four and a half years. This sounds kind of appealing for a certain person. Do you think it's hard to get water and electrical and all that stuff to these places, though? Is that the rub? Or they just want people to come? I'm sure there's lots of rubs to being in a startup town. but I don't know. Okay. So if you're, if you're worried about the cost of housing, this is sure. All right.

47:27Good one from the wall street journal that was flying around this past week, the rise of forever renters. This one was a little surprising to me. The number of renters with personal income in 2022 compared with one, three and five years earlier, more than a million is by far the fastest growing cohort. Okay. They still make up a small percentage of the overall market, but you see people's renters less than$50 ,000 is falling. more than 200k for income or more than a million is rising the number of renters of rental households with incomes of more than a million reached record high of 4453 in 2022 that is four times as many as in 2017 the number of renters earning 200 000 a year is up fourfold since 2010 i wonder how many of these are in california new york that's got to be like people in san francisco but the point was some people have just decided they want the flexibility and it's actually cheaper in a lot of cases, especially in big markets, to rent a place rather than buy it.

48:24And a lot of them, they're showing these high-end apartment complexes, how much it would cost to buy versus rent, and you still get all the amenities. It's pretty good. It also says, new subdivisions full of single-family homes for rent, all but non-existent a decade ago, are springing up from coast to coast. More rentals are advertising themselves as kid and pet-friendly, permitting renters to make extensive modifications to their spaces. this is interesting i i kind of a surprising trend i do wonder if interest rates fall to the number of renters fall like these seems like this these this seems like people that that are wanting to be in a house but are but a lot of them said that they they don't they just decided buying's not for them and you're right maybe it is the affordability thing yeah buying's not for them but interest rates are at eight percent i totally get it that's fair so they also had in this story, home ownership rates around the world.

49:13So the U.S. is 64%. Brazil is over 70%. India is 87%. And China is 89%. Those numbers I would not have expected. That's crazy high, right? Yes. I know people always worry about the Chinese real estate and housing market and stuff, and they must incentivize people to own land. But that's surprising how much, how small the U.S. is comparatively. And it's relatively steady there too. All right, so Bird. Bird scooters. I don't know if they're disappearing or if it's like a restructuring, but they declared bankruptcy. Okay. We had some good time on those scooters. Great time on those scooters. They raised$916 million.

49:53Wow. And they may be out of business? Yeah. I mean, it's not surprising, I suppose. The economics of that. I mean, we spoke about this last year, two years ago. The economics of that business does not work. Do you think they also underestimated the amount of people that would just crap on those scooters and just destroy them and push them over and throw them in such? Yeah. I'm guessing they lost so many scooters from drunk people leaving the bars. People threw them in rivers. People lit them on fire. Really? Maintenance. A lot of maintenance. Oh. Survey of the week. This is pretty bleak. They asked 12th graders.

50:38They asked 12th graders. This is not a new survey. Satisfaction with, quote, the way you get along with your parents and then with your life as a whole these days. It goes back to 1976. And satisfied with your parents is going up and up and up. And satisfied with life as a whole is going down and down and down. Now, let's start with the first line. I don't know. My first reaction to this is And I, this is a knee jerk reaction. I don't know that you should be satisfied with your parents. Like growing up, I don't know that I, I obviously like loved and respected my parents, but if I was in 11th grade, I don't know if I would have said like, yeah, my parents are my best friends.

51:23Like, I feel like that's like a lot of parenting these days. And I don't know if that's good. My parents were my parents. They weren't my best friends. I can see this both ways as well. You're right. There's a lot of millennial parents who, what's the line from Amy Poehler in Mean Girls? I'm a cool mom. I'm not like the other moms where they try to be the best friends. Is it good to have cool parents? I don't know. I don't know that it's black or white that you could paint with a broad brush, but I just don't know. Or the fact that parents just spend way more time with their children these days.

51:56There was a stat in one of the books I read. I summarized it. It's like the American dream is not dead. and the stat was something like stay-at-home mothers in the 1960s spent less time with their kids than working mothers do today. I see this both ways as parents are way, way, way more involved in their kids' lives today and that's a good thing but it can also be a bad thing. It really depends. Anyway, satisfied with life as a whole, this chart is just crashing and it's really a shame and I think a lot of this is really, I think a lot of this is social media. Derek Thompson had a piece on this and this is not everyone obviously but have we we've glamorized the idea of depression a little bit these days which sounds like a weird thing to say but it's almost like a crutch for some people i don't know somebody emailed us last this week like commenting on the person who has millions of dollars but doesn't feel rich because they see big houses right and the quote there is comparison is a thief of joy Right.

