Not a Slurpee Drinker Myself, But . . . July 11, 2008January 4, 2017 MORE BUBBLES As suggested yesterday, try to find 14 minutes to watch this. SLURPEE BUBBLES You will be excited to know that participating 7-Elevens – because today is 7/11 – will be giving away 1,000 free Slurpees each. Is this a great country, or what? ASSUME THE BEST A substantial friend (if you’re 77 and support more than 30 environmental internships each year, I’d call you substantial) sent me the Maureen Dowd column that reveals the true source of Obama’s funding. ‘Is this true?’ asked my friend – and in a way that suggested he had more than half a mind to think it was. Surely I would have heard about it if it were. And yet there it was in the New York Times, so it had to be true. Except that of course it was not. As noted in the Huffington Post: A comically absurd Barack Obama smear email is making the rounds right now . . . The email, presented as a June 29 op-ed (replete with The Times’ font, layout, and Dowd byline) presents the “shocking” revelation that Obama’s prodigious Internet fundraising apparatus is really driven by wealthy financiers from — you guessed it — “Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries.” Comically absurd – but it will be believed by an awful lot of the people who receive it. Separately, another friend – who used to give the DNC $100,000 at a pop back when that was legal – told me Monday that she couldn’t support Obama because of some terrible things she had come to believe about him . . . that just weren’t true. (And Gore never said he invented the Internet, never did anything wrong at the Buddhist temple, never inflated his and Tipper’s role in Love Story. Kerry never shot himself to get a medal. The Iraqis did not attack us on 9/11. The Jews do not bake cookies with the blood of Arab children.) I went back to the Chicago Sun-Times article my friend seemed to be referring to. It just didn’t say any of the things she had read it to say, or been told that it said. People: Assume the best of your fellow Democrats (if you are one) – it’s usually a pretty good assumption. And when you hear something like this about Obama, check out FightTheSmears.com, for starters. A lot of this junk is debunked there.
Bubbles July 10, 2008March 25, 2012 Try to find 14 minutes to watch this. Hmmm. On second thought, let me rephrase that: Watch this. And don’t be put off by the fact that it starts off with the familiar 17th Century tulip mania. I promise you, it gets more interesting. Not to say it may not be a bit too gloomy. (And let’s remember that at least some of the home price decline he talks of is already behind us.) But while no one has a crystal ball, here is a view of the Big Picture that is worth your consideration. Don’t sell your RSW.
Sally and the Surge; SYMS and a Hiss (Do NOT Miss the Hiss) July 9, 2008March 11, 2017 SALLY Sally HH: ‘I made it into your blog. How cool is that. Maybe even better than winning the daily news contest (the little wooden and brass plaque they sent reads: I WON THE DAILY NEWS CONTEST AND I AM SO HOT!) I won for the contest ‘how do you cure a cold’ and I used my great-uncle’s remedy: Put hat on bedpost. Get into bed. Drink gin until you see two hats.’ ☞ The plaque I would send if I weren’t so cheap: ‘I have the best readers in the world. How cool is THAT?’ THE SURGE Excerpts from Arianna Huffington: Surge Amnesia: The Media’s Newest Affliction John McCain, aided and abetted by his loving protectors in the media, is running a victory lap on Iraq. To hear them tell it, the surge has “worked” — indeed, it has been a huge success — and this, like a last second Hail Mary pass, has vindicated the entire disastrous Iraq misadventure. . . . [Yet] last month’s GAO report offered chapter and verse on all the ways the Iraqis have failed to reach the benchmarks that were the actual goals of the surge . . . . . . Despite the revisionist re-writes, we didn’t go to war because we were committed to demonstrating that America could unleash violence in Iraq and then, five years later, curb it through the use of reinforcements. We went to war because we were told Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to our national security and, secondarily, as a means of fomenting democracy throughout the Middle East. Of course, the “imminent threat” turned out to be non-existent, and our presence in Iraq has strengthened the hand of every bad actor in the region: al Qaeda is safe and adding recruits, Hamas has come to power in Palestine, Hezbollah has reasserted itself in Lebanon, and Iran has become the strongest player in Iraq. Meanwhile, the reduction in casualties in Iraq is starting to be offset by increased casualties in Afghanistan — once again showing the fatal ignorance of stealing from Peter to stop-loss Paul and keep him in Iraq. So, tell me again: how is the surge working? SYMS For those who follow it, here’s a good recap leading up to tomorrow’s annual meeting. Not that anything dramatic is expected to happen – with 57% of the stock, Syms and his daughter can do almost anything they want – but the situation is still interesting. HISS A 61-year-old librarian was ticketed (her court date is July 23rd), escorted off a public plaza outside a McCain town hall meeting, and threatened with arrest for carrying a sign that read ‘McCain=Bush.’ (Hey, it’s a free country – you ought to be able to be arrested for anything, so long as it’s not hurting other people, right?) You really have to watch the two-minute video. I love what she asks at the end: ‘Why is [the sign] offensive? Why would Republicans who voted for Bush find it offensive?’ I suppose it would be gilding the lily to note that when the grotesquely unchristian Reverend Phelps holds up signs reading ‘God Hates Fags’ outside funeral services, he is not ticketed, forced to leave, or threatened with arrest. (Nor, in America, should he be.)
