How to Handle Making More—or Less—Money Than Your Friends
4 min
Over the past year, I’ve watched as one friend lost a job, another scored a life-changing bonus, two took huge pay cuts and yet another sold a home at a large profit. As for me, my financial life sort of stayed the same. But what did all this mean for my friendships? An individual change in someone’s financial situation can have ripple effects throughout our greater social groups and wider peer networks, researchers and therapists say. One person’s financial loss and another’s sudden windfall can affect the ways in which we stay connected with our friends, and fights about money can lead to personal money problems or even friend breakups.
“The perception is ‘Oh, we’re on the same path,’ and as you get older, that’s not the case,” says Blake Blankenbecler , a financial therapist and friendship educator. “There is space to talk about it with your friends. But can it be cringy to talk about? Yes. Is it important to talk about? Yes.”
Humans typically gravitate toward people who are similar to us in some way, and we cling to that sense of similarity as the friendship grows and changes, says Rebecca Adams , professor of social work at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Individual privileges like family money, inherited wealth and more don’t always mean that perception is accurate, of course; but at the onset of a friendship, this sameness breeds closeness.
A growing divide
When we meet in college (as I met the folks now making up one of my oldest and dearest friend groups) or deskside at a job (how I bonded with two of my newer besties) we perceive ourselves to be on equal financial footing with the people we hold close. We chased down bargain-store deals and planned ad hoc dinner parties of rent-week leftovers. During an internship in New York, my best friend and I crammed together in the world’s tiniest sublet, subsisting off Trader Joe’s coupons and our dreams for the future. But more than a decade removed from those days, our financial lives have branched in all sorts of different directions. As we grow—or not—in our respective careers, these gaps in income and wealth will only widen, says Rhaina Cohen , a podcast producer and author of the coming book on friendship, “The Other Significant Others.” But we’re also loathe to change our behaviour or discuss how these individual ups and downs will affect the glue holding the friend group together.
“In my early mid-20s, people were pretty open about what they could and couldn’t afford, and things being expensive, but I think as people have risen up the career ladder, there is less conversation about that,” Cohen says. “The awkwardness of acknowledging that people are in really different places keeps people from having those conversations. But as we get older, these divides are more likely to crop up.”
Opening up the conversation
More often than not, the friend who’s suffered a financial setback feels the burden of communicating their new needs to the group—but doing so can be much, much harder to put in practice. Ashley Appelman , a 36-year-old living in Washington, D.C., took a significant pay cut after making a big career transition a few years back. At the time, her social calendar stayed packed with numerous friends’ weddings and bachelorette parties. Rather than bow out of these commitments or suggest cheaper alternatives, she decided that putting flights on her credit card and forgoing her savings goals was worth avoiding awkward conversations and pitiful glances.
“You don’t want to disappoint people,” she says. “I have given into so many things where I didn’t really have the budget, and I just did it.”
In her four decades of financial advising, Eileen Freiburger , managing director of the Garrett Planning Network, says she has often seen people’s behaviour change after a big money move in either direction. The friend in a lower-paying job finds themselves spending far outside their means, or the pal with more in the bank feels guilty after picking the expensive restaurant for dinner.
“Who you surround yourself with and your own value system will actively impact the next stages of how you handle your money,” Freiburger says. “Are you picking up those tabs because suddenly you can? Are you trying to spend with the Joneses?”
From her perspective, she has seen immense value in holding on to people who can ground you in your original values system, the rules you lived by before these “life happens” moments rocked your financial life. Sometimes, these people are the old friends from before; other times, they’re new friends you make after.
Finding the path forward
Financial advisers and friendship educators agree: Whichever side of the financial divide you now find yourself, the way forward for many true friendships is having more open, honest conversations about money and how it affects our relationships. These don’t have to be scary or stilted discussions, Cohen says, and they don’t have to happen in overtly formal, intimidating settings.
She recommends using a real-life example to open up a bigger conversation. For instance, if you’re buying tickets to an event, ask your friend how much money they plan to spend and why. That, in turn, can kick off a much deeper conversation about your relative finances. Cohen recommends a thoughtful line that struck me as especially empathetic and easy: “What would be helpful from me to make sure we’re on the same page about what we do together and how we spend money?’”
“There is so much that goes unsaid in friendship,” she says. “What I would want people to do is talk, to have open conversations with their friends about big transitions and big differences.”
Personally, I’ve been the friend in both positions: the richer friend and the definitely-not-rich one. I recently passed on a luxe vacation with one set of dear friends. I agonised over the decision, fantasising about suddenly finding a great flight deal or stumbling upon a can’t-miss hotel deal. After enough hours staring at travel booking sites, though, I knew my budget just couldn’t stomach it. And even though my friends understood—and of course they did! They’re good friends for a reason!—I had to hype myself up to send the “Hey guys, I’ve been thinking about our trip…” text.
