Tuesday, April 17, 2018
The Perks and Pressures of the Modern Tour Caddie
Mike Christensen never had any intention of becoming a caddie when he graduated from Duke in 2000. His dream was to play on the PGA Tour. If that didn’t work out, he had his degree in sociology. He played mini-tours for several years, often spending time with Kevin Streelman, one of his college teammates. But by the end of 2007, Christensen was beginning to think about graduate school or looking for a job.
“It was just time,” he says. “Time to get on with my life.”
And then fate intervened. Streelman was heading back to Q school, and Christensen’s cousin, Mark, was supposed to caddie for him but had a last-minute conflict, so Streelman asked his old teammate to step in.
“He made five birdies on the last six holes to make it on the number,” Christensen says. “Turned out to be life-changing for both of us.”
Streelman wanted Christensen with him for second stage. Christensen said yes. Then, the finals. When Streelman made it through to the tour, he asked Christensen if he would consider coming out with him for a year.
“I figured, why not?” Christensen says. “I thought the travel would be fun, and the potential to make decent money was there if Kevin played well.”
Streelman made more than $1.3 million as a tour rookie, meaning that Christensen made about $100,000—far more than he’d ever made playing mini-tours, and probably considerably more than he would have made at an entry-level job in corporate America. Plus, it was fun.
So, he agreed to come back for one more year. And then another.
It was all good, until a Sunday afternoon in 2010 when Streelman began the final round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational tied for sixth, meaning he played in one of the last groups. Late Sunday afternoon, a huge lightning storm swept through Bay Hill, and the players were evacuated from the golf course. Everyone headed for shelter.
Except the caddies.
“They wouldn’t let us inside,” Christensen says. “Kevin and the other players did everything but beg, pointing out it was dangerous outside. No. The rules said no caddies in the clubhouse—period. There were probably no more than 20 of us still on the course at that point, but that didn’t matter. It was frightening and humiliating. I was really shocked.” (...)
“If you stayed in a motel, it was usually four to a room. Now, it’s completely different. But I wouldn’t trade those days. Today, caddies make a lot more money. They’re treated with a lot more respect. But I’m pretty sure they don’t have nearly as much fun. There’s just too much money at stake.”
The money ratchets up the pressure everyone feels. One thing that hasn’t changed on tour is the old caddie mantra: “If your man’s going bad, he’s going to fire someone. It can be his wife or his caddie. Firing his caddie is a lot cheaper.”
Today, a lot of caddies make six figures—often well into six figures. Many are college graduates; often they’re players like Christensen who weren’t quite good enough to make it to the tour. Some, like Lance Ten Broeck, are former tour players. Sometimes, they’re family members—like Phil Mickelson’s brother, Tim. Most are white.
That’s all very different from the old days. Years ago, many caddies came from the clubs where tournaments were being played or were caddies at seasonal clubs—like Augusta National—who would come out on tour when the club closed for the summer.
“A lot of them were great caddies and real characters,” says Neil Oxman, who first caddied in the early 1970s to make enough summer money for college and then law school. “They taught the young guys how to be caddies. But as the money went up and players were allowed to bring their own caddies to all the tournaments, things changed.”
“Indoor plumbing and food,” says Jim Mackay, Phil Mickelson’s longtime caddie, who came out on tour in 1990. “Those are the two biggest changes. When I was first out, if you wanted food, you went to a concession stand. Sometimes you got discount tickets, sometimes not. And no one went inside a locker room or a clubhouse.”
Now, caddies are always allowed inside the locker room at the start of the week and at the end of the week. At the end of the Honda Classic in March, they were allowed to shower once their player was finished playing for the week. There is clubhouse access now at some tournaments—though not all.
And the tournaments are now required to give them shelter during a dangerous weather situation. “I’m really proud of the improvements our tournaments have made for caddies,” says Andy Pazder, the tour’s executive vice president and COO. “I think we’ve come a long way and done a lot for the caddies—which is the right thing to do. They deserve it.”
But it isn’t all hearts and flowers between the tour and the caddies. Three years ago, 168 caddies filed a $50-million class-action lawsuit against the tour, asking for health insurance and a share of the money the tour is paid by title sponsors to have their corporate logos on caddie bibs. (...)
The case was dismissed by a judge early in 2016 but was appealed later that year and is still under appeal. As a result, the tour won’t comment because, as Pazder puts it, “It’s still under adjudication.”
In court, the tour took the position that caddies are paid for wearing the corporate logos—through purse money. Most players agree with that position.
by John Feinstein, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: GLYN KIRK/AFP/GettyImages
“It was just time,” he says. “Time to get on with my life.”
And then fate intervened. Streelman was heading back to Q school, and Christensen’s cousin, Mark, was supposed to caddie for him but had a last-minute conflict, so Streelman asked his old teammate to step in.
“He made five birdies on the last six holes to make it on the number,” Christensen says. “Turned out to be life-changing for both of us.”Streelman wanted Christensen with him for second stage. Christensen said yes. Then, the finals. When Streelman made it through to the tour, he asked Christensen if he would consider coming out with him for a year.
“I figured, why not?” Christensen says. “I thought the travel would be fun, and the potential to make decent money was there if Kevin played well.”
Streelman made more than $1.3 million as a tour rookie, meaning that Christensen made about $100,000—far more than he’d ever made playing mini-tours, and probably considerably more than he would have made at an entry-level job in corporate America. Plus, it was fun.
So, he agreed to come back for one more year. And then another.
It was all good, until a Sunday afternoon in 2010 when Streelman began the final round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational tied for sixth, meaning he played in one of the last groups. Late Sunday afternoon, a huge lightning storm swept through Bay Hill, and the players were evacuated from the golf course. Everyone headed for shelter.
Except the caddies.
“They wouldn’t let us inside,” Christensen says. “Kevin and the other players did everything but beg, pointing out it was dangerous outside. No. The rules said no caddies in the clubhouse—period. There were probably no more than 20 of us still on the course at that point, but that didn’t matter. It was frightening and humiliating. I was really shocked.” (...)
“If you stayed in a motel, it was usually four to a room. Now, it’s completely different. But I wouldn’t trade those days. Today, caddies make a lot more money. They’re treated with a lot more respect. But I’m pretty sure they don’t have nearly as much fun. There’s just too much money at stake.”
The money ratchets up the pressure everyone feels. One thing that hasn’t changed on tour is the old caddie mantra: “If your man’s going bad, he’s going to fire someone. It can be his wife or his caddie. Firing his caddie is a lot cheaper.”
Today, a lot of caddies make six figures—often well into six figures. Many are college graduates; often they’re players like Christensen who weren’t quite good enough to make it to the tour. Some, like Lance Ten Broeck, are former tour players. Sometimes, they’re family members—like Phil Mickelson’s brother, Tim. Most are white.
That’s all very different from the old days. Years ago, many caddies came from the clubs where tournaments were being played or were caddies at seasonal clubs—like Augusta National—who would come out on tour when the club closed for the summer.
“A lot of them were great caddies and real characters,” says Neil Oxman, who first caddied in the early 1970s to make enough summer money for college and then law school. “They taught the young guys how to be caddies. But as the money went up and players were allowed to bring their own caddies to all the tournaments, things changed.”
“Indoor plumbing and food,” says Jim Mackay, Phil Mickelson’s longtime caddie, who came out on tour in 1990. “Those are the two biggest changes. When I was first out, if you wanted food, you went to a concession stand. Sometimes you got discount tickets, sometimes not. And no one went inside a locker room or a clubhouse.”
Now, caddies are always allowed inside the locker room at the start of the week and at the end of the week. At the end of the Honda Classic in March, they were allowed to shower once their player was finished playing for the week. There is clubhouse access now at some tournaments—though not all.
And the tournaments are now required to give them shelter during a dangerous weather situation. “I’m really proud of the improvements our tournaments have made for caddies,” says Andy Pazder, the tour’s executive vice president and COO. “I think we’ve come a long way and done a lot for the caddies—which is the right thing to do. They deserve it.”
But it isn’t all hearts and flowers between the tour and the caddies. Three years ago, 168 caddies filed a $50-million class-action lawsuit against the tour, asking for health insurance and a share of the money the tour is paid by title sponsors to have their corporate logos on caddie bibs. (...)
The case was dismissed by a judge early in 2016 but was appealed later that year and is still under appeal. As a result, the tour won’t comment because, as Pazder puts it, “It’s still under adjudication.”
In court, the tour took the position that caddies are paid for wearing the corporate logos—through purse money. Most players agree with that position.
by John Feinstein, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: GLYN KIRK/AFP/GettyImages
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
‘The Organic Side, to Me, Is Scarier Than the Ad Side’
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in front of Congress this week. To accompany the testimony, Select All is publishing transcripts of interviews with four ex-Facebook employees and one former investor, conducted as part of a wider project on the crisis within the tech industry that will be published later this week. These interviews include:
• Former Facebook manager Sandy Parakilas on privacy, addiction, and why Facebook must “dramatically” change its business model.
• Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on Facebook propaganda, early warning signs, and why outrage is so addictive.
• Former Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo on Facebook’s commitment to users, what the media gets wrong, and why regulation is unnecessary.
• Former Zuckerberg speechwriter Kate Losse on how the Facebook founder thinks and what is hardest for him to wrap his mind around.
This interview is with Antonio Garcia Martinez, a product manager on the Facebook Ads team between 2011 and 2012. He is the author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Kindle.
There’s an assumption that what Facebook does for advertisers is hugely influential. But on the other hand, as Zuckerberg said right after the election, it was a pretty crazy idea that fake news could influence an election in a meaningful way. Where do you think that dissonance kind of came from? As somebody who worked on the ad side.
So you’re referring to his somewhat jaw-dropping initial post after the election on November 11th or 12th or whatever it was, right? The one where he basically dismissed the claim that Facebook could have impacted the election. I mean, that was kind of a crazy claim. I also was clearly astonished when I read it. Until literally a few days before, this entire ad sales team at Facebook was literally telling every politician with any budget that Facebook can actually hand them the election. It is incredibly disingenuous and strange for an exec to get up and say that there’s no way Facebook could have potentially impacted the election.
Two or three days later someone sat him down, and he very quickly backpedaled. I mean, that I think is the combination of a few factors. At the exec level, it might just be a function of the fact that he doesn’t know too much about ads, and when I say that it sounds horrible, but I don’t mean it in a necessarily critical way. Zuck has famously never been very interested in either money or revenue of the company. Obviously he understands that it’s a necessary evil, but it’s the sort of thing that he just outsources to Sheryl and whatever lieutenants that are taking care of the ad system.
He’s a micromanager, and I never even saw him once in the ads area micromanaging anything. He just doesn’t care. I’m sure he knows but not in a top-of-mind sort of way that there’s an ad political sales force numbering in the hundreds and a huge D.C. office and that there’s this entire effort actually to make politics more sensational. Look, it’s probably not something that he thought of when he sat down in a postelection moment of panic or emotion or whatever to write about, right? So I think some of it’s just that. Some of it’s … people always approach this with this kind of overweening techno-optimism, right?
They only ever see the positive side of the technologies they create. I mean, part of that is because we really, at heart, really are just such optimists, they can’t imagine negative scenarios, they don’t have some kind of, sort of tragic history.
At what moment would you say that blindness actually became a really big problem? It feels like the election was just sort of the bubbling over of a lot of long-simmering kinds of issues in this realm.
I do think the election was, certainly in the case of Facebook, a key inflection point, not just in how the public perceives them but how they perceive themselves, right? The biggest sign that things are seriously amiss, or that there’s real turmoil in Facebook is the number of leakers that journalists have managed to find. Historically, Facebook was like the most impenetrable company ever. Nobody would ever leak or talk bad about it and now they are, and a lot of this dirty laundry and the palace intrigue, all that shit is leaking out now in a way that it wouldn’t in the past. I think the election definitely fractured that internal sort of mission focus and cohesion that Facebook has traditionally enjoyed. I mean, to your broader question of when was there a transition point? I don’t know, I think it certainly fits the narrative to say, “Aha, the key moment in the movie, when everything changed …”
I think a lot of the save-the-world stuff comes from the origins of the Valley. If you go back to the Seventies and the counterculture, the hippy flower children dropped out, and Silicon Valley was this alternative to mainstream, industrial life. Steve Jobs would never have gotten a job at IBM or a more conventional firm. He had to create this other thing, which was imbued with a lot of that hippy dippy whatever. After a while, the whole thing became more sharp elbowed. It wasn’t hippies showing up any more.
There was a lot more of the libertarian, screw-the-government ethos. That whole idea of move fast, break things, and damn the consequences — which by the way is a very powerful philosophy. I’m not completely dinging it, you kind of need to have that attitude to get things done but, yeah, you do end up in situations like you did in this.
I think Silicon Valley has changed. It still flies under this marketing shell of “making the world a better place.” But under the covers it’s this almost sociopathic scene. Even me, when I had my shitty little start-up that I acquired, I was also in total asocial personality disorder mode, and I think it characterizes a lot of people in this world. (...)
What changes could have been made in the ad business and in the business models of internet advertising that could have averted some of this at least? Take Cambridge Analytica just as a recent example of this. I’m kind of curious about the ways in which the business model could have been reoriented to avoid some of this.
Look, I mean, advertising sucks, sure. But as the ad tech guys say, “We’re the people who pay for the internet.” It’s hard to imagine a different business model other than advertising for any consumer internet app that depends on network effects. I just can’t think of many examples of viable businesses of that nature that weren’t based on advertising. What else are you going to do? How else do you pay for this?
One proposal would be something like subscriptions. Is there an alternative that is meant for the public benefit, that you think makes sense? Is that something that resonates at all?
Normally I just discard the subscription proposal. Facebook’s actual average revenue per user in developed nations like the U.S. is pretty damn high. So it would put it on the order of a Netflix subscription, or more, potentially. Even though people might derive that much value from it, it’s unlikely that they’re just going to fork out a couple hundred bucks a year for Facebook.
Maybe in mature markets where everyone who is going to become a Facebook user is already a Facebook user, maybe there you could do it, if you combined it with some premium features, like I post a lot on Facebook and I have a blue checkmark and I guess I’m a power user, whatever. Posting on Facebook is at least as much about pumping my own personal brand as it is keeping touch with friends. Yeah, would I pay 23 bucks a month for really nice, advanced feature and a better UI, and posts that went out a certain time and better analytics? Yeah, maybe I would. It’s not crazy.
The other question is what do you charge, right? How does the pricing work? Part of the point of advertising is that it’s a price-discovery mechanism. You just don’t know what that time is worth until you actually subject it to an ads auction model. So, I mean, how’s it going to work? The reality is, it could end up being the developed world subsidizing Facebook for the developing world. Which is already the case, I guess, in the sense that the amount of money that Facebook makes in ads sort of provides Facebook for India. India doesn’t pay for itself, frankly. The U.S. and Europe pay for Facebook and then the marginal cost of it is relatively small, so they give it away in Brazil or India, or whatever, right?
You get into these pricing problems because there’s going be an old lady in Arkansas who’s only willing to pay 50 bucks for Facebook and then there’s me, I’d pay $1,000 a year probably for it, for personal branding reasons. But, I mean, how do you distinguish those two?
• Former Facebook manager Sandy Parakilas on privacy, addiction, and why Facebook must “dramatically” change its business model.
• Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on Facebook propaganda, early warning signs, and why outrage is so addictive.
• Former Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo on Facebook’s commitment to users, what the media gets wrong, and why regulation is unnecessary.
• Former Zuckerberg speechwriter Kate Losse on how the Facebook founder thinks and what is hardest for him to wrap his mind around.
This interview is with Antonio Garcia Martinez, a product manager on the Facebook Ads team between 2011 and 2012. He is the author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Kindle.
There’s an assumption that what Facebook does for advertisers is hugely influential. But on the other hand, as Zuckerberg said right after the election, it was a pretty crazy idea that fake news could influence an election in a meaningful way. Where do you think that dissonance kind of came from? As somebody who worked on the ad side.
So you’re referring to his somewhat jaw-dropping initial post after the election on November 11th or 12th or whatever it was, right? The one where he basically dismissed the claim that Facebook could have impacted the election. I mean, that was kind of a crazy claim. I also was clearly astonished when I read it. Until literally a few days before, this entire ad sales team at Facebook was literally telling every politician with any budget that Facebook can actually hand them the election. It is incredibly disingenuous and strange for an exec to get up and say that there’s no way Facebook could have potentially impacted the election.Two or three days later someone sat him down, and he very quickly backpedaled. I mean, that I think is the combination of a few factors. At the exec level, it might just be a function of the fact that he doesn’t know too much about ads, and when I say that it sounds horrible, but I don’t mean it in a necessarily critical way. Zuck has famously never been very interested in either money or revenue of the company. Obviously he understands that it’s a necessary evil, but it’s the sort of thing that he just outsources to Sheryl and whatever lieutenants that are taking care of the ad system.
He’s a micromanager, and I never even saw him once in the ads area micromanaging anything. He just doesn’t care. I’m sure he knows but not in a top-of-mind sort of way that there’s an ad political sales force numbering in the hundreds and a huge D.C. office and that there’s this entire effort actually to make politics more sensational. Look, it’s probably not something that he thought of when he sat down in a postelection moment of panic or emotion or whatever to write about, right? So I think some of it’s just that. Some of it’s … people always approach this with this kind of overweening techno-optimism, right?
