E-piphany

For many years, I’ve been producing a blog and pushing free content. Before that, I wrote Sales and Trading commentary for Natixis, and before that Barclays, and before that Deutsche Bank, and before that, Bankers Trust. I never charged for any of that and neither did the banks, at least directly.

Writing, at least with respect to the blog itself, was part of my process of thinking through the economic and investing environment. I had to do that anyway, so distributing those thoughts was easy and the feedback/pushback I got was important and useful as well. It still is.

But over the years, my content offering (which is congruent to the set of Enduring Investments’ content offering) has widened to different channels and even different media. There is now an Inflation Guy podcast, an Inflation Guy mobile app, and even an Inflation Guy album of ‘80s hits. (Okay, not that one.) I’ve written two books and am contemplating a third. And then there’s Twitter. And as the number of content outlets and offerings metastasized, it has also become clear that I have gone way beyond just the idle penning of my musings and that this takes a lot of time. Some other things I would like to do would take even more time. So there needs to be a business purpose!

The hope has always been that some people who find these thoughts useful would become investing or consulting clients of Enduring Investments. Some have! And more will, in the future. But others may want some content and be willing to pay for the value, but not be willing or able to become clients. Consequently, I’ve been discussing with a bunch of my advisors how to capture the value that people are willing to pay, but not in the single avenue we presently offer (that is, becoming a client).

So I took a survey, and many of you participated. I want to tell you that I really appreciate the answers you gave and the time you took to answer the survey. It was well worth the two Visa gift cards (which, incidentally, haven’t yet been claimed – check your spam folders, folks, as I have written to two of you who are winners!). There were some very thoughtful comments and some good ideas. There was also some humor: one person put my address in for the raffle (I didn’t win). And then there was a bot! All of a sudden, one day I received a deluge of hundreds of responses. Some of these responses indicated that Inflation Guy content was worth $50,000 per month. I am flattered, robot, but money means different things to humans I guess. Fortunately, it was easy enough to cleanse the data of bot responses, which were fairly obvious…and, in retrospect, there is probably a thriving business out there of people pouring bot responses into raffles to tilt the odds. Live and learn.

On the basis of the responses, this is what we have decided to do with “Inflation Guy/Enduring Investments” content going forward.

First of all, free stuff:

• The E-piphany Blog, which was at https://mikeashton.wordpress.com and now can be reached at https://inflationguy.blog . It has always been free, and will remain free. You can subscribe to email alerts of the content. The monthly summary of my CPI-day tweets will continue to appear here, a couple of hours after the release.
• Cents and Sensibility: the Inflation Guy podcast. Free wherever good podcasts are found. There may someday be advertisements but the podcast itself will remain free.
• My weekly Investing.com column, which is unique to http://www.investing.com . They have subsidized it so that you don’t have to.
• The Inflation Guy mobile app. While there may be “premium content” on the app, the app itself will remain free as well as will a goodly amount of its content.
• @inflation_guy on Twitter will remain a free follow. My blog columns and podcasts and other free content will funnel through that channel. The monthly CPI tweets, though, will not (see below).

And now, the new offerings. These, and any others we add in the future, are available on the blog site at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ . Please note that Enduring Investments clients pay nothing for these offerings.

• Inflation Guy Plus on Twitter – Private Twitter account subscription. I am moving the real-time analysis of the CPI report to a private, subscription-only Twitter account. I will release my charts as soon as possible after the number, and will also have a private live audio broadcast as I comb through the charts and data. (I haven’t figured out whether this will be on Discord, Google meet, Zoom/Skype, but will probably start as a simple conference number). @InflGuyPlus will also have other daily/weekly charts and commentary not available on @Inflation_Guy. The cost of a monthly subscription will be $99/month with a discount for an annual subscription. This is in line with other private Twitter offerings. For example, Damped Spring offers a private Twitter feed for $80/mo with similar content though of course less concentrated on inflation. And the results of the survey we took suggested this price is not inappropriate for the people who require the real-time analysis to make trading decisions.

I do know that some people will be disappointed this isn’t cheaper. It’s an unfortunate characteristic of walls: unless there are people on both sides, you don’t need a wall. (Again, Enduring Investments clients are automatically catapulted over the wall. Although that is an unfortunate metaphor come to think of it.)

• Quarterly Inflation Outlook – I have been writing the QIO for more than a decade now. It comes out on the ‘refunding’ cycle: February, May, August, and November, within a couple of days after the CPI reports in those months. I decided to make single-issue subscriptions available, at least for now, hoping that after trying an issue people will sign up for the discounted monthly subscription. The current issue is $80 (right now, you can buy the August issue, which will be delivered via email when it is published); the preceding issue is $70 (in this case, that is the May issue) for an immediate download; earlier issues may be made available once I have time to sort through them and find ones with staying power. To test whether there’s any demand, I listed the Feb 2022 issue for $50. I also listed the 2020Q4 QIO, in which I look prospectively at the incoming Biden/Harris Administration, for $40. A recurring subscription gets a discount to $75/issue, which seemed to be acceptable to most of the respondents to the survey.

We are going to start with those two paid offerings, and see how it goes. There seemed to be some interest in a $2.99 monthly subscription which would update your personally-weighted inflation index, and in a $20 monthly subscription to a collection of model portfolios, but we will see how the response is to these products before adding other options.

One other quick comment about the prices: being a markets person, I will be attentive to dynamics that suggest I should raise or lower the price. But for you, if the price is acceptable there is no reason to delay subscribing. That’s because if I raise the price, all existing subscribers will be grandfathered at the original price; if I lower the price, I will lower it for all existing subscribers as well. So there is no price risk to you in deciding to buy now.

Now, let me mention one final offering. This has a very narrow audience but which audience seemed, in the survey, to be enthusiastic about deeper access to Inflation Guy.

“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

Morpheus, The Matrix

Let’s call this “Inflation Guy Prime.” It is really for the institutional investors and traders who want regular forecast updates and detail, some relative-value metrics and possibly trading signals, subcomponent forecasts/curves, and two-way communication with the Inflation Guy. Because of the two-way communication bit, this offering is capacity-constrained and so will be capped at a yet-to-be determined number of subscribers; the price will increase as we get more subscribers who want to be “Prime.” The current price is shown on the shop.

And so now…we see what happens. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the survey and offered independent, helpful suggestions. The offering will change and hopefully improve over time. We will add other offerings for readers/investors who have different needs. And we will figure out the right price points, eventually…but we had to start somewhere. Please let me know of any questions and/or suggestions you may have!