When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Pokemon cards (like most kids were back in those days). My parents used to take me to Books-A-Million on Saturdays for Pokemon League, which was essentially a chance to both trade cards and play competitively. At Pokemon League, I learned exactly what asymmetric negotiation was, as both the duper and the dupee. 

There was an adult man that used to attend that was essentially the encyclopedia entry for a neckbeard. Because he was an adult and had a job, he had the financial resources needed for booster boxes and releases that had only come out in Japan and hadn’t been released in the states yet. 

I remember I traded a complete (and valuable) haul of rare holographic cards for a single Japanese holo that he had, because I wanted to be able to show off that I had a card that hadn’t been released in the US yet. I didn’t understand that he had access to more resources than me, and therefore I was at a disadvantage in negotiations.

On the flipside, a couple months later, I traded a handful of fairly useless trainer cards to a much younger kid for the vaulted holographic Charizard from the original base set. That poor kid had no idea what he had. After my mom tore into me for taking advantage of a kid who didn’t know any better, I realized he had placed a bunch of stickers on the back of the Charizard anyway, rendering it valueless.

Whenever negotiations rely on having strong subject matter knowledge, there’s always room for some asymmetric negotiation. Churning and MS are no different. 

As we’ve covered, there is a market for pretty much every point, mile, certificate, or Amex coupon that you can possibly earn. But just because there’s somebody willing to take it off your hands doesn’t mean there’s a straightforward way to understand the value of your haul. 

I think it’s particularly a problem at the beginner to intermediate level – people that are able to generate some level of spend and points, but aren’t fully comprehending the cottage industry marketplace that exists for those points.

Regardless of whether someone is buying for personal use or acting as a middleman for somebody else, there is clear motivation for them to pay the smallest amount possible. It’s either less out of pocket, or higher margin for them with the end user. 

With the amount of relatively new churners out there the last couple of years coupled with the flood of market supply, there have been lots of opportunities for people (especially buyers) to put profits over people. 

Of course, it’s important to be clear-eyed – we’re all here to make money and travel, and chances are you fell into this hobby due to your tenacious appetite for a good deal. But getting a good deal for yourself isn’t mutually exclusive from it being a good deal for the counterparty as well. 

As always, I’ll use a recent example to illustrate. A few months ago, there was an extremely lucrative card linked offer that showed up for many of us in the community. While it was only possible to game through underground methods, there was a very legitimate usage of the offer for almost anyone with a business that dealt in goods, to the point that it was almost like a large percentage off on groceries for a normal household. 

Early on, the market value was erratic and split between buyers who understood the value of the offer and set a good-faith bid vs. others who threw out a price that sounded good to a beginner but was a small fraction of the true value. 

Over time, the low bids were forced to go multiples beyond the original – but only because there were more honest people offering higher prices without competition and sellers willing to wait for the right offer. 

Ultimately, taking that lower price in the interest of a quick cash out hurts both your wallet and the marketplace at large. In a community that is largely self-moderated, recent data points and trust is all we have to go on.

This isn’t slander of the demand side of the equation, either. Buyers provide a necessary service, and again, thanks to self-moderation, are largely trustworthy. But there will always be people looking to take advantage of others who don’t fully understand the value of what they’re holding, and it’s a net negative on the marketplace. 

My advice to budding sellers – if you don’t know what something is worth, ask. Most advanced MSers would much rather argue about the market value of something vs. answering something that is already discussed ad nauseam on TPG. 

And for buyers – get your margin and/or value, but don’t forget that the person you’re buying from is a potential future collaborator that is worth more than making a quick buck from a beginner. 

To this day, I still feel bad about that Charizard holo. If it makes you feel any better, I ended up selling my entire Pokemon card collection on eBay for like $100 in the aughts when Pokemon had fizzled out, and it likely would have been worth a ton now. I got what I deserved – lesson learned. 

Good luck on your cashout ventures, friends.

æгас цу!

I was lucky to spend the last couple of weeks in the Caribbean (including the truly great Hermitage Bay) so I tried to be at least somewhat unplugged and not spend too much time thinking about churning and MS. More on that trip at some point in the future, but for the one sentence summary – Hermitage Bay is one of the very few churning hotels that lives up to the hype, and I can’t think of a better way to use a Hilton FNC.