They only ever see the positive side of the technologies they create. I mean, part of that is because we really, at heart, really are just such optimists, they can’t imagine negative scenarios, they don’t have some kind of, sort of tragic history.
At what moment would you say that blindness actually became a really big problem? It feels like the election was just sort of the bubbling over of a lot of long-simmering kinds of issues in this realm.
I do think the election was, certainly in the case of Facebook, a key inflection point, not just in how the public perceives them but how they perceive themselves, right? The biggest sign that things are seriously amiss, or that there’s real turmoil in Facebook is the number of leakers that journalists have managed to find. Historically, Facebook was like the most impenetrable company ever. Nobody would ever leak or talk bad about it and now they are, and a lot of this dirty laundry and the palace intrigue, all that shit is leaking out now in a way that it wouldn’t in the past. I think the election definitely fractured that internal sort of mission focus and cohesion that Facebook has traditionally enjoyed. I mean, to your broader question of when was there a transition point? I don’t know, I think it certainly fits the narrative to say, “Aha, the key moment in the movie, when everything changed …”
I think a lot of the save-the-world stuff comes from the origins of the Valley. If you go back to the Seventies and the counterculture, the hippy flower children dropped out, and Silicon Valley was this alternative to mainstream, industrial life. Steve Jobs would never have gotten a job at IBM or a more conventional firm. He had to create this other thing, which was imbued with a lot of that hippy dippy whatever. After a while, the whole thing became more sharp elbowed. It wasn’t hippies showing up any more.
There was a lot more of the libertarian, screw-the-government ethos. That whole idea of move fast, break things, and damn the consequences — which by the way is a very powerful philosophy. I’m not completely dinging it, you kind of need to have that attitude to get things done but, yeah, you do end up in situations like you did in this.
I think Silicon Valley has changed. It still flies under this marketing shell of “making the world a better place.” But under the covers it’s this almost sociopathic scene. Even me, when I had my shitty little start-up that I acquired, I was also in total asocial personality disorder mode, and I think it characterizes a lot of people in this world. (...)
What changes could have been made in the ad business and in the business models of internet advertising that could have averted some of this at least? Take Cambridge Analytica just as a recent example of this. I’m kind of curious about the ways in which the business model could have been reoriented to avoid some of this.
Look, I mean, advertising sucks, sure. But as the ad tech guys say, “We’re the people who pay for the internet.” It’s hard to imagine a different business model other than advertising for any consumer internet app that depends on network effects. I just can’t think of many examples of viable businesses of that nature that weren’t based on advertising. What else are you going to do? How else do you pay for this?
One proposal would be something like subscriptions. Is there an alternative that is meant for the public benefit, that you think makes sense? Is that something that resonates at all?
Normally I just discard the subscription proposal. Facebook’s actual average revenue per user in developed nations like the U.S. is pretty damn high. So it would put it on the order of a Netflix subscription, or more, potentially. Even though people might derive that much value from it, it’s unlikely that they’re just going to fork out a couple hundred bucks a year for Facebook.
Maybe in mature markets where everyone who is going to become a Facebook user is already a Facebook user, maybe there you could do it, if you combined it with some premium features, like I post a lot on Facebook and I have a blue checkmark and I guess I’m a power user, whatever. Posting on Facebook is at least as much about pumping my own personal brand as it is keeping touch with friends. Yeah, would I pay 23 bucks a month for really nice, advanced feature and a better UI, and posts that went out a certain time and better analytics? Yeah, maybe I would. It’s not crazy.
The other question is what do you charge, right? How does the pricing work? Part of the point of advertising is that it’s a price-discovery mechanism. You just don’t know what that time is worth until you actually subject it to an ads auction model. So, I mean, how’s it going to work? The reality is, it could end up being the developed world subsidizing Facebook for the developing world. Which is already the case, I guess, in the sense that the amount of money that Facebook makes in ads sort of provides Facebook for India. India doesn’t pay for itself, frankly. The U.S. and Europe pay for Facebook and then the marginal cost of it is relatively small, so they give it away in Brazil or India, or whatever, right?
You get into these pricing problems because there’s going be an old lady in Arkansas who’s only willing to pay 50 bucks for Facebook and then there’s me, I’d pay $1,000 a year probably for it, for personal branding reasons. But, I mean, how do you distinguish those two?
by Noah Kulwin and Antonio Garcia Martinez, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Helena Price
Risk-Aversion Meets a Hypervalued Market
Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.
– Roger Babson, September 5, 1929
Roger Babson’s first rule of investing was “keep speculation and investments separate.” He is remembered not only for founding Babson College in Massachusetts, but also for his speech at the National Business Conference, warning of an impending crash just two days after the 1929 peak, at the very beginning of a decline that would wipe out 89% of the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
As I’ve observed before, the back-story is that Babson’s presentation began as follows: “I’m about to repeat what I said at this time last year, and the year before…” The fact is that Babson had been “proven wrong” by an advance that had taken stocks relentlessly higher, doubling during those two preceding years. Over the next 10 weeks, all of those market gains would be erased. If Babson was “too early,” it certainly didn’t matter. From the low of the 1929 plunge, the stock market would then lose an additional 79% of its value by its eventual bottom in 1932 because of add-on policy errors that resulted in the Great Depression.
To slightly paraphrase Ben Hunt, how does something go down 90%? First it goes down 50%, then it goes down 80% more.
This lesson has been repeated, to varying degrees, at every market extreme across history. For example, the 1973-1974 decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index (market returns over and above T-bill returns) all the way back to October 1958. The 2000-2002 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to May 1996. The 2007-2009 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to June 1995. I expect that the completion of the current market cycle will wipe out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to about October 1997. That outcome wouldn’t even require the most reliable valuation measures we identify to breach their pre-bubble norms.
The chart below presents several valuation measures we find most strongly correlated with actual subsequent S&P 500 total returns in market cycles across history. They are presented as percentage deviations from their historical norms. At the January peak, these measures extended about 200% above (three times) historical norms that we associate with average, run-of-the-mill prospects for long-term market returns. No market cycle in history – not even those of recent decades, nor those associated with low interest rates – has ended without taking our most reliable measures of valuation to less than half of their late-January levels.
Don’t imagine that a market advance “disproves” concerns about overvaluation. In a steeply overvalued market, further advances typically magnify the losses that follow, ultimately wiping out years, and sometimes more than a decade, of what the market has gained relative to risk-free cash.
Daily news versus latent risks
I’ve been increasingly asked my opinion of the recent market volatility. The proper answer, I think, is that we’re observing the very early effects of risk-aversion in a hypervalued market. To some extent, the actual news events are irrelevant. I certainly wouldn’t gauge market risk by monitoring the day-to-day news on potential tariffs or even prospects for rate changes by the Fed.
Indeed, when our measures of market internals have been unfavorable (signaling risk-averse investor psychology), the S&P 500 has historically lost value, on average, even during periods of Fed easing, falling interest rates, or interest rates pinned near zero. The reason is that when investors are inclined toward risk-aversion, safe liquidity is a desirable asset rather than an inferior one, so creating more of the stuff doesn’t provoke speculation.
This distinction – that Fed easing can strongly amplify existing speculative pressures but is often wholly ineffective when investors are inclined to risk-aversion – is likely to smack believers in a “Fed put” like a ton of bricks over the completion of this cycle. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the financial memory of investors wasn’t so selective. Recall that the Fed eased aggressively and persistently throughout the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses.
In a speculative market, bad news is good news and good news is good news. In a risk-averse market, the opposite is true. When investors have to argue among themselves about which news event is causing them to worry, the news is probably just providing day-to-day occasions for investors to act on more general concerns, like extreme valuation.
Does anyone really think the market crashed in October 1987 because of a larger-than-expected trade deficit with Germany? That’s the only news event people could find that day, and investors would fearfully monitor every blip in trade reports months afterward. Attributing the market change of the day to the particular news of the day is an exercise in spurious correlation. Unless there’s an event that will materially alter the long-term stream of cash flows that will be delivered by companies to investors for decades to come, what you’re actually seeing is a daily dance of surface-level investor psychology that gradually reveals or obscures the latent fundamentals below. (...)
Investment and speculation
Both Benjamin Graham and Roger Babson were careful to distinguish investment from speculation. This remains a critical distinction today. Understanding it will make an enormous difference to investors in the coming years.
At its core, speculation is about psychology. It’s about waves of optimism and pessimism that drive fluctuations in price, regardless of valuation. Value investors tend to look down on speculation, particularly extended periods of it. Unfortunately, if a material portion of one’s life must be lived amid episodes of reckless speculation that repeatedly collapse into heaps of ash, one is forced to make a choice. One choice is to imagine that speculation is actually investment, which is what most investors inadvertently do. The other choice is to continue to distinguish speculation from investment, and develop ways to measure and navigate both.
