A Disease Called More
And other dangerous delusions
If you fly commercial, you’ve surely seen one of these people. The seat wipers.
They show up prepared for germ warfare. Usually this means a big supply of Clorox wipes. Stored inside a freezer-sized Ziploc bag.
As soon as they sit down, the wiping starts. Seatbelt, TV screen, tray table, seat bottom, headrest, etc. It’s a furious process. It seems almost anxiety-fueled. It’s also fun to watch. If they notice you looking, they’ll engage, and while scrubbing they’ll start telling you how dirty “these things are.”
They read about it online, or heard it from a friend, and wouldn’t dare expose themselves. That’s about the time they offer you a dripping wet piece of polyester. It’s their way of making room on a life raft. A chance to save yourself from this invisible threat. Turn it down and watch the look of horror show up on their face.
Clorox seems to be the respected name in seat safety. Known for its iconic liquid bleach, the company’s wipes oddly do not contain bleach. According to Perplexity AI, the polyester fabric sits soaked in 0.29% ammonia, and 99.71% other stuff.
The main disinfecting agents are quaternary ammonium compounds, supported by solvents and cleaning agents in a bleach-free formulation.
0.145% n-Alkyl (60% C14, 30% C16, 5% C12, 5% C18) dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride
0.145% n-Alkyl (68% C12, 32% C14) dimethyl ethylbenzyl ammonium chloride
The wipers aren’t taking chances with any part of the seat. Same goes for bathroom door handles, handshakes, or any other surface they believe harbors dangerous pathogens.
Don’t tell them it’s all in their head. It’s cherrypicked facts subjectively magnified. Psychosomatic is the technical term for their condition.
Belief Shapes Reality
It’s entirely possible all that furious seat wiping does close to nothing…or worse.
While we can’t find scientific studies on the topic, the wipers do seem sick more frequently than non-wipers.
It’s fairly obvious commercial airliners are dirty. The same goes for restrooms, subway platforms, and most any other surfaces frequently touched by humans.
Not just humans… animals are also dangerous. A big rock in a remote section of wilderness might contain trace amounts of bird micturate, invisible to the human eye. If you stop there for a rest while hiking, be sure to bring plenty of chemical-soaked polyester wipes. Animal waste can pose a serious health risk…
Which means there’s only one time-trusted, albeit less scientific, defense available in the war against germs. Keep your hands out of your mouth, pretty much all the other orifices too. It’s not difficult, and requires no harmful chemicals.
What nobody tells the wipers is, we need germs. It’s part of our ecosystem. Snakes eat mice, spiders eat mosquitos, and germs fight it out in a war that results in a well-balanced biome.
The wipers have beliefs. A one-dimensional view of the situation. Like people who think they “catch” a cold from a person with a cold. Or you need belly injections to lose weight, or believe strongly that people with more money are just lucky…forgetting that they themselves don’t feel luckier than people with less money.
What makes that last one worse is, those types believe the stock market creates wealth, and they just know it’s true…
Pete, the most talkative and least interesting person in my men’s doubles group at the tennis club told me it’s crazy not to own stocks. That was back in January… during the pre-inaugural everything rally.
Maybe so Pete, but universal beliefs cause big problems. Maybe not in a day, or a week, but over a longer time period, they create big distortions, and often painful outcomes.
Owning some stock is one thing, it’s the long term investing equivalent of keeping your hands out of your mouth. But borrowing to double or triple your stake is a whole other problem. It’s soaking your seat area in ammonia… It’s good thinking gone too far.
When everyone agrees the seat wiper has the best of intentions, and can’t be questioned, we’ve normalized bizarre behavior.
Not Always This Way
American thinking about stocks is dangerously out of whack. It’s a symptom of our thinking about money generally.
Back in 2010, almost nobody thought stocks were safe. They’d tell you any day now we could wake up to another crash. They’d warn a lifetime of work, of sacrificing short term enjoyment for a better tomorrow, could go poof, gone in a few months. Financial horror stories seemed like the common topic in conversations.
People bought annuities, they hedged, and reached for safety… after the crash.
Media marketing companies peddled doom headlines, subscriptions to advice on financial safety, and the promise of firm ground before the next wave hit shore. It was all dead wrong.
The better advice was to go all-in. To buy like crazy when the masses rush for safety in annuity products… Largely, nobody believed in stocks.
What’s wild is, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Benjamin S. Bernanke wrote an opinion editorial in the Washington Post telling us he’d guide asset prices higher, in so many words.
He made the case for home values and retirement accounts being the modern-day bread and circuses that pacified plebian class during ancient times. And we didn’t listen…
“[…] higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.”
Ben Bernanke – Washington Post November 3, 2010
That was almost three full years before then CEO of Amazon.com Inc (AMZN) bought the Washington Post. AMZN was a huge beneficiary of the Chairman’s stock market levitation efforts.
Here’s a chart of AMZN stock back to 2010. The first arrow shows the date of the Chairman’s opinion piece, where he told us all about the second-order benefits of rising asset prices. Think of it like the psychosomatic benefits of feeling rich… you’ll do all kinds of risky things if you feel comfortable.
Almost three years later, late summer 2013, the second arrow marks the notable tech CEO buying the entire newspaper.
To be clear, the two events are not necessarily linked. Meaning, the opinion piece and the newspaper purchase were separate.