Regardless of how much I tried to avoid spending much time on churning the last couple of weeks, since it is 2025, the gods of MS had to deliver one more volley before the year ended, and I ended up thinking about it more than I wanted to. 

Since banks love to use vague blanket wording that is approved by their legal team, nobody really knows for sure if this is as big of a blow as it seems to be or not. But regardless, this is another good example of not spending too much time worrying about things that are 100% out of our control, and we’re just going to have to wait and see (and start probing for alternative options). 

But what do you have control over as more and more plays die and limits are imposed? You can’t change the downstream effect of a dead play, shutdown, or something similar. But you can start working on the diversification and creative thinking that is clearly going to be required to thrive in 2026. 

A lot of people were one trick ponies the last few years, and I don’t blame them. Why deal with things like the volatility of precious metals or the time suck of buying gebits if you didn’t need to? But as more and more people flocked to mindless couch MS, the writing was on the wall that it wasn’t going to be sustainable for long.

And with the spigot of endless points starting to be turned off for many, there’s going to be quite a bit of attrition coming in the near future. For example, I frequently see people asking how to meet Amex SUBs in this current state. There’s many different ways that are still alive, and plenty of them aren’t remotely secret. 

You just need to pop on your collared shirt, grab a box of cookies, and don your social engineering hat. But for a cohort that never did that, that seems more daunting than it really is. I say this not to belittle people that haven’t done these things – it’s more of a push to evaluate things like street MS that were here way before this current era, and will be for quite awhile after. 

I fully expect MS to be trickier in 2026, but I also think that there will be plenty of opportunity out there for people who are willing to do some creative thinking to figure it out. More importantly, you won’t be hitting a method that’s also being hit by every rando who saw a reddit ad and joined a Substack anymore. 

Anyway, as my friend (and guest poster) Will memed it, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. I’ll let you decide for yourself where you think we are in this sequence, but I’m optimistic that we’re closer to another beginning of the cycle than recent news would make it appear. 

But to get back to those good times, we’re going to have to get through some hard times first. There’s still a universe of plays out there to be hit, you just need to know where to look (and do some probing of your own). The next big thing isn’t going to be spelled out verbatim for beginners in a Substack post. 

我们都会漂浮在水面上。

We’re about to kick off the holiday season, and it’s got me feeling a bit reflective. I’m about to head off to a relaxing time in the Caribbean, powered by uncapped FNCs. Before I leave, I wanted to address the (rather consequential) MS news item du jour and share some things I’m grateful for this year.

A large part of the churning world is collectively holding their breath right now, waiting to see what is going to shake out with a major issuer. I doubt anyone is too surprised by the situation – the clock started ticking on the lifetime of the play the second it was announced. 

There are a lot of opinions out there on how best to deal with the situation. Play it conservatively and (maybe) live to see another day, throw caution to the wind and carry on, or somewhere in the middle. 

Ultimately, you need to decide for yourself how you want to handle it, depending on your own personal circumstance. All of those opinions out there are just that – opinions. 

But if I was weighing whose opinion was most valuable when making the decision, I’d trust the various people in the community who have a direct line to el jefe and not someone in a Facebook group that is LARPing as an insider. 

And if you want my two cents, all I can do is shrug. I had my money on this lasting for six months, so I came up 33% short. This is why I like to bet on both sides when I gamble.

For a classic #chasingcetaceanstherapythought, there’s no use worrying about things you can’t control. There is no takesies-backsies on whatever MS you did with this bank, so consider your situation, drown out the noise, and make the best decision for you. 

Anyway, tomorrow is Thanksgiving for those of us in the states, so I’ll end this doom and gloom with some MS things I’ve been thankful for this year. It hasn’t been a year for the light-hearted, but that doesn’t mean the juice hasn’t been worth the squeeze.

MS things I am grateful for this year, which may or may not be in chronological order:

• Interchange fees (aka the engine of the whole thing, for better or worse)
• Crypto shenanigans
• Old school financial services companies
• Hilton FNCs
• Prediction markets
• Citi’s IT
• Baccarat
• Scenic rides up and down
• My probe group club
• Everyone who has read, commented and been so receptive to this blog

And some things I wish we could leave back in 2025:

• Restrictive crypto charters
• “Questionnaires”
• Payment rail swaps
• BIN blocks
• Shutdown after shutdown after shutdown

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers, and to the handful of you elsewhere, enjoy us not bothering you for a couple of days. Good luck on your Black Friday shenanigans and fingers crossed you come out the other side unscathed. 