The central tools of speculative analysis focus on the observable prices, trading volume, sentiment, and other objects that emerge as the expression of investor psychology. For our part, two sorts of measures are useful; one dealing with the uniformity or divergence of price behavior, and the other dealing with overextended extremes.
We gauge investor preferences toward speculation or risk-aversion by extracting a signal from what we call “market internals” – the behavior of thousands of securities; individual stocks, industries, sectors, and security-types, including debt securities of varying creditworthiness. While we do keep our methods proprietary on that front, we’re very open about the underlying concepts: 1) when investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it, and 2) when two securities diverge, the dispersion provides information about factors that they do not share in common. As a simple example, consider junk bonds versus high-grade bonds. Uniform market action conveys information or investor perceptions about interest rate pressures. Divergence conveys information or investor perceptions about oncoming credit risk and default.
With regard to overextended extremes, prior episodes of speculation in market cycles across history usually ended, or encountered sharp air-pockets, at the point where valuations, price extremes, and investor sentiment simultaneously reflected overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions. Unfortunately, we learned the very hard way in recent years that, faced with zero interest rate policies, these syndromes were virtually useless in signaling even a pause in the relentless yield-seeking speculation and “there is no alternative” mindset that the Federal Reserve deliberately encouraged. So we had to adapt, ultimately restricting our discipline from taking a negative outlook unless we also observed explicit deterioration in our measures of market internals.
At present, stock market investors are faced with offensively extreme valuations, particularly among the measures best-correlated with actual subsequent market returns across history. Investment merit is absent. Investors largely ignored extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes through much of the recent half-cycle advance, yet even since 2009, the S&P 500 has lost value, on average, when these syndromes were joined by unfavorable market internals.
We observed a clear deterioration in our measures of market internals in the week of February 2nd. While we have to be open to changes in market internals that might signal a resumption of speculative investor psychology, we don’t see that here. So speculative merit is also absent (apart than the rather weak potential that emerges from short-term “oversold” conditions). When we examine market collapses across history, the common feature is that both investment merit and speculative merit are absent.
– Roger Babson, September 5, 1929
Roger Babson’s first rule of investing was “keep speculation and investments separate.” He is remembered not only for founding Babson College in Massachusetts, but also for his speech at the National Business Conference, warning of an impending crash just two days after the 1929 peak, at the very beginning of a decline that would wipe out 89% of the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
As I’ve observed before, the back-story is that Babson’s presentation began as follows: “I’m about to repeat what I said at this time last year, and the year before…” The fact is that Babson had been “proven wrong” by an advance that had taken stocks relentlessly higher, doubling during those two preceding years. Over the next 10 weeks, all of those market gains would be erased. If Babson was “too early,” it certainly didn’t matter. From the low of the 1929 plunge, the stock market would then lose an additional 79% of its value by its eventual bottom in 1932 because of add-on policy errors that resulted in the Great Depression.
To slightly paraphrase Ben Hunt, how does something go down 90%? First it goes down 50%, then it goes down 80% more.
This lesson has been repeated, to varying degrees, at every market extreme across history. For example, the 1973-1974 decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index (market returns over and above T-bill returns) all the way back to October 1958. The 2000-2002 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to May 1996. The 2007-2009 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to June 1995. I expect that the completion of the current market cycle will wipe out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to about October 1997. That outcome wouldn’t even require the most reliable valuation measures we identify to breach their pre-bubble norms.
The chart below presents several valuation measures we find most strongly correlated with actual subsequent S&P 500 total returns in market cycles across history. They are presented as percentage deviations from their historical norms. At the January peak, these measures extended about 200% above (three times) historical norms that we associate with average, run-of-the-mill prospects for long-term market returns. No market cycle in history – not even those of recent decades, nor those associated with low interest rates – has ended without taking our most reliable measures of valuation to less than half of their late-January levels.
Don’t imagine that a market advance “disproves” concerns about overvaluation. In a steeply overvalued market, further advances typically magnify the losses that follow, ultimately wiping out years, and sometimes more than a decade, of what the market has gained relative to risk-free cash.
Daily news versus latent risks
I’ve been increasingly asked my opinion of the recent market volatility. The proper answer, I think, is that we’re observing the very early effects of risk-aversion in a hypervalued market. To some extent, the actual news events are irrelevant. I certainly wouldn’t gauge market risk by monitoring the day-to-day news on potential tariffs or even prospects for rate changes by the Fed.
Indeed, when our measures of market internals have been unfavorable (signaling risk-averse investor psychology), the S&P 500 has historically lost value, on average, even during periods of Fed easing, falling interest rates, or interest rates pinned near zero. The reason is that when investors are inclined toward risk-aversion, safe liquidity is a desirable asset rather than an inferior one, so creating more of the stuff doesn’t provoke speculation.
This distinction – that Fed easing can strongly amplify existing speculative pressures but is often wholly ineffective when investors are inclined to risk-aversion – is likely to smack believers in a “Fed put” like a ton of bricks over the completion of this cycle. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the financial memory of investors wasn’t so selective. Recall that the Fed eased aggressively and persistently throughout the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses.
In a speculative market, bad news is good news and good news is good news. In a risk-averse market, the opposite is true. When investors have to argue among themselves about which news event is causing them to worry, the news is probably just providing day-to-day occasions for investors to act on more general concerns, like extreme valuation.
Does anyone really think the market crashed in October 1987 because of a larger-than-expected trade deficit with Germany? That’s the only news event people could find that day, and investors would fearfully monitor every blip in trade reports months afterward. Attributing the market change of the day to the particular news of the day is an exercise in spurious correlation. Unless there’s an event that will materially alter the long-term stream of cash flows that will be delivered by companies to investors for decades to come, what you’re actually seeing is a daily dance of surface-level investor psychology that gradually reveals or obscures the latent fundamentals below. (...)
Investment and speculation
Both Benjamin Graham and Roger Babson were careful to distinguish investment from speculation. This remains a critical distinction today. Understanding it will make an enormous difference to investors in the coming years.
When we examine market collapses across history, the common feature is that both investment merit and speculative merit are absent.At its core, investment is about valuation. It’s about purchasing a stream of expected future cash flows at a price that’s low enough to result in desirable total returns, at an acceptable level of risk, as those cash flows are delivered over time. The central tools of investment analysis include an understanding of market history, cash flow projection, the extent to which various measures of financial performance can be used as “sufficient statistics” for that very long-term stream of cash flows (which is crucial whenever valuation ratios are used as a shorthand for discounted cash flow analysis), and a command of the basic arithmetic that connects the current price, the future cash flows, and the long-term rate of return.
At its core, speculation is about psychology. It’s about waves of optimism and pessimism that drive fluctuations in price, regardless of valuation. Value investors tend to look down on speculation, particularly extended periods of it. Unfortunately, if a material portion of one’s life must be lived amid episodes of reckless speculation that repeatedly collapse into heaps of ash, one is forced to make a choice. One choice is to imagine that speculation is actually investment, which is what most investors inadvertently do. The other choice is to continue to distinguish speculation from investment, and develop ways to measure and navigate both.
The central tools of speculative analysis focus on the observable prices, trading volume, sentiment, and other objects that emerge as the expression of investor psychology. For our part, two sorts of measures are useful; one dealing with the uniformity or divergence of price behavior, and the other dealing with overextended extremes.
We gauge investor preferences toward speculation or risk-aversion by extracting a signal from what we call “market internals” – the behavior of thousands of securities; individual stocks, industries, sectors, and security-types, including debt securities of varying creditworthiness. While we do keep our methods proprietary on that front, we’re very open about the underlying concepts: 1) when investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it, and 2) when two securities diverge, the dispersion provides information about factors that they do not share in common. As a simple example, consider junk bonds versus high-grade bonds. Uniform market action conveys information or investor perceptions about interest rate pressures. Divergence conveys information or investor perceptions about oncoming credit risk and default.
With regard to overextended extremes, prior episodes of speculation in market cycles across history usually ended, or encountered sharp air-pockets, at the point where valuations, price extremes, and investor sentiment simultaneously reflected overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions. Unfortunately, we learned the very hard way in recent years that, faced with zero interest rate policies, these syndromes were virtually useless in signaling even a pause in the relentless yield-seeking speculation and “there is no alternative” mindset that the Federal Reserve deliberately encouraged. So we had to adapt, ultimately restricting our discipline from taking a negative outlook unless we also observed explicit deterioration in our measures of market internals.
At present, stock market investors are faced with offensively extreme valuations, particularly among the measures best-correlated with actual subsequent market returns across history. Investment merit is absent. Investors largely ignored extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes through much of the recent half-cycle advance, yet even since 2009, the S&P 500 has lost value, on average, when these syndromes were joined by unfavorable market internals.