52:59And I think that that's what social media did to young people. And young people just, it's hard for grownups to see other people and not be envious. 17-year-olds just cannot, it's not good. It's really, really not good. I agree. I couldn't imagine going through high school with, I've always said, I'm so glad that we didn't have camera phones or social media when I went through college. And I feel like it has to change the way that you behave in a lot of ways because you're under a microscope. Yeah. If there was pictures available or videos of me at parties in college or something, I would totally change my behavior.

53:33Maybe it would be in a good way in some ways, but I'm just so glad I didn't have to live under that microscope all the time. All right. This is a bit fringe, but I don't think it's – I thought this was interesting enough to share. Talk about sentiment scores seem out of whack in the U.S. versus the rest of the world. Everyone's trying to pin the disconnect between the economy is great, but survey scores are in the toilet on social media or some other cause. Sure, those are plausible, but what if it is this? Tipping. Go on. He says, tipping culture has gotten out of control. The increase in the price you pay isn't captured in CPI because the tip doesn't count in the price reported.

54:06And if you don't tip, you are ashamed. So you either pay more than you expected or you feel like an asshole if you're not adding 20%. Given that tipping culture isn't as prevalent globally, could that explain the US versus the world disconnect? Okay. The answer is definitely no. There's no way that tipping is the source of the disconnect. I give this person, I have respect for this person for coming up with this hot take, though. Great take. All credit to the take, because I do think that there's, the fact that CPI does not capture tipping. Interesting. Very interesting. Good little nugget. The thing is, people think you'll be shamed if you don't tip, but you can just say no or press no.

54:40You don't have to do it. You feel obliged, but you don't have to. I mean, but when somebody spins around the computer at you and you just say no tip, you feel a little... You feel the sweat glands percolating. I have found myself tipping more since the pandemic because I feel like service workers got a raw deal. And so I felt... As somebody who spent almost a decade in the service industry living on tips, I tip well, not to brag. Good on you. Oh, so speaking of the why aren't millionaires happy thing, I have a solution for all the people who have a lot of money and aren't happy. The family man.

55:22watch The Family Man with Nicolas Cage and Tay Leone. That'll solve all your problems. I never saw it. If you... Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? You've never seen The Family Man? I never saw it. Okay. I rewatch it almost every year. I remember you mentioned going to the theater. I remember going to see this in the theater on Christmas Day in 2000 or whenever it came out. You've literally never seen this movie before? I've never seen that movie. It's even a New York slash New Jersey movie. That's disappointing. Go see it. I mean, the moral of the story is if you marry Taye Leone, you'll be happy. It doesn't matter how much money you have, but the premise is amazing.

55:57Nicolas Cage is a wealthy financier in New York, and he gets to go back and see the life he could have had if he would have just married his college sweetheart and not left her. Don Cheadle's in it. Amazing movie. One of the best Christmas movies of this century, easily. And Nicolas Cage is cooking. Okay. Here's another movie from the early 2000s. Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, Catherine O 'Hara, and Christina Applegate. Surviving Christmas, you heard of it? Never heard of it. James Gandolfini in a Christmas movie. This could have been a classic, and I rewatched it for the first time in, I don't know, 15 years?

56:34It's terrible. Just bad. I mean, it felt like a CBS sitcom with, like, it needed a laugh track. I don't know how it's so bad with that lineup of people. How do you feel about A Wonderful Life? It's my mom's favorite Christmas movie. She used to always make me watch it. That being said. Yeah, it never really did it for me. Listen, it's almost 100 years old. It's tough. It's a tough watch. I had a girlfriend in high school who made me go see a theatrical version with her parents, the first time I met her parents, of A Wonderful Life. That's way too much. That was tough. Congratulations on the Lions.

