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They have a lot of ETFs, over a hundred, most of them boasting expense ratios so low they practically apologize for existing. Which leads people to assume everything they touch turns to gold. It doesn’t. Not always. My aunt Mildred, bless her, once bought a timeshare based on a similar assumption. It didn’t end well.

For the discerning investor, the early months of 2026 reveal a rather more nuanced picture. Apple, it seems, has chosen a path of elegant restraint, a refusal to participate in the current frenzy. A sensible course, one might add, for a company with rather more pressing concerns than chasing the latest algorithmic chimera. The market, predictably, failed to grasp the subtlety. It preferred the theatricality of grand gestures and exorbitant capital expenditure.

Everyone’s panicking, naturally. The news channels are filled with talking heads who look vaguely panicked themselves, which is comforting, in a way. It’s reassuring to know that even people paid to seem confident are occasionally flustered by rapidly declining numbers. I try to explain to Barry that these things happen, that volatility is…part of the deal. He just sighs and says, “It’s like watching your retirement fund take a swan dive.” He’s not wrong.

Those who have followed the arc of Bitcoin from its nascent days will recall a certain cyclicality, a pattern of exuberance followed by inevitable correction. Every four years, with the precision of a seasoned clockmaker, the price has succumbed to gravity. In 2014, a decline of fifty-eight percent. 2018 witnessed a more precipitous fall, seventy-four percent surrendered to the winds. And in 2022, a sobering sixty-four percent loss. It is a rhythm as predictable as the changing seasons, though few seem inclined to heed its lesson.

One is compelled to ask: what precisely are we valuing? Not merely revenue, certainly. Revenue is a crude measure, like judging a masterpiece by the amount of canvas it consumes. No, we’re valuing a promise. The promise of artificial intelligence, naturally. A field currently populated by more charlatans than genuine visionaries, and where the line between the two is vanishingly thin. Palantir, it seems, is attempting to deliver on this promise, a feat akin to teaching a cat to play the violin.

Pony AI, you see, isn’t building automobiles; it’s peddling a dream – the dream of autonomous vehicles, of robotaxis gliding silently through our cities, of trucks delivering goods without the tedious intervention of human drivers. A rather Faustian bargain, wouldn’t you agree? The company, with a valuation that seems to defy both logic and gravity, specializes in the technology that makes this possible. They don’t make the vehicles, mind you. They sell the soul – the algorithmic intelligence – to those who do.