We observed a clear deterioration in our measures of market internals in the week of February 2nd. While we have to be open to changes in market internals that might signal a resumption of speculative investor psychology, we don’t see that here. So speculative merit is also absent (apart than the rather weak potential that emerges from short-term “oversold” conditions). When we examine market collapses across history, the common feature is that both investment merit and speculative merit are absent.
by John P. Hussman Ph.D., Hussman Funds | Read more:
Image: Hussman Funds
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Data Lords
This afternoon I saw a friend on Twitter say that he doesn’t buy the idea that if people just paid Facebook some sort of fee the data and privacy issue would go away. Because he subscribes to the Times, the Post and the WSJ and they each track his readership habits and sell that data to advertisers or make it available to them for targeting. This is at least partly true – I’ll discuss the ins and outs of that point in a moment. But this is a good opportunity to discuss the real relationship between publishers and big data. It’s actually very different than it looks.
First, what my friend says is true. These publications are all in the data collection and sale business. Indeed, TPM is too – not directly at all but because of the ad networks (like Google and others) we have no choice but to work with. The key on the main claim is that the issue is one of diversity of revenue streams. Each of those big publications mentioned has at least three big revenue sources that are relevant to this conversation. They have premium advertisers for which the kind of data we’re talking about has limited importance. They also have subscriptions. The final bucket is made up of advertising that is heavily reliant on data and targeting.
The difference is that Facebook is almost 100% reliant on advertising which is not only reliant on data and targeting but reliant on the most aggressive kinds of data collection, tracking and targeting. That is Facebook’s entire business. Anything that cuts deeply into that model and advantage represents an existential threat.
But here’s the really salient point. Almost every publication participates in the data economy. But the data economy is almost universally a bad thing for publications, especially ones that have real audiences.
Allow me to explain.
Different publications have different kinds of audiences. If you want to sell consumer goods to a mass audience, you might advertise in People magazine or Yahoo News. If you want to advertise to affluent investors you might advertise on WSJ or Barron’s. If you want to advertise to highly educated progressive news junkies who are what ad industry types call ‘opinion leaders’ you might advertise on TPM.
Different publications have different audiences and they have different relationships with those audiences. Some have deep bonds of trust, others don’t. Historically (and increasingly today), publications sell subscriptions. They also sell ads which can command different rates depending the value advertisers attach to talking to different groups of people. If you have a strong brand and a key audience, a publication can command profitable advertising rates because they become a kind of gatekeeper for a given audience.
The evolution of big data, tracking, targeting and advertising over the last half dozen years has transformed this dynamic.
Let’s take a hypothetical publication, Fishing Times. In the old days, paper or digital, if you’re advertising fishing equipment, Fishing Times is a must-buy. But tracking and targeting changes that. Now Google or Facebook or a number of other players whose names you haven’t heard of can target people interested in fishing or even Fishing Times readers wherever they go on the internet. Let’s call these “Fishing Times readers” collectively.
So Fishing Times’s ad department is selling access to the prime Fishing Times readership. But the Data Lords can say, ‘we can show your ad just to Fishing Times readers when they’re on Facebook, or on some meme site, on the Times or TPM or really anywhere.’ Because the Data Lords have the data and they can track and target you. The publication’s role as the gatekeeper to an audience is totally undercut because the folks who control the data and the targeting can follow those readers anywhere and purchase the ads at the lowest price.
That’s not all. The Data Lords can also create something called ‘look alike audiences’, a key part of what Facebook (but by no means only Facebook) does. This means that the data may show that people with brown eyes, Toyota Camrys, fans of Katie Perry and chocolate milk buy the most fishing equipment and are the most intensely loyal readers of Fishing Times. Now the Data Lords can show your ads not only to Fishing Times readers (wherever they go on the web) but to this demographic profile which may seem to have no connection to fishing but yet has a demonstrated propensity to purchase fishing gear in the same way Fishing Times readers do.
There’s one final part of the equation. Let’s go back to advertising at Fishing Times. We have an advertiser who sells hand crafted fly fishing gear. This is pricey stuff and it appeals to only one, fairly small part of the Fishing Times demographic. The advertiser may set up a private auction or marketplace with Google which will allow them to show their ads on Fishing Times only when a reader fits a very specific demographic profile. So Fishing Times is getting those dollars but only a tiny fraction of them because the Data Lords have allowed them to pick and choose the small subset of the audience they want to show their ads to.
A few caveats: This transformation is not quite as total as I suggest. Some publications have sufficient brand cachet that appearing on their site retains a value of its own. Some have enough market power that they can keep the data/targeting world off their most prized publication real estate. But the dynamics I’ve noted are affecting all publications and most of them to a great degree. If you’re hearing about the advertising and monetization crisis so many publishers are facing, what I’m describing here is a huge part of what is going on.
There’s one more indeterminate asterisk that floats over all these calculations: that is, the Facebooks’, Googles’ and other Data Lords’ data pretty clearly isn’t as good as they claim. In recent weeks, for instance, Facebook has had to repeatedly reduce estimates of the “reach” of their ads (how many people actually see them). Since the value of ads is whether and how many people see them, having the reach numbers wrong is a pretty big deal.
In pure efficiency terms, most of this is great. As an advertiser I don’t have to pay high rates to reach New York Times readers on The New York Times. I can pay Google or Facebook to find them for me elsewhere for much cheaper prices. But as you can see, in this new world of data, tracking and targeting, it’s the Data Lords who have the power and get the money. It’s comparable to the way Apple’s iTunes and Spotify dramatically reduced the amount of money in music sales and took a big, big chunk of the reduced size pie for themselves. Amazon is comparable with books and a lot else.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
First, what my friend says is true. These publications are all in the data collection and sale business. Indeed, TPM is too – not directly at all but because of the ad networks (like Google and others) we have no choice but to work with. The key on the main claim is that the issue is one of diversity of revenue streams. Each of those big publications mentioned has at least three big revenue sources that are relevant to this conversation. They have premium advertisers for which the kind of data we’re talking about has limited importance. They also have subscriptions. The final bucket is made up of advertising that is heavily reliant on data and targeting.The difference is that Facebook is almost 100% reliant on advertising which is not only reliant on data and targeting but reliant on the most aggressive kinds of data collection, tracking and targeting. That is Facebook’s entire business. Anything that cuts deeply into that model and advantage represents an existential threat.
But here’s the really salient point. Almost every publication participates in the data economy. But the data economy is almost universally a bad thing for publications, especially ones that have real audiences.
Allow me to explain.
Different publications have different kinds of audiences. If you want to sell consumer goods to a mass audience, you might advertise in People magazine or Yahoo News. If you want to advertise to affluent investors you might advertise on WSJ or Barron’s. If you want to advertise to highly educated progressive news junkies who are what ad industry types call ‘opinion leaders’ you might advertise on TPM.
Different publications have different audiences and they have different relationships with those audiences. Some have deep bonds of trust, others don’t. Historically (and increasingly today), publications sell subscriptions. They also sell ads which can command different rates depending the value advertisers attach to talking to different groups of people. If you have a strong brand and a key audience, a publication can command profitable advertising rates because they become a kind of gatekeeper for a given audience.
The evolution of big data, tracking, targeting and advertising over the last half dozen years has transformed this dynamic.
Let’s take a hypothetical publication, Fishing Times. In the old days, paper or digital, if you’re advertising fishing equipment, Fishing Times is a must-buy. But tracking and targeting changes that. Now Google or Facebook or a number of other players whose names you haven’t heard of can target people interested in fishing or even Fishing Times readers wherever they go on the internet. Let’s call these “Fishing Times readers” collectively.
So Fishing Times’s ad department is selling access to the prime Fishing Times readership. But the Data Lords can say, ‘we can show your ad just to Fishing Times readers when they’re on Facebook, or on some meme site, on the Times or TPM or really anywhere.’ Because the Data Lords have the data and they can track and target you. The publication’s role as the gatekeeper to an audience is totally undercut because the folks who control the data and the targeting can follow those readers anywhere and purchase the ads at the lowest price.
That’s not all. The Data Lords can also create something called ‘look alike audiences’, a key part of what Facebook (but by no means only Facebook) does. This means that the data may show that people with brown eyes, Toyota Camrys, fans of Katie Perry and chocolate milk buy the most fishing equipment and are the most intensely loyal readers of Fishing Times. Now the Data Lords can show your ads not only to Fishing Times readers (wherever they go on the web) but to this demographic profile which may seem to have no connection to fishing but yet has a demonstrated propensity to purchase fishing gear in the same way Fishing Times readers do.
There’s one final part of the equation. Let’s go back to advertising at Fishing Times. We have an advertiser who sells hand crafted fly fishing gear. This is pricey stuff and it appeals to only one, fairly small part of the Fishing Times demographic. The advertiser may set up a private auction or marketplace with Google which will allow them to show their ads on Fishing Times only when a reader fits a very specific demographic profile. So Fishing Times is getting those dollars but only a tiny fraction of them because the Data Lords have allowed them to pick and choose the small subset of the audience they want to show their ads to.