ቺርስ! 

Companion song: Wait So Long – Trampled by Turtles this one is worth a listen if you haven’t heard it – about as cool as a song with banjos and fiddles gets

Today concludes this goofy folk music-inspired series of timely MS advice. Part 1 and part 2 are here if you missed them.

If you’ve found your way into this wild hobby, you probably have at least some level of personality traits that trend towards responsibility and measuredness. I think those can sometimes lend themselves towards hesitation as well, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Hesitation is your brain telling you to stop and think harder before making a decision, and in so many different scenarios, it is your friend. It’s also very natural to hesitate with financial decisions, especially since so many of us aspire to FIRE. 

However, in this hobby, fortune favors the bold. It’s something that’s stressed from the very beginning. If you see a sign-up bonus you’re interested in, don’t wait for it to go away. If you see an award flight that fits your plans, don’t wait for your P2 to confirm they can take off work, book it before it’s gone. 

This mantra carries over as you get deeper into MS as well. Some of the most profitable things are only around for days (or hours). In this day and age, you often don’t have the luxury of saying that you’ll “figure it out later” or waiting to apply on a different screen. Things come and go so quickly that you need to strike when the iron is hot.

One historical example is the quasi-famous Aspire link. Way back when (somewhere around 2018-2019 I believe) somebody managed to get their hands on a link for the Hilton Aspire card without the annual fee. That card is already one one of the few cards that makes sense for many of us to keep even with the fee, so getting an uncapped FNC, Diamond status, and a handful of useful credits for free was quite the coup.

As you’d imagine, that link didn’t last very long, and all the people wringing their hands over whether they were going to get in trouble or if the link was legit ended up empty handed. 

To add insult to injury, many people had years of not being charged the annual fee via that link. Again, not a home run play. But it was one free night a year at the Waldorf in the Maldives and (at the time) $250 to spend there – aka enough for the famous cheeseburger. 

However, there are some other instances where the play is a home run and hesitating on it is seriously detrimental to your bottom line. I can think of a very recent instance where the window to take advantage of the play’s full value was short (and is now closed). In addition, one extremely easy way to meet the requirements amidst a dearth of other options died the same week. 

Back in that Aspire example, I hesitated and only got the zero fee Aspire on P2’s account (“sorry babe, you’re Amex shutdown now”), which was a mistake. But learning from that mistake led to me not hesitating on a myriad of other plays, many of which were markedly more exciting than a Maldivian cheeseburger.  

The usual disclaimers apply – assess your own risk tolerance, go at your own pace, etc. etc. But if you can clearly understand the value proposition when something new inevitably pops up and you’re stuck on a company all hands, consider taking the initiative right away. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, at least if it involves churning. Good luck hitting those unicorns.

Živjeli!

Companion Song: Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright – Bob Dylan

Time for part 2 of churning and MS advice pulled from folk music. In part one, I posited that diversifying your lineup of plays and not overlooking opportunities with limited profit ceilings was both a good way to scale up, but also a way to hedge against shutdowns. This time, I’m going to talk more about what to do in the latter situation.

A limited profit ceiling generally means tight caps. That could be something like the Chase Freedom capping quarterly 5x at $1500, but that isn’t a good example for my thesis. That (extremely) tight cap is the reason a mainstream fee free card with valuable transfer partners has 5x categories in the first place. 

Other times, tight caps are instituted by a fintech or smaller bank that is at least peripherally aware of rewards arbitrage and wants to nip that in the bud. While those caps stop them from hemorrhaging bonus and/or interchange payouts, it doesn’t stop savvy customers from getting some level of value out of them.

Nobody ever gets shutdown by Chase for maxing the Freedom cap, for a couple of reasons. The first is that $300/year is peanuts. But the second is that I’d imagine there was some level of financial modeling performed down at 270 Park Ave that determined the caps placed on certain cards were within acceptable risk and they were ok with a certain percentage of advantage players maximizing the cap. 

You know who probably doesn’t have the ability to do this (besides Citi)? A lot of the platforms that fit the mold of a play I described in the first installment. They’ll have limits in place, but they aren’t quite as scientific as a big bank like Chase could do (and they may be a direct reaction to an uncapped launch). 

