One commonly discussed quirk (if you can call it that) of getting deeper and deeper into MS is that your perception of what is a lot of money changes. When you’re moving many multiples of your actual paycheck around every day, it starts to feel like it’s barely real at all.
Us millennials in the “I only make big purchases on my laptop” meme are now moving amounts that previously qualified for that treatment across whatever fintech or crypto app we still have deposit limit left on that day.
But the whole point (at least in these discussed loops) is that you aren’t actually buying anything – just taking your nibble of the arbitrage pie before it ends up right back where it started again a couple of days later.
Most people don’t get that desensitization to moving money around like that unless they have a job involving making payments to vendors (and they probably aren’t the owner, otherwise they’re likely acutely aware of the outflow being a purchase vs. a transfer).
This post is one of those “just as much a reminder to myself as it is entertainment for you” sort of posts, because it’s coming out of a situation I find myself in.
I’ve alluded to the fact that I’m lucky to have a job with good work/life balance, but my P2 has the opposite. I was working through my loop tracker yesterday and felt that same (whether this is good or bad is beyond me) numbness that I feel towards the never ending inflows and outflows of every business day as a MSer.
Why is my P2 spending so much time and energy stressing about something that can be replaced by any cat clicking and clacking away on a phone(s)?
As much as I wish it was that simple, it really isn’t. And there’s a few reasons why.
The first is that, as much as I hate to admit it, a W2 job can provide some things that MS can’t. Benefits, predictability, a hair more security than MS. I know that the job market is brutal right now, but layoffs are generally something that companies try to avoid. However, culling unprofitable customers is a unanimous win for a bank or fintech.
The second is that earning solid MS profit in this current environment isn’t exactly super easy. The loops only take a few seconds to run, but it takes a serious dedication to following the signal to find them. It’s kind of an embodiment of that old trope: “you don’t pay me for the five minutes I spent to do it, you pay me for the ten years I spent learning how to do it in five minutes”.
Is it true that a good set of loops can potentially alleviate the stress of an overbearing corporate job? Absolutely. But is it really as simple as just knowing what card to use where? That might have worked in 2024 when somebody would just sell it to you on Whop. But to accomplish that in July 2026 means you have a good network, a good eye for arbitrage, or, ideally, both.
And there’s one big distinction between getting laid off and losing a play that feels like getting laid off. With both a dead play or layoff, you walk away with no future earnings (unless you get severance). But while you walk away with knowledge to apply to your next step in both scenarios, it’s much easier to apply relevant experience to a new job than it is to recreate a dead play’s exact combination of risk tolerance, limits, cadence, and scale somewhere else.
It’s definitely true that MS and networking are more fun than heading down to the ‘ol business factory. But I’d caution against calculating your hourly earnings as your weekly profit vs. the seconds it takes to run a loop, because it’s discounting the many hours of time spent to know how to run the loop in the first place (as well as the opportunity cost of just getting better at your job).
If I’m being honest, I’d probably have a much better title at my W2 if I wasn’t as into churning as I am, and that’s what I try to remember when I get irritated that MS is much more efficient at making numbers go up and to the right.
I’m not trying to advocate for having a W2 if you don’t feel like you need to (I wish I didn’t), just to try and stay grounded when assessing MS profits vs. work paychecks. Avoiding that feeling of numbness towards transaction value is hard. And it’s also important to weigh the fact that it’s 2026, and even your rock-solid loops could be gone tomorrow.
Fingers crossed that no churners lose any big plays this week.
Ошкӧм!