A few caveats: This transformation is not quite as total as I suggest. Some publications have sufficient brand cachet that appearing on their site retains a value of its own. Some have enough market power that they can keep the data/targeting world off their most prized publication real estate. But the dynamics I’ve noted are affecting all publications and most of them to a great degree. If you’re hearing about the advertising and monetization crisis so many publishers are facing, what I’m describing here is a huge part of what is going on.
There’s one more indeterminate asterisk that floats over all these calculations: that is, the Facebooks’, Googles’ and other Data Lords’ data pretty clearly isn’t as good as they claim. In recent weeks, for instance, Facebook has had to repeatedly reduce estimates of the “reach” of their ads (how many people actually see them). Since the value of ads is whether and how many people see them, having the reach numbers wrong is a pretty big deal.
In pure efficiency terms, most of this is great. As an advertiser I don’t have to pay high rates to reach New York Times readers on The New York Times. I can pay Google or Facebook to find them for me elsewhere for much cheaper prices. But as you can see, in this new world of data, tracking and targeting, it’s the Data Lords who have the power and get the money. It’s comparable to the way Apple’s iTunes and Spotify dramatically reduced the amount of money in music sales and took a big, big chunk of the reduced size pie for themselves. Amazon is comparable with books and a lot else.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
Image: Tobias Hase/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Report: This is Not a Gun
NEW YORK—In a discovery that flies in the face of conventional law enforcement wisdom of what does and does not constitute a deadly firearm, weapons and non-weapons experts alike reported Thursday that an array of objects including but not limited to steel pipes, wallets, and cell phones are not, in fact, guns. “After extensive research and careful analysis, we can definitively state that these objects are not guns and cannot inflict harm by firing bullets,” said head researcher Jerome Morvis, whose team found no reason why, despite obvious differences in the size, shape, and color of the objects in question, the items so often appear as firearms to the not-completely-untrained eye. “To any law enforcement officer unsure about the object a civilian is holding, we recommend looking at the firearm in your own hand and looking back for parallels between its physical qualities and those of the object in a suspect’s hands. If you find no similarities, the object does not pose an immediate danger.” In related news, the experts have released a guide to help law enforcement officials discern the difference between a gun and an African American man’s empty, upraised hand.
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Please share with the TSA, re: deadly food items.]
When Do You Know You're Old Enough to Die?
Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.
While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.
Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”
It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.
The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.
Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.
She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads.
These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies. But in the latter part of the book, Ehrenreich argues this is not so. For example, she details how our immune systems can turn on us, promoting rather than preventing the spread of cancer cells.
When Ehrenreich talks of being old enough to die, she does not mean that each of us has an expiration date. It’s more that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.
“That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she says. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. I found that rather refreshing.” (...)
Ehrenreich, who is divorced, has talked to her children – Rosa, a law professor, and Ben, a journalist and novelist – about her realisation she is old enough to die, but “not in a grim way”. That wouldn’t be her style. While a sombre subject, she chats about it with a matter-of-fact humour.
“I just said: ‘This is bullshit. I’m not going to go through this and that and the other. I’m not going to spend my time, which is very precious, being screened and probed and subjected to various kinds of machine surveillance.’ I think they’re with me. I raised them right,” she laughs.
“The last time I had to get a new primary care doctor I told her straight out: ‘I will come to you if I have a problem, but do not go looking for problems.’”
She pauses: “I think I beat her into submission.”
[ed. See also: Why Are the Poor Blamed and Shamed for Their Deaths?]
While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.
Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”
It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.
Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.
She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads.
These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies. But in the latter part of the book, Ehrenreich argues this is not so. For example, she details how our immune systems can turn on us, promoting rather than preventing the spread of cancer cells.
When Ehrenreich talks of being old enough to die, she does not mean that each of us has an expiration date. It’s more that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.
“That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she says. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. I found that rather refreshing.” (...)
Ehrenreich, who is divorced, has talked to her children – Rosa, a law professor, and Ben, a journalist and novelist – about her realisation she is old enough to die, but “not in a grim way”. That wouldn’t be her style. While a sombre subject, she chats about it with a matter-of-fact humour.
“I just said: ‘This is bullshit. I’m not going to go through this and that and the other. I’m not going to spend my time, which is very precious, being screened and probed and subjected to various kinds of machine surveillance.’ I think they’re with me. I raised them right,” she laughs.
“The last time I had to get a new primary care doctor I told her straight out: ‘I will come to you if I have a problem, but do not go looking for problems.’”
She pauses: “I think I beat her into submission.”
by Lucy Rock, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Stephen Voss for the Guardian[ed. See also: Why Are the Poor Blamed and Shamed for Their Deaths?]
Pay for Your Words
There used to be two kinds of words: written or spoken. Written statements were more consciously edited. You’d take full responsibility for what you wrote, and you’d have the chance to hone your words. One was always aware one was writing at least in part for posterity, whether literary or legal. One consciously crafted a voice. One expected to be judged for it.
And then there were the words used in bars and restaurants and rows, still performative of course but also meant to remain largely unrecorded: uttered to blow off steam, as a momentary flirtation or provocation, meant to then fall to the ground and be swept away.
Social media occupies a third, hybrid space – the worst of both worlds. On the one hand a post only makes sense in the context of a specific time and conversation, with its temperature and colour, like dinner-party discussion. But it is recorded like a seriously intended text, and can be judged with that severity long after the fact.
Or, naked and without context, these posts can be stripped for their behavioural qualities. Instead of information or meaning they are read for data: the frequency of certain words; how close certain words are to others; sentiment analysis; whether we use more aggressive language as a conversation proceeds; times of postings and what that says about our personality; whether our grammar, likes and dislikes indicate that we are conscientious or open, extrovert or neurotic.
The idea that our words can betray something about ourselves beyond what we think we are saying has always been the premise of psychoanalysis. When one talks to therapists the way we use words, our Freudian slips and ellipses, is how our unconscious is meant to emerge. But psychoanalysis’ confessions take place in a closed, secure space. Social media uses the same trick as the psychoanalyst: ‘What’s on your mind’ is the question Facebook asks when you open it, much like the shrink does when you enter their cabinet. But this time the unconscious is being revealed not to a doctor but a data broker.
This is the real nightmare of social media. Not so much that ‘they’ know something about me I considered private, hidden. Though that’s unpleasant it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect from ‘them’. More worrying is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that my data betrays more about me than I know about myself: that I’m not who I think I am. Ones complete dissolution into data.
There’s a morality tale here: social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, propagandise ourselves, is also the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.
The more skilful social media user will claim that they have successfully created a persona, that they are involved in a creative game, that they are playing the data field not it them. But social media has its own logic which dictates that persona. (...)
‘The most tragic part of social media’, the writer Zinovy Zinik told me the other evening, ‘is that though people think they are expressing their personalities they’re always just quoting someone else’.
He meant that when people think they are writing ‘what’s on their mind’ on Facebook they are just following a set of sub-literary tropes, prescribed poses. And in the sense that people choose social media as the main forum to express themselves, that means there’s less of themselves all the time. For those who are more passive-expressive, there is always the option to re-post other people as a way of signalling your position: literally transforming oneself into a series of quotes.
As the evening wore on, Zinik and I looked back to the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s, a movement obsessed with the idea of how you could express the individual in a world where Soviet propaganda had occupied all modes of expression. Our politics are more Orson Wellesian than Orwellian, more Twitter-narcissistic than top-down totalitarian, but were there be tactics to be gleaned from them?
by Peter Pomerantsev, Granta | Read more:
And then there were the words used in bars and restaurants and rows, still performative of course but also meant to remain largely unrecorded: uttered to blow off steam, as a momentary flirtation or provocation, meant to then fall to the ground and be swept away.
Social media occupies a third, hybrid space – the worst of both worlds. On the one hand a post only makes sense in the context of a specific time and conversation, with its temperature and colour, like dinner-party discussion. But it is recorded like a seriously intended text, and can be judged with that severity long after the fact.Or, naked and without context, these posts can be stripped for their behavioural qualities. Instead of information or meaning they are read for data: the frequency of certain words; how close certain words are to others; sentiment analysis; whether we use more aggressive language as a conversation proceeds; times of postings and what that says about our personality; whether our grammar, likes and dislikes indicate that we are conscientious or open, extrovert or neurotic.
The idea that our words can betray something about ourselves beyond what we think we are saying has always been the premise of psychoanalysis. When one talks to therapists the way we use words, our Freudian slips and ellipses, is how our unconscious is meant to emerge. But psychoanalysis’ confessions take place in a closed, secure space. Social media uses the same trick as the psychoanalyst: ‘What’s on your mind’ is the question Facebook asks when you open it, much like the shrink does when you enter their cabinet. But this time the unconscious is being revealed not to a doctor but a data broker.