Cheer Up! Soon I’ll Be Able to Enlist July 8, 2008March 11, 2017 CHICKENS Chris Marcil: ‘You write: ‘And I fear there are a lot more chickens straggling roostward. (Did anyone count them when they left?)’ Well, I did, but that was before they hatched, unfortunately.’ ☞ Cute. CHEER UP Anon: ‘Your blog was terribly depressing Thursday and you sounded very depressed yourself. You must focus on the positive. Sunrises and sunsets are both free.’ ☞ I totally agree . . . and to the extent I am a bit glum from time to time, it is way less for me than in thinking how much needless harm we Americans have done ourselves. Sally: ‘Hey, Don’t Feel Bad!!! I took a little money that I could afford to lose, just as you said, and bought a little tiny bit of FMD. When it went up by 25%, I said, Hey! I’m outta here! And made a cool $400 or so. That was quite fun for a novice pipsqueak investor, thank you! I’ll spend some of it on Obama.’ ☞ You were a heck of a lot smarter than I was. SALUTE What happens when you assemble a bipartisan panel of retired brass to study ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ 15 years after its adoption? Study: Military gays don’t undermine unit cohesion By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer Monday, July 7, 2008 (07-07) 14:18 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) — Congress should repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law because the presence of gays in the military is unlikely to undermine the ability to fight and win, according to a new study released by a California-based research center. The study was conducted by four retired military officers, including the three-star Air Force lieutenant general who in early 1993 was tasked with implementing President Clinton’s policy that the military stop questioning recruits on their sexual orientation. “Evidence shows that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly is unlikely to pose any significant risk to morale, good order, discipline or cohesion,” the officers state. . . . Navy Vice Adm. Jack Shanahan said he had no opinion on the issue when he joined the panel, having never confronted it in his 35-year military career. A self-described Republican who opposes the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, Shanahan said he was struck by the loss of personal integrity required by individuals to carry out “don’t ask, don’t tell.” “Everyone was living a big lie – the homosexuals were trying to hide their sexual orientation and the commanders were looking the other way because they didn’t want to disrupt operations by trying to enforce the law,” he said. ☞ The study itself is even clearer. Page 2 has ten ‘findings’ and four ‘recommendations’ that blow this issue out of the water. If you want a stronger America, you don’t want to exclude talented, committed volunteers based on their race or religion or gender – or, yes, sexual orientation.
