You’ve felt it, right?
Some headlines flash across your screen:
Pqndr raises $300m just 2 months after announcing $20m Series A for no-code platform.
Meet this 7-year-old mute who makes $21 million a month trading photos taken by his late grandma.
It’s not the FOMO that you felt—no, we’re beyond that.
You’ve become immune to FOMO. You aren’t even surprised anymore. You joke that the next one will be even bigger.
You don’t even really give much thought to the fact we measure the Enterprise Value of the largest companies in the world in trillions. You noticed the first time, but now the financial press treats hitting the $1 trillion threshold as a competition between Big Tech for validation. It’s not even that much money, anyway; Government investment packages routinely involve the creation of enough money to buy Apple with spare change for a couple of other tech giants. A trillion here, a trillion there… it’s kind of a game, at this point.
Except it isn’t.
And that’s what you’ve really felt, isn’t it? That bizarre sensation that conjures up mental images of sand running through your fingers. Every time you believe you have found a winner, another one seems to appear that appears to be a bigger winner faster than your one. Damn, why didn’t I pick that one?
Value is transient and accrues in press releases and twitter threads, not cash flow. It is all completely illusory. It doesn’t mean anything. Cash flow is for losers. War chests are for winners.
A tax-avoiding YouTube astrologer trader tells tax-paying, regular Internet folk that you have to keep on dancing while the music’s playing or get left behind and your local barman regurgitates this as sage advice, candle chart-emblazoned phone in-hand as your friends nod along. This is how it is now; we’ve democratised access to finance; it’s changed for good; this is the “new normal”.
Perceived wisdom is dangerous. Sheep don’t think; they bleat.
Flitting from asset to asset like a magpie, collecting shiny junk to sift through later, where anything disliked is tossed, previous declarations of “💎🙌” be damned… this isn’t investing. It’s gambling.
Try and capture that sand running through your fingers and it will accrue in your hand into a little mound that you can put in a bucket and use to build a nice sandcastle. Until the tide comes in.
At present, our foundations are built upon the notion of paying for today with tomorrow’s dreams. We can’t shake it. I want it now. Delayed gratification is incompatible with pull-to-refresh.
If interest rates are what they are, and there’s no losing in this game because the Central Alchemists will step in and keep the music playing, then we should all lever ourselves up to the eyeballs and collectively default. If enough of us do it, the scale of the problem will be so large that there’ll be a bailout by necessity. We all know now that it's not about preventing "Too Big To Fail," it's about collectively deceiving ourselves that "Nothing Can Fail".
How manifestly absurd.