There's this famous story about the moment when Joe Kennedy got investment tips from his shoe shine boy, and right then, he knew the market was in a bubble and about to crash. That day, he decided to short the market, and went on to become a multi-millionaire.
I've seen people in this subreddit sat that say, you should have known a crash was coming because J Pow said he was going to tank the stock market. The thing is, people don't trust the FED, and it's understandable why that is. The FED have been really dragging their feet with interest rates. They've changed their tune before. They started by calling inflation transitory. Then they talked about interest rates and inflation for months without actually doing anything. Clearly, for a while, they were hoping that the inflation problem would just fix itself.
I think that, if a documentary is ever made about this crash and the coming recession, they should talk about the modern day “shoe shine boy indicator”. We should all have known that we were in an epic bubble and that everything was about to crash when people started paying money for the URLs of JPEGs of ugly monkeys stored on the chain. Investors were getting so desperate to catch the next 10X or 100X investment that they were spending their hard earned cash on assets that were obviously total garbage to any sane person. I mean fuck, I'd rather invest in subprime mortgages, at least they have some intrinsic value.
Of course, much before this, you also had something that was also closer to the actual shone shine boy story, with a rush of fresh young and naive investors coming into the market at the beginning of the pandemic and the RobinHood app being overhyped, and ARK ETFs going up very high, but the stock market still had one more huge leg up to go at the beginning of the pandemic. I think that the peak of the virtual art craze corresponded roughly with the time the markets started coming down. That's how we should have known we were at peak euphoria.
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