Investing

To most people, Michael Konik is a poet-philosopher-essayist-thought-leader who used to be on TV.

To the investment community, Michael Konik is King Midas. What Michael Konik touches turns to something better than gold: ROIs in the mid-teens. That’s why venture capital firms throw money at us; that’s why brokerages want our business.

On the heels of our latest breakaway success, K2O2 Himalayan bottled air, the excess cash is starting to pile up. We can’t hire enough interns fast enough! Plowing all the fresh venture capital parked on the doorstep back into our core business would seem like a good idea to a traditional “entrepreneur.” Not us. Our watchword is diversify. So in addition to adding several more Filipino call centers to our customer service budget, we’ve decided to park some of our excess dollars in interest-bearing investment instruments. Debentures. Notes.

We’ve decided to make our money work for the good of the world by buying a financial product offered by the esteemed bank Societe Generale called Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes. They come due in April of 2017 do these Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes.

The main reason you know this is a solid investment is because these Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes are linked to the performance of the common stock of Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, some of the most upstanding corporations in America, if not the world. We feel good getting in bed with companies like these, because they’ve figured out how to include massive fines for criminality into their business plans while still posting record profits. We know our money is in the best, most venal hands possible.

Exactly what Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes do we can’t really say. The prospectus explaining the finer points of Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes is 103 pages, so we haven’t yet read the whole fascinating document. We did notice that on pages 66-68, there’s a lengthy discussion of whether Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes might or might not be subject to FACTA Withholding, and if you don’t know what a drag that can be then you’re probably not in a tax bracket that concerns itself with such matters.

Let’s put it this way (as the prospectus does): “FACTA is particularly complex and its application…is uncertain at this time.”

One thing is clear: Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes are not a great way to hide income from the Internal Revenue Service. Or maybe they are and we just can’t decipher the prospectus.

Did you know certain Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes can be treated as a Put Option and a Deposit? For accounting purposes.

Page 14 also contains a trenchant analysis of Dodd-Frank provisions that may or may not be applicable to these particular Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes. Or maybe they are.

We’re not really concerned. These Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes pay only 9% annually. Whatevers. No biggie. We’re moving on to bigger ideas, grander schemes, larger plays. We’re putting all our attention on earning double-digit returns from horse racing.

In the meantime, while everything matures, growing incrementally each night we sleep, it’s comforting – to us, at least – that for a certain kind of person Auto-Callable Worst-of-Reverse Convertible Non-Principal Protected Notes are there in times of need, putting excess money to work in the most righteous ways imaginable.