This is the real nightmare of social media. Not so much that ‘they’ know something about me I considered private, hidden. Though that’s unpleasant it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect from ‘them’. More worrying is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that my data betrays more about me than I know about myself: that I’m not who I think I am. Ones complete dissolution into data.
There’s a morality tale here: social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, propagandise ourselves, is also the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.
The more skilful social media user will claim that they have successfully created a persona, that they are involved in a creative game, that they are playing the data field not it them. But social media has its own logic which dictates that persona. (...)
‘The most tragic part of social media’, the writer Zinovy Zinik told me the other evening, ‘is that though people think they are expressing their personalities they’re always just quoting someone else’.
He meant that when people think they are writing ‘what’s on their mind’ on Facebook they are just following a set of sub-literary tropes, prescribed poses. And in the sense that people choose social media as the main forum to express themselves, that means there’s less of themselves all the time. For those who are more passive-expressive, there is always the option to re-post other people as a way of signalling your position: literally transforming oneself into a series of quotes.
As the evening wore on, Zinik and I looked back to the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s, a movement obsessed with the idea of how you could express the individual in a world where Soviet propaganda had occupied all modes of expression. Our politics are more Orson Wellesian than Orwellian, more Twitter-narcissistic than top-down totalitarian, but were there be tactics to be gleaned from them?
by Peter Pomerantsev, Granta | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, April 9, 2018
The Why of Cooking
It’s a shame that the standard way of learning how to cook is by following recipes. To be sure, they are a wonderfully effective way to approximate a dish as it appeared in a test kitchen, at a star chef’s restaurant, or on TV. And they can be an excellent inspiration for even the least ambitious home cooks to liven up a weeknight dinner. But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it.
This means that for most novice cooks, kitchen wisdom—a unified understanding of how cooking works, as distinct from the notes grandma lovingly scrawled on index-card recipes passed down through the generations—comes piecemeal. Take, for instance, the basic skill of thickening a sauce. Maybe one recipe for marinara advises reserving some of the starchy pasta water, for adding later in case the sauce is looking a little thin. Another might recommend rescuing a too-watery sauce with some flour, and still another might suggest a handful of parmesan. Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization: There are many clever ways to thicken a sauce, and picking an appropriate one depends on whether there’s some leeway for the flavor to change and how much time there is until dinner needs to be on the table.
The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.
Short of enrolling in a cooking school, is there not a more direct, less haphazard way to arrive at a fuller idea of the theory behind good cooking? One gets the sense that chefs and cookbook authors are in possession of some magnificent guidebook full of culinary insights, consulting it to construct their dishes and revealing its secrets to everyday cooks only in fragments. No book could live up to that hyperbolic image, but I was still surprised, after roughly a year of searching, to find that there are very few books that concisely articulate the concepts that underlie good cooking, in a way that neither patronizes nor overwhelms. One might call what I was looking for “a metacookbook”—a book not about a certain cuisine or style of cooking, but about cooking itself—and I found good ones to be surprisingly rare.
One of the reasons for this is that the standard recommendations for a concept-based book about cooking are not completely helpful. Many of them, I found, were not metacookbooks at all, but rather in-depth guides to mastering the fundamentals of a classically respected cuisine (most often French or Italian) or matter-of-fact catalogues of cooking techniques, such as how to poach an egg or make a soufflé that doesn’t cave in. And of the recommendations that did fit the category, few struck a readable balance between in-the-weeds scientific digressions and everyday pragmatism. After reading through about a dozen metacookbooks, I did eventually arrive at the sort of knowledge I’d hoped for, but I also saw how some were much better than others at getting me there. Of all of them, my favorite—and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a beginning cook with even a faint desire to improve—is Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is out this week.
This means that for most novice cooks, kitchen wisdom—a unified understanding of how cooking works, as distinct from the notes grandma lovingly scrawled on index-card recipes passed down through the generations—comes piecemeal. Take, for instance, the basic skill of thickening a sauce. Maybe one recipe for marinara advises reserving some of the starchy pasta water, for adding later in case the sauce is looking a little thin. Another might recommend rescuing a too-watery sauce with some flour, and still another might suggest a handful of parmesan. Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization: There are many clever ways to thicken a sauce, and picking an appropriate one depends on whether there’s some leeway for the flavor to change and how much time there is until dinner needs to be on the table.The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.
Short of enrolling in a cooking school, is there not a more direct, less haphazard way to arrive at a fuller idea of the theory behind good cooking? One gets the sense that chefs and cookbook authors are in possession of some magnificent guidebook full of culinary insights, consulting it to construct their dishes and revealing its secrets to everyday cooks only in fragments. No book could live up to that hyperbolic image, but I was still surprised, after roughly a year of searching, to find that there are very few books that concisely articulate the concepts that underlie good cooking, in a way that neither patronizes nor overwhelms. One might call what I was looking for “a metacookbook”—a book not about a certain cuisine or style of cooking, but about cooking itself—and I found good ones to be surprisingly rare.
One of the reasons for this is that the standard recommendations for a concept-based book about cooking are not completely helpful. Many of them, I found, were not metacookbooks at all, but rather in-depth guides to mastering the fundamentals of a classically respected cuisine (most often French or Italian) or matter-of-fact catalogues of cooking techniques, such as how to poach an egg or make a soufflé that doesn’t cave in. And of the recommendations that did fit the category, few struck a readable balance between in-the-weeds scientific digressions and everyday pragmatism. After reading through about a dozen metacookbooks, I did eventually arrive at the sort of knowledge I’d hoped for, but I also saw how some were much better than others at getting me there. Of all of them, my favorite—and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a beginning cook with even a faint desire to improve—is Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is out this week.
by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Amazon
The Big Question for Markets
These are unsettled times in financial markets.
Stock prices rose or fell by more than 1 percent in four of five days last week, and if anything those closing numbers masked even larger swings within each trading sessions. A common measure of expected stock market volatility is about to double its level from early January.
The proximate cause is pretty obvious: President Trump is threatening a trade war with China and perhaps other trading partners. But beneath those daily headlines are two more fundamental questions: Is there a Kudlow Put? And is there a Powell Put?
More specifically, will the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow (and his free-trader allies within the administration) be able to rein in the Trump administration’s trade stance if markets keep falling? And will the Federal Reserve’s chairman, Jerome Powell, be ready to take action, such as by delaying interest rate increases or even cutting rates, if markets tumble further?
If the answers are “yes,” there isn’t much to worry about and the stock market should be able to keep humming along at its current high levels. If it’s a “no,” well, in a word, uh-oh.
A “put” is an option contract that offers its buyer protection against losses. If you own a stock worth $100 and buy a put with a strike price of $80, you are ensuring the ability to sell for that price if you wish, so you can’t lose more than 20 percent of your money.
Back in the 1990s, traders started referring to the “Greenspan Put,” the notion that the stock market as a whole had the equivalent of a giant put option in the form of the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. Amid an emerging markets debt crisis in 1998, the Fed cut interest rates to try to guard the United States against economic fallout, which helped the stock market gain a whopping 29 percent that year despite the global troubles.
This notion that the Fed is always ready to act when the stock markets start to dip has almost become a piece of conventional wisdom in market circles over the years — often said with a bit of snark and implicit criticism of the Fed for supposedly bailing out investors whenever the going gets tough. Fed officials themselves hate the idea, and argue that they’re looking out for the economy, not markets.
Nonetheless, in the popular discourse the Greenspan Put gave way to the (Ben) Bernanke Put, and to the (Janet) Yellen Put, as Mr. Greenspan’s successors engaged in multiple rounds of “quantitative easing” in recent years.
Which brings us to the 2018 equivalents. (...)
The pattern on trade policy through the first 14 months of the Trump administration has been to pair blustery talk — about pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example — with more modest policy actions and negotiations that may avert real economic damage.
But the question is whether that dynamic is changing, with the departure of more internationalist voices within the administration like Mr. Kudlow’s predecessor, Gary Cohn, and the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
If Mr. Kudlow is able to offer only soothing words in the White House driveway — and those words aren’t matched by restraint in policymaking — the Kudlow Put will turn out to be fairly worthless. A warning sign about that possibility came Thursday night, when the administration threatened tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese imports, in retaliation to China’s retaliation.
This is the kind of escalation that would, if it became policy rather than mere threat, be quite ominous for financial markets. Again on Friday, Mr. Kudlow offered calming messages, saying “there are all kinds of back-channel discussions going on.” But given the continued escalation after his earlier attempts at calm, the Kudlow Put didn’t quite work, and the market fell 2 percent that day.
Then there is Mr. Powell, who is in his second month as Federal Reserve chairman. He delivered a speech Friday that threw into doubt whether the Powell Put exists — at least with respect to potential economic disruption from a trade war.
