The discussion is now well over my head. I generally pursue pretty much any mileage opportunity for AA that I qualify for, unless it's a real PITA or the cost or opportunity cost is too expensive, or I can instead get spg points instead of AA points for the same value. (Thus, I have done brokerage deals, but for SPG not AA, which I then converted to AA during the 35 percent bonus.) While there are plenty of ways to accumulate AA miles for less than 1.9 cpm, which is pretty much what I'm considering doing by paying $1105 for 56k miles, I'm not really sure what that has to do with my current situation. There are lots of ways to accumulate miles in general and one doesn't really affect the other in the main -- for example, I would gladly pay $25 for 2500 AA miles even with no immediate use for the miles. I would do this even though I could join netflix and get the same number of miles for free. I would be happy to do both!

I don't need the 56k immediately miles to book travel. I have enough miles to do it. But I have a genuine need, right now, for tickets that would cost $1020 that I could get for 50k miles. I also have a promo that I'm eligible for, right now and for the next 8 days, that would give me 56k miles for just $85 more than the cash price of tickets I need to purchase. To me that seemed like a simple analysis. Rather than spending the money on tickets, I could spend it on miles, and, in so doing, get the same tickets, get 6k extra RDM miles, 56k more miles toward status, and also use miles in an account that otherwise won't get much use. I have to admit that many of you have convinced me that I should look at this primarily as separate transactions, but I'm also not entirely sure of that. The fact that I could possibly accumulate miles on AA some other way that would end up less costly than 1.9 cpm doesn't really seem to matter to me -- I will do that every way and anyway possible until I reach 1,000,000, although at that point I'll probably go for 2M.