Touring the Devastation July 7, 2008March 11, 2017 A FRIEND WRITES: ‘In this election, experience does matter. Think about YOUR experience with eight years of Bush/McCain policies. Can you afford four more?’ PRESIDENT BUSH TOURS THE DEVASTATION Click here. JOHN McCAIN – This, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It’s not new, but I just saw it: . . . Right up to his twenties, he remained a strikingly violent man, “ready to fight at the drop of a hat,” according to his biographer Robert Timberg. This rage seems to be at the core of his personality: describing his own childhood, McCain has written: “At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.” But he claims he was transformed by his experiences in Vietnam – a war he still defends as “noble” and “winnable,” if only it had been fought harder. (More than three million Vietnamese died; how much harder could it be?) His plane was shot down on a bombing raid over Hanoi, and he was captured and tortured for five years. To this day, he cannot lift his arms high enough to comb his own hair. On his release, he used second his wife’s fortune to run to as a Republican senator. He was a standard-issue Reaganite corporate Republican – until the Keating Five corruption scandal consumed him. In 1987, it was revealed that McCain, along with four other senators, had taken huge campaign donations from a fraudster called Charles Keating. In return they pressured government regulators not to look too hard into Keating’s affairs, allowing him to commit even more fraud. McCain later admitted: “I did it for no other reason than I valued [Keating’s] support.” McCain took the only course that could possibly preserve his reputation: He turned the scandal into a debate about the political system, rather than his own personal corruption. He said it showed how “we need to drive the special interests out of Washington,” and became a high-profile campaigner for campaign finance reform. But privately, his behavior hasn’t changed much. For example, in 2000 he lobbied federal regulators hard on behalf of a major campaign contributor, Paxson Communications, in an act the regulators spluttered was “highly unusual.” He has never won an election without outspending his opponent. But McCain has distinguished himself most as an über-hawk on foreign policy. To give a brief smorgasbord of his views: at a recent rally, he sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” He says North Korea should be threatened with “extinction.” McCain has mostly opposed using U.S. power for humanitarian goals, jeering at proposals to intervene in Rwanda or Bosnia — but he is very keen to use it for great power imperialism. He learned this philosophy from his father and his granddad Slew, who fought in the Philippine wars at the turn of the 20th century, where he was part of a mission to crush the local resistance to the U.S. invasion. They did it by forcing the entire population from their homes at gunpoint into “protection zones,” and gunning down anybody over the age of 10 who was found outside them. Today, McCain dreamily describes this as “an exotic adventure” which his grandfather “generally enjoyed.” Then McCain’s father, John, led the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, at a time when there was a conflict on the Caribbean island. On one side, there were forces loyal to Juan Bosch, the democratically elected left-wing president who was committed to land redistribution and helping the poor. On the other side, there were forces who had overthrown the elected government and looked nostalgically to the playboy tyranny of Rafael Trujillo. John McCain Sr. intervened to ensure the supporters of the democratic government were crushed, bragging that it taught the natives “how to behave themselves.” He saw this as part of a wider mission, where the U.S. would take over Britain’s role as a “world empire.” These beliefs drive McCain today. He brags he would be happy for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq for 100 years, and declares: “I’m not at all embarrassed of my friendship with Henry Kissinger; I’m proud of it.” His most thorough biographer — and recent supporter — Matt Welch concludes: “McCain’s program for fighting foreign wars would be the most openly militaristic and interventionist platform in the White House since Teddy Roosevelt…[it] is considerably more hawkish than anything George Bush has ever practiced.” With him as president, we could expect much more aggressive destabilization of Venezuela and Bolivia — and more. So why do so many nice liberals have a weak spot for McCain? Well, to his credit, he doesn’t hate immigrants: He proposed a program to legalize the 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. He sincerely opposes torture, as a survivor of it himself. He has apologized for denying global warming and now advocates a cap on greenhouse gas emissions but only if China and India can also be locked into the system. He is somewhat uncomfortable with the religious right (while supporting a ban on abortion and gay marriage). It is a sign of how far to the right the Republican Party has drifted that these are considered signs of liberalism, rather than basic humanity. Yet these sprinklings of sanity — onto a very extreme program — are enough for a superficial, glib press to present McCain as “bipartisan” and “centrist.” Will this be enough to put white hair into the White House? At the moment, he has considerably higher positive ratings than Clinton, and beats her in some match-up polls. If we don’t start warning that the Real McCain is not the Real McCoy, we might sleepwalk into four more years of Republicanism. SYMS This, from the New York Observer. Don’t sell.