Chase might be fine paying out on $6k/yr of Freedom spend or $25k/yr of CIC spend, because it’s a beyond miniscule part of their P&L. For your average series B fintech, paying interchange fees or bonus points is a more important part of the overall equation.

As a result, it’s not super hard to get shutdown even when you are playing fully within the rules. I encourage everyone to be ok with this outcome – you aren’t a profitable customer by any stretch of the imagination, so why would they want to retain you? It’s not like you’re suddenly going to start carrying a bunch of debt or using their pointless debit for everyday purchases. 

Talking about it theoretically is nice, but I always find it easier to illustrate with a real-world, recent example. A relatively large group of the community got axed by a fintech in the last week or so, even though they had fairly strict limits. This fintech wasn’t actually special, but it was one of a few somewhat well-known cogs in a much more well-known loop. 

Since this is 2025, I sympathize with those that are upset about losing something easy. But I’ve seen way too much thought and time devoted to these shutdowns and what the next step is. For 99% of us, the profit ceiling was somewhere between $300-$420/mo. I’m not minimizing that amount, especially since the hourly return on the time it took was fantastic. But ultimately, it’s not the home run play that is going to buy that orange Evora. 

The whole reason I advocated for finding and understanding as many $300-$500/mo plays as you can in the previous post is to reduce your exposure to a play dying – and to be able to shrug and say “oh well” when it does, because you have eggs in other baskets. 

Losing this one is a mild bummer. But that’s really all the brainpower you need to spend on it – it’s not exactly surprising that a company doesn’t want a bunch of users that load money in with a payment method they lose money on, and get the money out in a way they also don’t earn on, regardless of if it was within their limits. Ironically, we were the exact opposite of the customer persona they’re targeting. 

Onwards and upwards, my friends.

Cảm ơn!

Companion song: One Trick Ponies – Kurt Vile

When I’m working at my 9-5 or couch MSing, I usually listen to high-tempo music like early phonk or the seminal metalcore album Jane Doe as the perfect background to focus. 

As a result of losing plays over the last few weeks, I’ve spent way more time driving around town returning to the ‘ol street MS grind. But hardcore screaming isn’t exactly the perfect soundtrack for a monotonous road trip, so I’ve been listening to some old folk-adjacent favorites. 

In revisiting some of those songs, there were some lyrical themes that are good advice for the state of the hobby right now – here’s part one of a three part series.  

For a long time in MS, being a one trick pony was more than enough. Plays lasted so long and networks of information were so disparate that you could find your golden goose and be all set. Whether you’re talking about old school stuff that lasted for years or the new(er) school plays that have died this year, it was possible to sustain a healthy margin on one play alone. 

For many, there wasn’t a compelling reason to learn the quirks and nuances of a new system, platform, or bank. Why bother when it was just taking attention away from the play you know like the back of your hand? I don’t think I need to write a paragraph explaining why we need to bother now, as frustrating as that may be.

Over the last couple of years, a lot of us got complacent because of how easy it was. A big part of the MS world was content to have the MS equivalent of an “email job” (not that I blame anyone for that). 

A small population saw the writing on the wall, rolled up their sleeves, and laid the groundwork for the MS equivalent of a blue collar job. That group is much less concerned about any of the shutdowns going on now, because they weren’t shutdown in the first place.

I’m feeling some of this pain myself because of an unrelated shutdown, hence the rolling around listening to Kurt Vile. It has been years since I spent a day awkwardly staring at the back wall of the Staples register as the cashier passive-aggressively fumbles with the security tape of fee-free gift cards. But much like a FIREd person taking a job as a barista for human interaction, it feels strangely good.

I’m a huge proponent of streamlining your time spent on MS lest it shift from a highly profitable hobby to a low-wage full time job. But in the spirit of continuous education and staying curious, paying more attention to signal you’re seeing out there is going to become more and more important.  

MS home runs are going to get harder and harder to hit going forward as things like uncapped bonus categories and unlimited debit pay go largely the way of the dinosaurs. This does not mean there aren’t still valuable opportunities. While a lot of these plays will cap out in the $500-$1000/mo range, when you add multiple plays and players, they add up fast.

So next time you see someone extolling the virtues of the latest vowel-less fintech, take a few minutes to evaluate and understand the possible value. Chances are it’s something you can spend a maximum of 5-10 minutes a week on. AKA, the average amount of time it takes to spend $1,800 at a Staples. 

เชียร์!