Picture this: Bitcoin, valiantly trying to break through the $70K threshold, only to be met with more selling pressure than an overzealous clearance sale. It plummeted back down below recent lows, reinforcing the idea that the sellers are still very much in charge, like a grumpy landlord who won’t budge on the rent.
Some folks see that and walk away. Perfectly reasonable. I bought more. Here’s why. It’s not a story of triumph, mind you. Just a slightly less dismal one than most.
I’ve decided to focus on consumer staples. It feels…safe. People will always need food, deodorant, and the stuff you use to…clean things. Even in an apocalypse, presumably. It’s the logic of a slightly desperate person, but it works for me. I’ve been quietly accumulating shares in three companies: General Mills, Hormel, and Clorox. Don’t judge. It’s a coping mechanism.
In the dusty plains of the crypto frontier, where miners usually cling to their Bitcoin like a prospector to his gold nugget, Singapore’s Bitdeer has done the unthinkable. They’ve sold every last crumb of their 943.1 BTC treasury, including the 189.8 BTC they just mined. “Don’t worry,” they chirp, “it’s all part of the plan.” Sure, and I’m a kangaroo with a briefcase.
This Vanguard ETF, a carefully constructed portfolio of 139 companies drawn from the S&P 500, is not simply a reflection of the whole, but a deliberate selection. It possesses a certain… discernment. It does not concern itself with the middling, the stagnant, but seeks out those enterprises exhibiting a vitality, a momentum that sets them apart. This approach, refined over the years since its inception in 2010, has consistently yielded returns exceeding the broader index – a quiet triumph, perhaps, but a triumph nonetheless.
There’s this fund, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF – they call it VOO. It’s a mouthful, I know. It holds bits of around 500 of the biggest companies in the United States. The really big hitters. About 80% of the whole U.S. stock market, actually. It’s not a bad little collection, if you ignore the fact that everything eventually turns to dust.
Unlike most of these quantum cowboys, D-Wave isn’t just burning venture capital on theoretical physics. They’re actually selling something. Actual revenue. Paying customers. Deployments. A balance sheet that hasn’t completely dissolved into the ether. Which, in this business, is practically a miracle. But don’t mistake pragmatism for prudence. This valuation…it’s a hallucination. A beautiful, terrifying, potentially catastrophic hallucination. And the dilution? Oh, the dilution… it’s a slow bleed, a constant drip of shareholder equity into the quantum void.
Yet, one must ask: do you need to acquire more shares? The answer, as with most things involving enchanted objects and complex financial instruments, is… complicated. It isn’t that Apple is destined to crumble into dust (though all empires eventually do, it’s just a matter of time and sufficiently motivated barbarians). Rather, it’s a matter of perspective, and the disconcerting habit of finding you’ve already purchased the thing several times over, indirectly.
Four billionaire investors notably decreased their holdings in Nvidia during the fourth quarter of 2023. These actions, while not necessarily indicative of a negative outlook, merit scrutiny given the current valuation context and evolving competitive landscape.
I suspect a rally is coming, not because of some groundbreaking technological leap, but because the market is, at its core, a creature of habit. It prefers predictability, even if that predictability is just a well-managed letdown. And Rocket Lab, a small rocket company with aspirations of being…well, not small…is particularly good at setting expectations it can then modestly, almost apologetically, exceed.