Clay July 3, 2008March 11, 2017 I sent my piece to 12 magazines simultaneously (I was 23; I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do that) and got rejected by them all. Weeks later, New York Magazine called – I had forgotten about that one – I must have sent it to 13 – and had me fly down from Cambridge to have my picture taken for the cover. And that, in the fall of 1970, is how I met Clay Felker. He was old (to a 23-year-old, 45 is old), but erupting – always – with energy and enthusiasm and urgency. He was a spectacular advocate for his writers, always putting them front and center and reveling in their success. And, for whatever reason, he had decided to make me one of them. My piece was about a company I’d worked for called National Student Marketing. Its stock went from 6 to 140 in 18 months – DLJ bought some, Harvard’s Endowment Fund bought some – but the ‘creative accounting’ the company had been practicing, it turned out, could really only be fairly termed ‘fraudulent accounting.’ The CEO went to jail – as did a guy from Peat Marwick, the auditor – and I went off to business school. One thing led to another, and MBA in hand, I found myself in the employ of Clay Felker. Here are the things I remember best about Clay: He was passionate about everything, but especially people and power. He would meet someone at a cocktail party – real estate developer Sam Lefrak or music mogul Ahmet Ertegun or British financier Sir James Goldsmith – and the next day he would have me calling to profile them for New York. (‘It’s not hard to make fun of a billion-dollar builder who can’t pronounce the word ‘condominium,” the Lefrak piece began, ‘ – he pronounces it ‘condominimum.’ But Samuel J. Lefrak . . .’) He was irreverent – the more outrageous, at least within the limits of an upstanding Missouri native, the better. He had me write a piece about OPEC – should we just go into the Middle East and TAKE the now outrageously-priced $12-a-barrel oil? The thrust of the piece was, ‘no,’ but it landed me on an assassination list anyway, because he had illustrated the cover Action Comic style, with Ford and Kissinger storming the desert with machine guns. He knew how to sell magazines. He let me do a piece on solar energy, circa 1974, and I was amazed to find that he not only had made room for it — he had made it the cover. The cover? Well, it was February, so used a shot of a gorgeous model on a pool float, all but topless, soaking in the rays. He allowed his writers tremendous latitude. He once let me do a piece called, ‘How Tall Is Robert Redford Really?’ – the Times had said he was 6’2′, others had told me he was 5’7′, and I just thought this was one question, in a complex subjective world, we ought to be able to answer definitely. (‘About five-nine.’) And the next week he would let me do a piece about ‘Bank Capital Adequacy.’ He supported writers every way he could. He helped Gloria Steinem launch Ms. He helped Judy Daniels launch Savvy. He helped Steve Brill launch American Lawyer. He ran the Aaron Latham piece that became John Travolta’s ‘Urban Cowboy.’ He persuaded George J. W. Goodman to adopt the penname ‘Adam Smith,’ which led to the #1 best-seller, The Money Game, and the long-running, award-winning ‘Adam Smith’s Money World’ on PBS. He was not great with money. Personally, he was always asking me (and others, let’s hope) for financial advice. Professionally, how could he stint on the editorial package? The stories and graphics and writing meant far more to him than profits. And so it was he once met a terrific young Australian publishing tycoon – ‘you’ve got to go meet this guy,’ he told me, sending me over to visit Rupert Murdoch – who soon joined the New York Magazine board and then, to Clay’s consternation, grabbed it out from under him. But in even the few years he had it, Clay made an enormous impact, not least on us, his writers. I can’t imagine how different, and less interesting, and less blessed, my life would have been if he hadn’t. Clay died Tuesday morning, at 82, in the loving care of another of his writers, his wife, Gail Sheehy. ‘A visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine,’ the Times obit begins. A great talent – and, not incidentally on this July 4th eve, a great American – is gone.