57:15And congratulations to me. I won a lot of money on them. I had to sweat it out, but we did it. We did it. First time in almost 30 years. They won their division. So season ticket holders in 2024 will see an average increase of 30 % and as much as 85 % for certain forward field seats. All right, that's what happens. I'm okay with that as long as you give us a discount when the team stinks. Yeah, that's never going to happen. That's what it should be, though. Oh, Ben, did your daughter win that game that you yelled at the rest of the stands defeated? of course my coaching yes I went to see a movie this week I saw The Iron Claw the 824 production of the Von Erich family I remember Texas Tornado vaguely I think it was like the early 90s I think he did some stuff with Ultimate Warrior see I'd never heard of him but I saw the preview and it looked really good so it's not so much a wrestling movie as it is a family drama like the wrestling was sort of in the background it's not like rocky where like there's like a build-up to the fights you know what i mean now i think that the audience is going to like it a lot more in general than i did now i'm not sure if it's because i saw it on friday night at 9 45 which is past my bedtime and i also took an edible which was not advised because it's not really it's not like a fun movie it's in fact the opposite of fun is depressing but it's also I just, I thought it would have been.

58:43That was a Long Island hedge right there. I feel like you just say you didn't like the movie. I didn't love, no, how about this? It was definitely a good movie that I didn't love. And I wonder if, I wonder if it would have been better served in, as a six episode show. Because there's just a lot of plots and subplots and relationships that they didn't get to go deep on because it was a two hour movie. So I felt like I needed more, but yeah. All right, Ben. Did you watch Past Lives or not? I did not watch Past Lives. I want to. I asked you for it. I'm going to. I've got one more Christmas one that I rewatch almost every year now.

59:22And it's bizarre because I don't know why. The Family Stone. Have you ever seen this movie? No. It's almost a hate watch. The cast is amazing. I remember the first time I watched it, I absolutely hated it because the plot is so insane. But it's Craig T. Nelson and Dan Keaton and Luke Wilson and Rachel McAdams and Claire Danes. And it's a Sarah Jessica Parker. It's an amazing cast. And I just like the coming home for Christmas vibe of the movie. And once you get over the plot holes, which are immense, I actually, it's, and a lot of the characters are unlikable. For some reason, I love rewatching it.

1:00:01I don't know why. It's a hate rewatch. I want you to watch Salt Burn and tell me what you think. Okay. you got it you watch the family man we'll call it uh watch the family man okay i will watch a family man is saltburn on a streaming platform is what saltburn is on amazon prime okay it's uh i have no idea what it's about okay better off just go in with a blank slate all right this is this is our last show of 2023 much better year for most of us than 2022 but we started the show in November 2017 17 wow November 2017 pretty remarkable when we started this thing I remember the New Yorker had a cartoon like literally two weeks before he launched it and it was two people sitting down at a restaurant table and one of them said to the other I'm thinking of stopping a podcast because that was all the rage I'm starting a podcast and we were nervous we were nervous doing this we felt like imposers imposters, posers.

1:01:05I just mixed two words. But here we are, six years later, almost six years later. And Duncan tells us that we're now in some weeks, a top five investing podcast on Apple. So for people, for new listeners, thank you. But especially for the originals that have been with us from the beginning, just cannot say enough, cannot express enough gratitude. Even people in the comment section that that are not nice. I appreciate you as well. We we love our audience. Everyone is great. The people who we come in contact with. I got run into with a gym the other day by some guy listening to our show in the gym.

1:01:44Also, it was a very I got to ask you about this. It was a very awkward encounter. What's the etiquette of taking out AirPods when you're having a conversation with someone? Do you ever take them out or not? I just I just I just feel like the polite thing to do is just to take one out. Okay. You know why? Because one stops the music. True. I don't have the etiquette for these things, but yes. Thank you to all the listeners. We really appreciate it. We love hearing from people. We have a great audience. Personal emails. Personal responses. And next show, I think, Michael's 2024 predictions. All right.

1:02:19We'll see you then. Animal Spirits of the compound news.com.

1:02:36This next one's for all you CarMax shoppers who just want to buy a car your way. Want to check some cars out in person? Uh-huh. Want to look some more from your house? Okay. Want to pretend you know about engines? Nah, I'll just chat with CarMax online instead. Want to get pre-qualified from your couch? Wanna get that car? Hey, that's a beat! You wanna do it your way Wanna drive? CarMax