Bubble on
When you think back to the tech wreck and all the crazy stories about companies with no earnings being bid up to the sky, you might think: imagine living through something like that!
Well, here we go again!
It started with cyrptocurrencies with names we'd never heard of, but now we're moving into stocks...
Late last year some users of the commission-free trading app Robinhood found a glitch which allowed them to use unlimited leverage, and naturally dollars began to flow into the hot stocks.
The Robinhood debacle was symbolic of a wider shift into the rampant speculation market phase.
Some of the discussions on the chat forums literally defy belief.
Flick of the switch
You could pick any one of a thousand ways to measure these things, but the end result will be the same, because in short run markets are a voting machine, and in the long run they're a weighing machine.
In other words, in the short term speculative money flows toward what is presently popular, but at some point a switch is flicked and rational thinking returns, so markets begin to look at what a realistic valuation should be.
Unfortunately humans invariably fail to learn from the past, so we're doomed to repeat it!