$$$$$ July 2, 2008January 4, 2017 So – your money. (And mine.) The chickens so many of us were warning of have indeed come home to roost, but what good has that fore-knowledge done us? We decided not to speculate in the overheated real estate market – that’s something. And we bought oil stocks years ago – that’s something. Just this April, those of us who could afford the risk bought double-inverse S&P EFTs – RSW – which is a fancy way of saying we shorted the market when it was higher and have been making paper profits at twice the rate it’s been declining. And we’ve always been frugal (a complex algorithm on this site actually blocks visitors who fail to pay their credit cards in full each month) – a really big thing, because living light on the land, and beneath one’s means, are two keys to our collective, and individual, success. Our timber keeps growing. PCL, first suggested here 5 years ago at $26.50, is around $43, having paid out $8 or so in dividends along the way. But, oh, have we ever lost a lot of money in FMD and WM. It was money we could truly afford to lose but I still feel terrible that you lost it. And I’m not thrilled that the TRBR some of us bought around $11 is now, just a few months later, half price. So what do we do now? The easy things to say are the things it’s always easy to say: economize wherever you can; keep paying your credit cards in full each month to avoid interest (and so your browser will be able to access this site); recognize that there can be as much happiness reading a good library book under a tree – at zero cost in cash or carbon – as in driving out to the ballgame for whatever that costs in gasoline, tickets, hot dogs, beer, crackerjacks and antacid (sorry, stadium bondholders). All that. (Oh: and ‘study hard, kids.’ It’s a global economy. It would be great if you had the skills, and character, to compete.) (And: ‘eat less.’ You’ll save money, look better, live longer.) But then what? I fear we have not hit bottom in real estate or the stock market. And I fear there are a lot more chickens straggling roostward. (Did anyone count them when they left?) I like to think world economic growth will boom, with China and India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, et al, shrugging off any momentary unpleasantness and pulling the American economy out of the fire . . . even if more and more of it will be owned by our friends the Saudis. I like to think astounding technological progress – much of it invented here – will pump new energy, efficiency, and prosperity into our economy. I like to think a youthful new President next January will capture the popular imagination, turning our deficits away from enriching the richest through tax cuts toward financing America’s future (deficits are fine if they’re incurred to make compelling investments) and inspiring investors to take the leaps of faith that will lead to millions of new jobs greening our economy and modernizing our infrastructure. And maybe the stock market will begin to anticipate all that sooner than I think. But this much I know: 1. I don’t know much. So I try to diversify. (And to keep my fees and transaction costs low, because it’s not worth paying a lot for what others don’t know, either. I would say, by way of example, that the comments you are reading right now are appropriately priced.) 2. We could well have a serious recession and serious inflation. Which comes first would be nice to know (a recession we reflate our way out of? an inflation we stifle with recession?). Anyone who’s lost a job lately or seen her commission income shrink at the same time food and fuel prices have skyrocketed knows we’re already having a good deal of both simultaneously. And who knows: deflation could get into the act at some point, too. A stable system, once nudged off its track, can be hard to restabilize. So, again, what do we do now? If you’re 24, rejoice! You’re poor (I assume), but getting relatively less so by the minute. Someone who had $100 million more than you (who have a 1998 Honda and $38 in your checking account) just a few months ago may now have only $70 million more. You’re $30 million closer to having what he does! More to the point, if you can contrive to start putting $100 or $500 a month into (say) the stock market for what might be the next 30 years (raising the monthly contribution if and as circumstances permit), you’ll be sitting pretty at 54, and the lower the market might go in the next months or years, the better price at which you’ll be able to accumulate shares. And you have all your hair. (We hate you.) But what if you’re 54 or 64 or 74? All I can really tell you (at least in this overlong column) is what I’m doing with some of the items I’ve suggested here from time to time. The list won’t be exhaustive because some of the worst suggestions have doubtless been dragged and dropped into the repressed memory folder. (But feel free to me-mail me a reminder or recrimination.) And of course I’m not going to rehash positions I suggested you sell, a few of which turned out nicely, because that was then, this is now. 1. Real estate. I doubt we’ve seen the bottom. Then again, if you can afford to carry it, real estate is, well, real, and could eventually be an inflation hedge. Of course, homes in Las Vegas are different from warehouses in Scranton are different from office towers in Manhattan. And property in Costa Rica (visit and then consider buying a lot!) may perform differently from farmland in Kansas. So there’s nothing hard and fast. Just try very hard not to dive into something it turns out you can’t afford to carry for a long time, in case your interest rises, your boiler bursts, your tenant goes broke (but refuses to leave), or you lose your job. I still have much of the SYMS we bought four years ago around $6.50 (adjusted for cash distributions). It closed last night at $14.56. Nominally a clothing chain, it’s basically a real estate play, not least Manhattan real estate. Someone with a lot more shares than me thinks that real estate makes the stock cheap. Of course, months or years from now, commercial real estate could be a lot cheaper or more expensive than it is today. For now, I’m holding my remaining shares. 