(which is something cats aren’t good at)
A lot of MSers spend a majority of their time probing new fintechs, banks and platforms in an effort to find the next big play. This is a smart way to spend your time, since so many plays die quickly due to too many people hitting it, the scale at which people are hitting, or both. Finding something new means you may get to have an internal “no debit cards accepted” rule named after you.
That is never going to happen at a big, publicly traded company because all of us are already aware of them. But what big companies may lack in obscurity, they more than make up for in random product launches outside of their original specialty and pointless bureaucracy.
If one were to do the opposite of scouring the dark corners of the internet for a unicorn, where would the best place to look be? The Fortune 500, of course.
It’s funny to scroll through the list and think about how many of the conglomerates featured on there are involved in churning and MS to some degree – whether as a key platform, a target, or even both. But it isn’t immediately obvious if you’re a beginner or intermediate MSer. Let’s discuss the companies on just the Fortune 100 through a MS and churning lens.
A beginner would definitely count 9 of the Fortune 100 – the six biggest churning banks and the three airlines. Maybe 10 if they really like buying Hue lights and include Dell. Perhaps even throw in Boeing since they make planes.
An intermediate level would probably name somewhere between 25-30 – outside of the previous 10, there are plenty of important companies to add for churners. FAANG companies like Amazon and Apple for buyers groups, gas stations and grocery stores for street MS, Costco for gold, etc. They’d also remove Boeing, because it’s not actually related.
An advanced MSer would say that more than half the list is involved in MS in some capacity. Here’s the big distinction between the first ~25 and the second ~25 – the first grouping is all about ways to increase your spend. The second grouping is primarily ways to increase your liquidation, hence why these angles aren’t publicly talked about.
A handful are a little tenuous (after all, the GOAT credit card has been discontinued for six years), but most of these companies added in the advanced tier are very helpful for allowing you to score a lot of very small wins that snowball into quite a haul over time.
And yes, even some of the companies on there that make products that only exist for you to waste your time have a liquidation angle to them – any time a company gets ambitious and starts adding random functionality to their platform a la an Asian superapp, there are opportunities to make money off of it.
I chose the Fortune 100 for the sake of brevity, but if you continue further down the list, you’ll find plenty of important companies for MSers – some are obvious (PayPal, Dollar General, Synchrony, etc. etc. etc.) while some are not.
If you don’t see the second batch of companies that are relevant, take a scroll through the list and think about your goal – liquidation of spend that already occurred, not an increase in spending.
All that to say – the core of your next home run play may be a company that doesn’t even exist yet, but the old standbys that have stood the test of time for MSers are chilling at the top of the Fortune 500, too big to act swiftly on unprofitable activity from savvy customers.
Happy searching, my friends