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At the close of February, Coinbase unveiled a scheme allowing customers to trade stocks and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) without those pesky commission charges, and all during the working week, no less. A stroke of genius, really. It expands their reach in a most agreeable fashion, blurring the lines between the traditional financial world and this newfangled crypto business. The question is, what does it portend for the company’s stock? A dash of prosperity, one hopes.

I’ve been looking at REITs – Real Estate Investment Trusts – because, well, everyone says they’re good for dividends. Which is…comforting. They’re supposed to pay out 90% of their taxable income, which sounds generous, almost suspiciously so. Like a boyfriend who buys you extravagant gifts to distract from the fact he’s terrible at doing the dishes. And there are so many types. Residential, shopping malls (remember those?), even gambling places. The problem is, a high yield isn’t automatically a ‘buy’ signal. It’s more like a flashing red warning light, really. Which, naturally, I ignored at first.

You’d think the oil companies would be throwing parties. ConocoPhillips, Chevron, ExxonMobil…they should be raking it in. But they’re…not. Barely moving, honestly. A little nudge here, a slight dip there. It’s unsettling. Makes you wonder if they know something we don’t. Or if they’re just as confused as the rest of us.

This Home Depot, it’s a creature of habit, just like the rest of us. When times are good, when folks have a little extra coin jinglin’ in their pockets, they start fixin’ up the place, paintin’, hammerin’, generally pretendin’ to be carpenters. Back in ’20 and ’21, when money was cheap as dirt, they were spendin’ like there was no tomorrow. But those days, bless their fleeting memory, are gone. Now, interest rates are higher than a giraffe’s eyebrow, and folks are thinkin’ twice before startin’ a costly remodel. It’s simple enough, really: when folks ain’t spendin’, Home Depot feels it. They saw a little growth last year, a measly 3.2%, and that was mostly because of the professionals – more on them in a bit. They’re expectin’ a little more growth in the next few years, but it’s a slow crawl, not a gallop. Doesn’t exactly set the heart a-thumpin’, does it?

These figures, seemingly precise, are illusions of certainty. The ‘value’ is a construct, dependent on the collective belief of countless actors, a shared hallucination given form by the machinery of exchange. The remaining 339,545 shares represent not merely capital, but a claim on the future earnings of RingCentral, a future as mutable and uncertain as the shifting sands of time.