Many have questioned why the gold price has failed to do the normal thing (decline significantly) in the face of high ‘real’ yields (an indication of very tight monetary policy)…
On July 27, 2023, I was absolutely miserable. I had plenty of troubles going on in life, and the market had soared to yet another high. My portfolio was a wreck. Bulls were dancing in the streets. People were cancelling their subscriptions, which I bust my ass to acquire. I felt like shit. And then, just to add salt to the wound, THIS email tumbled into my inbox:
In case you can’t read this, it’s an email I get whenever someone cancels. I ask every person who cancels why they cancelled. In 100% of the prior cases, it was some version of “It’s not you, it’s me”, but in this case, here’s what the guy wrote……………and this is verbatim:
No one has ever asked, but some may be wondering what my interest in /wsb is all about. I simply see it as a unique subculture on the web where young wanna-be traders (who are much closer to degenerate gamblers) convene and throw nonsense around. Sometimes it’s amusing. Occasionally it’s tragic.
This go-around, it’s a bit closer to the latter. I stumbled upon a chap who apparently had his luck YOLOing his way into hundreds of thousands of dollars in gains. Given the insane run-up in crappy stocks from January through July, it’s no surprise. He knew what he was doing was reckless, but he got a huge charge out of it, and he made a lot more money than he lost.
If I haven’t said it before, I’m saying it now. I have a huge disdain for meme stocks mostly because they are a result of improper market behavior. Translation: I can’t get rich off them, so I hate it when other people do.
The whole idea of a free market structure is that the price at any time should, theoretically, represent the sum total of all known public information to arrive at a true valuation for a security. As is usually the case with mathematical or economic theorems, however, reality is often much messier. The meme stock craze was possible because these companies were heavily shorted (as they were fairly unprofitable and seemed worthy of a large decrease in stock price).
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