Why American Express is Fucked, Which Means All Trading is Discretionary

Ultimately, fuck your math. The economy is anecdotal.

You can argue macro concepts and bang on The Wealth of Nations like a Bible. You can come armed with a mound of data. But when it comes to market insight, you need to be able to pair that knowledge with a really good story. It has to make sense. Insecure sacs of flesh and bone are what meets the pavement in a crisis. MATLAB is the useless pair of safety goggles on the charred corpse of Lehman Brothers.

I work in banking, and the first thing I think when I sit down at my desk every day is not "I feel so effortless, free, and secure!" It's much more along the lines of "I wonder how much all this shit weighs?" Or perhaps "I really hope they fire me mid-day so I'm guaranteed a seat on the train so I won't have to carry a box." You know, stuff that fucked people think while waiting for the ax to fall.

You know what happened last Monday? In the midst of my "I'm fucked!" ruminations?

American Express doubled my credit limit. They DOUBLED it. Are they fucking retarded?

32% of AMEX's exposure is to borrowers with "risky" credit scores. I'm not in that unfortunate population, but I might be one of those dirty, evil bankers that gets his Privatized Losses for setting fire to Main Street in my War on the Middle Class. Not that I even USE my credit card for anything but a bill aggregation tool. But still! I'm a huge risk underneath that supposedly-gaudy credit score, and they have no idea. To say nothing of the people who are obvious risks at this point because they stopped paying bills 6 months ago!

You know what the other fun thing about AMEX is? Everyone on the Street uses them. AMEX cards are a status symbol amongst a population of ex-Street over-borrowed punks that are sending out resumes right now. Even if those assholes stay up-to-date, is the lucrative charge card market going to float AMEX through this crisis? Fuck no.

Also, AMEX, you can fucking forget about business users, you can't comp a tray of sandwiches for a meeting with Warren Buffet right now.

Smart investors, and people really, think like this all the time - they, like Rockefeller, see the extra rivet on the oil barrel, which you don't notice if you base all your analysis and decision-making on a spreadsheet full of cost figures like Quant investors. Investing is discretionary. Remember that, and don't be afraid to throw the statistics out on their asses if you've got a good reason. Economies are anecdotal, and ultimately your model doesn't know a fucking thing about scared investors doing what comes naturally - times like this prove both points.