The point here is, when the Chairman told us rising asset prices would create a virtuous circle, in turn sending asset prices higher, and so on, we didn’t believe him. AMZN was an $8.44/sh stock at that time.
Today, at 22-times the price, people like Pete think you’re crazy not to own it.
The More Disease
The real issue is a disease called More.
It’s a condition where you compulsively buy stocks hoping they go up.
Of course, everyone wants their stock to go up… but obsessively staring at the daily gyrations hoping for More leads to delusion. Things get very messy.
For starters, you may end up doing crazy things with money. Borrowing to buy More of a stock when it’s down… like gamblers who double the bet after a loss.
Or, you may sell other assets to add to the trade you’re sure is set to do better any minute now.
A one-minute time horizon is tough… and people afflicted with More tend to experience emotions tied to the direction of the stock. Green means happy, red sad.
What’s worse is, sadness requires soothing. This means find someone who told you about the stock, or someone you asked about it, blame them for leading you astray.
This is like the people who within minutes of meeting me ask questions about a popular stock like NVIDIA Corp (NVDA).
At ~$120/sh in mid-March a very smart neighbor asked “Will it go back to $150/sh.” This was about 10 minutes into our first conversation ever. The answer, “Probably not,” didn’t go over well… and she now pretends to be on headphones when I see her.
NVDA did not go back to $150… it fell below $100. More disease has her thinking that’s somehow my fault...
Plus, like guessing the weight of a cow at the State Fair, the bet on downside was merely how the chart looked. It flirted with a death cross at the time, so I went with the odds.
A price-target specific question is a symptom of More. The stockholder in this case is not an owner… involvement is simply a bet on just a little More.
Owning NVDA would be less about the price and more about leadership harnessing a quantum computing boom… or some radical new technology sniffed out by good thinking.
Most people watching NVDA at this point are purely price motivated… green means happy. Red means despair.
How Much More
Lots of people have the More disease. Try asking them how much More will get the job done… they don’t know.
Worse yet, they scoff at the question. Or, fire back with the standard low-bottom response accusing you of being too rich to appreciate their plight.
What you’re trying to do in this case is help them. They’d have More money if they did some critical thinking about why they own stocks.
This is not deep research, reading annual filings, and filling weekends with boring work. In fact, people often do those things when they’re so deep into a losing position they need to rationalize it.
The treatment for More is far easier… about as easy as avoiding sick days by simply keeping your hands out of your mouth.
The first step, the crucial step, is figuring out what kind of life you want. Meaning where you want to live, what you want to do, and what it takes to do it.
If you hate your job, your house, your partner, and your neighborhood, it means you think More will fix it. It won’t.
Worst of all, More causes paradoxical outcomes. Meaning your quest for more might halve your current pile. More, left untreated, often results in less.
Honestly trying to answer the question “How much More?” helps break this dangerous cycle. It sheds light on the fact that more green screen days, more zeros, more action, does nothing to address the problem.
Try this for yourself… pretend you have double the wealth you have… really think about it. Then think about what you’d do differently with that larger pile of assets.
People sometimes say they’d own stock in more serious companies, they’d diversify, they’d stop buying triple-levered daily movement ETNs… or weekly options. What they’ll learn later is, they’ll never get More until they take a look at those things now.
You Had a Chance…
With More in remission, you may see things differently.
Stocks hit a high in February with the S&P 500 Index (SPX) closing at a high of 6,144.
The index fell slowly for five weeks before absolutely tumbling in early April hitting a closing low of 4,982.
During these types of events, people ask for advice. In the throes of More, they reach out for a smart person to assure them it’s OK to hang on. I’m not that person.
I listen to people stricken with More talk; it makes me want to reconsider one of those Clorox wipes. I’m terrified of More.
The first question I ask is, What’s your percentage exposure to stocks?
Nobody with More knows the answer. Plus, they refuse the question, going back to “Do you think Meta Platforms Inc (META) will bounce back?” It’s a price-specific question, which we identified earlier as a key symptom of More.
OK, fine, “No.” And they begin arguing with me. People with More tend to refuse treatment.
META is a great company. Most people in their 60s love reading its feed posts, unable to distinguish between those from friends, and advertisements. People even step into scam situations initiated from social media posts, only to quickly return to social media for more. That’s the sign of a good business…
But the chart says gravel road ahead… slow down. And stocks can grind sideways for a while, making ownership miserable.
People with untreated More will hold a grinding stock until they can’t take it anymore, and sell at the lows.
They’ll never understand the question of what they own, what percentage. It’s the first step to stable returns.
If you’re a high-earner, in your working prime, with a solid balance sheet, you might own ~50% stocks. That’s the percentage of your liquid assets.
Then you might break down that ~50% and decide you want ~20% of the ~50% invested in tech. And a portion of that in META, and other leading names.
That’s something More makes impossible. You just need META to go up More, and if it doesn’t, it’s all because you asked that smart stranger if it would and he said no… and he should’ve made a stronger case so you’d take him more seriously. But loses, and gains, are always and only a result of your decisions, not some other party, regardless of circumstances.
Deciding What to Own
Many people wanted a chance to get out at the old prices, the February highs. Now, with markets back near the high-water mark, they hold on for More.
Take data-mining titan in the making Palantir Technologies Inc (PLTR).