Over the weekend, some strong evidence appeared suggesting that a longstanding loophole that was a preferred avenue for many of your local whales may be closing. While we don’t really know for certain if this is the end, the writing has been on the wall for awhile that it was on borrowed time.  

The play changed over the last few years, and took on different forms. But I wouldn’t call this a phoenix play, because it technically never died, provided you weren’t trying to set it up anew. It’s more of a grandfather(ed) phoenix. 

But unlike a lot of other whale plays from the last few years, this one was positioned in a sweet spot of margin and sustainability that doesn’t come along very often.

Think about it – a lot of the high margin plays that generated the outsized profits the last few years generally involved certain spend categories. Those categories are sometimes difficult to scale (and are becoming even more difficult) and are hard to explain if your FI asks what the deal is. 

With this one, as long as you had a decent bankroll, a way to generate a lot of spend of any kind, and a pinch of foresight, you were golden. And it was good enough that it would potentially keep you from diversifying your MS portfolio.

But if there’s anything the last 2 years have taught us, relying too heavily on one avenue (even as great as this one was) is a recipe for getting caught flat-footed, especially given that there were very clear signs that it wouldn’t continue forever.

It would be hard to justify using your float elsewhere at these margins, but it wouldn’t be hard to justify understanding what your options are when the churning war on happiness inevitably finds its next victim. 

Anyway, I hope that it’s a false alarm, but it doesn’t feel like it is. As with the other adverse actions we’ve seen in the last couple of months, this is a prime opportunity to start combing through the signal you may have ignored lately about other avenues that are working. 

The only constant is change, especially in this game. I’ll cross my fingers that this is the only time I post about this topic and will be sending positive vibes to my siren-loving whales. In the meantime, it might not be the worst idea to head back down to the mines.

Pictured: An enterprising MSer on their way to finding the next fintech loop