Admitting I had to back out felt like a tiny failure, like I wasn’t as committed to the friendship as I had been in years past. But when another pal recently took a large pay cut as she pursued a more demanding—and lower-paying—career, I found myself on the other side of the table. After a handful of conversations about her reduced salary and inflexible schedule, I remembered my own struggle to send that text. I took the initiative to bring up the new discrepancy, suggesting we move our usual dinner-and-drinks hangouts to a lower-key TV night in. Six months later, I have to say: Both of our budgets are happier for it.
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Mirzaian is a senior director within CBRE’s Development NSW business, operating across the company’s Western Sydney and North Sydney offices
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Wall Street’s hottest momentum trade has reversed sharply, as former winners tumble and heavily shorted stocks surge.
3 min
Wall Street’s hottest trade has gone ice cold.
For years, it paid off to buy stocks that were rising in price—and bet against struggling shares. The momentum trade was especially profitable this year, as investors piled into hot stocks including Micron Technology, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other artificial-intelligence darlings while wagering against those likely to be hurt by the embrace of AI.
The S&P 500 Momentum Index soared 44% in the second quarter, its best quarterly performance on record, and it surged 133% over the past five years, nearly double the broad market’s performance.
Mega funds and rookie investors alike piled into the trade, some using leverage and options contracts in an effort to amplify their returns, propelling the underlying shares higher.
“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Matthew Tym, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, of the trade.
Suddenly, the trade is a loser. The momentum index has tumbled more than 9% since July 1, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 2.8% gain. The index—which tracks stocks in the S&P 500 based on a “momentum score”—is on track for the biggest quarterly underperformance in 25 years. July was the second-worst month for the momentum trade in around 40 years, according to Bank of America estimates; the only month worse was April 2009, in the teeth of the global financial crisis.
Hedge funds that bought momentum shares while shorting low-momentum stocks suffered even more. At the same time, a basket of the most popular stocks held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs recorded its biggest one-month underperformance in July relative to the S&P 500 in more than 20 years, according to the bank’s analysts.
Momentum trading is based on a rather simple observation: Investments that go up tend to keep outperforming; those that underperform often remain laggards. This kind of trading might seem too simple a stock-picking strategy to work. Yet it often has.
“For decades, it didn’t take a lot of sophistication to run a momentum strategy and make a decent living at it,” says Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre, a trading firm.
Part of the reason: It takes a while for corporate and other information to spread to various investors, so they slowly build positions, producing buying momentum.
“A huge pension fund can’t flip around its positions in a day,” says Lebron. “Behavioral biases also account for some of the effect, as well—people tend to sell their winners too early and hold losers too long.”
Fans of the strategy point to the human tendency to extrapolate from past results—and chase investment returns—noting that momentum patterns have been evident in markets for decades, even centuries. They also say that some of the worst months for momentum strategies are during longer periods of outperformance.
Some have been doing the trade by buying the strongest investments in a sector while shorting the weakest; others lean in to rising markets or asset classes. Still others use a quantitative approach or turn to banks or others who sell ways to make distinct wagers on momentum as a “tradable factor” or a “thematic basket.”
The fans remain believers. “Any strategy has disappointing periods,” says Antti Ilmanen, global co-head of the portfolio solutions group at AQR Capital Management.
The surge in Moderna and other biotech stocks helped crush the momentum trade. These shares were among the most heavily shorted in recent years, but positive news on a cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck sent those stocks flying, crushing some quant and other hedge funds. Moderna is up around 150% so far this month.
These traders had an especially rough day on Aug. 19, which Goldman Sachs told its clients was the worst day for “systematic long-short managers” in more than two years. About half of the losses were because of momentum trades, the bank said.
Some traders have begun to short, or bet against, the very stocks that propelled the momentum trade earlier this year. Net short positions in futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 index among speculators recently climbed to some of the highest levels of the past two decades, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The about-face is a sign of how markets have become more treacherous for investors, even as indexes keep climbing. Part of the issue: the recent meltdown of Situational Awareness, a hedge fund that had piled into some of the most popular momentum shares, including chip stocks. After a period of market tumult, Nvidia shares rocketed almost 9% after its earnings, showing how quickly sentiment can shift.
Some investors say the run-up in share prices driving tech stocks higher reminds them at times of the dot-com frenzy decades ago.
Mike Ogborne, the founder of San Francisco-based Ogborne Capital Management, said he has grown more cautious on technology stocks and is keeping more of his portfolio in cash than he typically does.
And he is nervous about the surge in spending by technology giants and quarterly capital expenditures that keep rising.
“It is a little bit like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. You don’t know when midnight is going to come around,” Ogborne said. “They don’t send a memo around telling you when the capex cycle is over.”
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