He mentioned that business contacts had told Fed officials they were worried that trade tensions could spill into broader economic distress. But he did not go the next step of giving any hint that this might lead the Fed to reconsider its plans to raise interest rates gradually in the year ahead.
There’s good reason for that. If the trade skirmish escalates into a trade war, it will harm economic growth, but it will also be inflationary. Prices would rise for American consumers in the near term because of the new tariffs, and would rise in the medium term as production of goods moved to less economically advantageous locations.
It is an economic problem that the Fed’s tools would be particularly ill suited to solve; the Fed can help address weak demand in the economy but can’t do much about a negative supply shock, which is what a trade war would be.
So it’s understandable that Mr. Powell would be quiet on the subject, and disinclined to float the possibility that Fed interest rate policy could or would prevent damage from a trade war. But if things continue to escalate, expect markets to hang on his every word even more in search of evidence that the Powell Put is real.
Stock prices rose or fell by more than 1 percent in four of five days last week, and if anything those closing numbers masked even larger swings within each trading sessions. A common measure of expected stock market volatility is about to double its level from early January.
The proximate cause is pretty obvious: President Trump is threatening a trade war with China and perhaps other trading partners. But beneath those daily headlines are two more fundamental questions: Is there a Kudlow Put? And is there a Powell Put?
More specifically, will the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow (and his free-trader allies within the administration) be able to rein in the Trump administration’s trade stance if markets keep falling? And will the Federal Reserve’s chairman, Jerome Powell, be ready to take action, such as by delaying interest rate increases or even cutting rates, if markets tumble further?If the answers are “yes,” there isn’t much to worry about and the stock market should be able to keep humming along at its current high levels. If it’s a “no,” well, in a word, uh-oh.
A “put” is an option contract that offers its buyer protection against losses. If you own a stock worth $100 and buy a put with a strike price of $80, you are ensuring the ability to sell for that price if you wish, so you can’t lose more than 20 percent of your money.
Back in the 1990s, traders started referring to the “Greenspan Put,” the notion that the stock market as a whole had the equivalent of a giant put option in the form of the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. Amid an emerging markets debt crisis in 1998, the Fed cut interest rates to try to guard the United States against economic fallout, which helped the stock market gain a whopping 29 percent that year despite the global troubles.
This notion that the Fed is always ready to act when the stock markets start to dip has almost become a piece of conventional wisdom in market circles over the years — often said with a bit of snark and implicit criticism of the Fed for supposedly bailing out investors whenever the going gets tough. Fed officials themselves hate the idea, and argue that they’re looking out for the economy, not markets.
Nonetheless, in the popular discourse the Greenspan Put gave way to the (Ben) Bernanke Put, and to the (Janet) Yellen Put, as Mr. Greenspan’s successors engaged in multiple rounds of “quantitative easing” in recent years.
Which brings us to the 2018 equivalents. (...)
The pattern on trade policy through the first 14 months of the Trump administration has been to pair blustery talk — about pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example — with more modest policy actions and negotiations that may avert real economic damage.
But the question is whether that dynamic is changing, with the departure of more internationalist voices within the administration like Mr. Kudlow’s predecessor, Gary Cohn, and the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
If Mr. Kudlow is able to offer only soothing words in the White House driveway — and those words aren’t matched by restraint in policymaking — the Kudlow Put will turn out to be fairly worthless. A warning sign about that possibility came Thursday night, when the administration threatened tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese imports, in retaliation to China’s retaliation.
This is the kind of escalation that would, if it became policy rather than mere threat, be quite ominous for financial markets. Again on Friday, Mr. Kudlow offered calming messages, saying “there are all kinds of back-channel discussions going on.” But given the continued escalation after his earlier attempts at calm, the Kudlow Put didn’t quite work, and the market fell 2 percent that day.
Then there is Mr. Powell, who is in his second month as Federal Reserve chairman. He delivered a speech Friday that threw into doubt whether the Powell Put exists — at least with respect to potential economic disruption from a trade war.
He mentioned that business contacts had told Fed officials they were worried that trade tensions could spill into broader economic distress. But he did not go the next step of giving any hint that this might lead the Fed to reconsider its plans to raise interest rates gradually in the year ahead.
There’s good reason for that. If the trade skirmish escalates into a trade war, it will harm economic growth, but it will also be inflationary. Prices would rise for American consumers in the near term because of the new tariffs, and would rise in the medium term as production of goods moved to less economically advantageous locations.
It is an economic problem that the Fed’s tools would be particularly ill suited to solve; the Fed can help address weak demand in the economy but can’t do much about a negative supply shock, which is what a trade war would be.
So it’s understandable that Mr. Powell would be quiet on the subject, and disinclined to float the possibility that Fed interest rate policy could or would prevent damage from a trade war. But if things continue to escalate, expect markets to hang on his every word even more in search of evidence that the Powell Put is real.
by Neil Irwin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Jordan Spieth Misses a Victory, but Gains Another Masters Memory
When Jordan Spieth’s birdie putt on the 16th green dropped into the hole just after 5:40 p.m. on another stirring Masters Sunday, Spieth had made up the nine strokes that formed the gap between him and Patrick Reed at the beginning of the day.
At that moment, any number of stunning outcomes were possible for Spieth over the next hour. The Augusta National course record was in reach. So was the record for the biggest final-round comeback in Masters history. And, oh yes, Spieth could have won his second Masters and his fourth major championship, all three months before his 25th birthday.
But as the ball disappeared into the cup at No. 16 and the gallery erupted with an ovation that shook a sturdy grandstand, Spieth did not react.
There was no celebration, not even a smile. At last, he turned to his caddie, Michael Greller, and said, “Are you kidding me?”
Throughout a worldwide golf community that is drawn annually to the final two hours of the Masters tournament precisely because it produces examples of unmatched drama like Spieth’s rousing charge, there must have been a lot of people with the same notion on their lips.
Are you kidding me?
And while Spieth did not set any records and he finished in third place, two strokes behind Reed, he nonetheless created another indelible Masters memory, something he has done in each of the last five Aprils as a perennial contender here.
One takeaway from the 2018 Masters might be this: Golf fans might as well get used to Spieth as a dominant story line at Augusta National’s famed competition for a green jacket. Since 2014, Spieth has always seemed to be the one to watch — even when he has begun the day as an afterthought, as on Sunday.
All eyes did not turn to him immediately. The attention was on the final-group pairing of Reed and Rory McIlroy, whose Masters aspirations fizzled yet again. But Spieth began his day with birdies on the first and second holes.
Then he birdied the fifth, eighth and ninth holes, capping a torrid opening nine-hole score of five-under-par 31. Spieth was still four strokes behind Reed, who did not appear rattled. But perhaps because he is neither physically imposing nor long off the tee, Spieth attracts a fervent following in nearly every golf circle. And on Sunday, on the hills and hollows of Augusta National, the galleries began to relocate, quick-stepping so they could watch Spieth perform in Amen Corner.
At that moment, any number of stunning outcomes were possible for Spieth over the next hour. The Augusta National course record was in reach. So was the record for the biggest final-round comeback in Masters history. And, oh yes, Spieth could have won his second Masters and his fourth major championship, all three months before his 25th birthday.
But as the ball disappeared into the cup at No. 16 and the gallery erupted with an ovation that shook a sturdy grandstand, Spieth did not react.
There was no celebration, not even a smile. At last, he turned to his caddie, Michael Greller, and said, “Are you kidding me?”Throughout a worldwide golf community that is drawn annually to the final two hours of the Masters tournament precisely because it produces examples of unmatched drama like Spieth’s rousing charge, there must have been a lot of people with the same notion on their lips.
Are you kidding me?
And while Spieth did not set any records and he finished in third place, two strokes behind Reed, he nonetheless created another indelible Masters memory, something he has done in each of the last five Aprils as a perennial contender here.
One takeaway from the 2018 Masters might be this: Golf fans might as well get used to Spieth as a dominant story line at Augusta National’s famed competition for a green jacket. Since 2014, Spieth has always seemed to be the one to watch — even when he has begun the day as an afterthought, as on Sunday.
All eyes did not turn to him immediately. The attention was on the final-group pairing of Reed and Rory McIlroy, whose Masters aspirations fizzled yet again. But Spieth began his day with birdies on the first and second holes.
Then he birdied the fifth, eighth and ninth holes, capping a torrid opening nine-hole score of five-under-par 31. Spieth was still four strokes behind Reed, who did not appear rattled. But perhaps because he is neither physically imposing nor long off the tee, Spieth attracts a fervent following in nearly every golf circle. And on Sunday, on the hills and hollows of Augusta National, the galleries began to relocate, quick-stepping so they could watch Spieth perform in Amen Corner.
by Bill Pennington, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
[ed. It was a great tournament.]
Sunday, April 8, 2018
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