Key insights
- The article discusses the speculative nature of recent large-cap stock gains, particularly in meme and AI-related stocks, questioning whether this constitutes 'real wealth' creation. While acknowledging significant paper gains, the author highlights the volatility and lack of fundamental contribution, suggesting market behavior is driven by speculation rather than intrinsic value. The author's personal trading examples underscore the perceived irrationality of market participants. The overall influence on the US market is deemed neutral due to the focus on speculative sentiment rather than concrete economic or policy drivers.
Every day, there seems to be a large-cap company gaining 10–20% in a single day. We swing between meme stocks like SPCE and AI-related stocks (from Intel to Dell to NCBI to MU—you name it), many of which end up behaving like meme stocks themselves. On paper, these price increases generate the "wealth" that Donald T. likes to brag about. Do we have an estimate of how much "money" has been created through this kind of speculation?
(And don't tell me it's real wealth—two weeks ago Intel was everybody's darling and supposedly headed to the moon. Now nobody can even spell the company's name anymore, and they've already moved on to Dell or whatever the next hot stock is.)
Disclosure: I made roughly a year's salary this way by buying Intel and Nebius. And f*ck me, man... I contributed absolutely nothing to the world beyond pressing a button. Today, I wanted to see whether people are really that stupid, so I bought 500 shares of SPCE at $7.00 and sold them at $8.50. And yeah... people really are that stupid.