2. Oil. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it drop back to $70 for a while, but even at $70 the oil companies should do nicely, thank you; and in the long run, the price is likely to keep trending up. If gas is going to be $8 a gallon, you may as well be one of the people selling it (which as an oil company owner you sort of are), not just buying it. So I’m keeping my Anadarko (APC), selling very short-term calls against it in my retirement plan from time to time when it’s had a run up (e.g., selling the $75 call for $2 and change when the stock was $74 with 20 days to the expiration of the call). I’m keeping my TXCO, first suggested here at $4.50, but hardly tearing up the turf at $11.90 last night, considering that the price of oil has gone through the roof in the meantime – suggesting that those who know the company best may not have a lot of faith in management. Someday, alternative energy may provide much of our fuel, displacing oil, just as wood was long ago displaced as the dominant fuel. But, as with wood, there are so many other uses for oil, it may always be valuable. And speaking of wood . . . 3. Timber. As I said earlier, it keeps growing. I bought my PCL as a very long-term retirement holding, and plan to sit tight. 5. SPACS. We did so well with that first batch of Aldabra warrants, that turned into GLDD, ten-tupling our money, or more. But in thinking we might have good luck with more deals, I failed to foresee that the market’s music would shortly stop. I should be shot for not suggesting you sell at least half your Aldabra II / Boise Cascade warrants after they doubled, from $1.40 or so to $3, because then you would now have been playing with the house’s money, as it were. Instead, we agonize over not having taken some or all that profit and, instead, watched BZ+ drop al the way to 20 cents last night. I bought a bunch more there yesterday, not because I have any assurance Boise’s business, and stock price, will be good by 2011, when the warrants expire, but because just in case they were – well, the leverage is enormous. If sometime in the next three years the underlying stock got back to the $9.50 it was four months ago, the warrants would jump twelvefold. Likewise the Infusystems warrants, INHIW. And NRDC warrants, NAQ+. Highly speculative, only for money you can truly afford to lose. 6. Barges. I still like GLDD and TRBR, for the reasons set out before. I wish I had waited to buy TRBR until, when it’s half price – though in a bad market, it could certainly get cut in half again. 7. BOREF. Go ahead and laugh. Nothing has changed except that (according to the company) we continue to inch along toward realization of our iron ore riches in Canada and our technological riches to be made in the nose wheels of every jet. The stock sits at $4.50, giving the entire enterprise a value of $25 million. My friend Sandy is selling his beach house for more than that. 8. Cash. I can think of worse things to hold, whether in the bank, a money market fund, or Treasuries. If you have a lot of it, consider whether you’re sure the U.S. dollar will outperform all other currencies (which is what holding all your cash in dollars implies). I have some of mine in FXC (Canadian dollars – a country with lots of natural resources but not the military burden) and, when someone smarter than me tells me which to bet on, some of the others. 9. RSW. I’d love to lose money on these, because that can happen only if the market goes up. So far, sadly, we’re well ahead. 10. FMD and WM. Ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh. But I’m not selling.
Not Good Enough July 1, 2008March 25, 2012 The Dow was up yesterday three hundredths of one percent? I’m still on strike! (Or, well, I guess, sort of on vacation.)
If At First . . . June 30, 2008March 25, 2012 Friday, at some personal sacrifice, I wrote no column, hoping that by canceling the day, I could keep the market from dropping any further. (What was the personal sacrifice? Well, I forewent the opportunity to brag about this great New York Times photo from Charles’s upcoming ‘resort’ line. As you know, this site makes its money through your purchases of Charles Nolan apparel and Honest Tea.) It did not work. The market fell. And I’m not sure how to get it to go back up any time soon, so – for lack of a better plan — I’m going to try it again.
Today . . . June 27, 2008March 25, 2012 . . . has been canceled. As an experiment. To see if it will keep the market from going down any further. However that works out today, I doubt we’ve hit bottom. Don’t sell your RSW double-inverse S&P EFTs (if you bought them with MYCTATL*). Enjoy the long weekend. *Money you can truly afford to lose.