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Metaphors and analogies are how I tend to make sense of the world, and a new one occurred to me today between two unlikely situations: the purchase of my company in 2005 and the price of Bitcoin, show below (with an arrow marking the Presidential election).
There won’t be a victory lap. We can start with that fact. I’ve done this long enough to know what a multi-dimensional error that is.
Don’t get me wrong. The mini meltdown taking place in crypto and tech stocks is a delight to my soul and made it very hard for me to sleep in anticipation of Monday’s opening bell. I mean, honestly, there’s one particular meme coin I’ve been watching carefully as it lost 66% of its value in just a week, and seriously, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks.
When I was a young lad in the southern wilds of Louisiana, I would love to grab a random volume of our World Book, flop on the sofa, and just thumb through it. I was a curious kid, and one of the entries I enjoyed was in the “C” volume – – Computers – – which at the time discussed these electronic machines that only governments and large businesses could afford.
One of the illustrations I vividly remember showed a very tall skyscraper next to a person, and the caption explained that a computer that equaled the thinking power of a human being would be 28 stories tall. God only knows who dreamed up that “fact”, but as a kid I felt pretty proud to be walking around with a squishy organ in my head that was just as powerful as a skyscraper-sized computer.
So, here’s a chap who took the entirety of his inheritance and decided it would be a capital ideal to put every penny of it into DJT $40 calls. Yes, 1,654 contracts, a seven-figure position, and all dependent upon the price ascent of a company that has done nothing but lose hundreds of millions of dollars. It began to dawn on him this might have been an error in judgement a few days ago when he made this post.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Tulip bulbs. The South Sea bubble. Japan in the late 1980s. We’ve heard these tired old tropes countless times, yet given the age we live in, these allegories are the equivalent of holding up a $20 bill and expecting to keep the rapt attention of your audience while there is a billion bucks of gold stacked up behind you. We need the drama to match our new reality.
What we are experiencing at this very moment utterly dwarfs all past examples, and on this very weekend, we have entered an entirely new level of crazy.