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The quarterly reports, at first glance, were rather jolly – all smiles and shiny numbers. But lurking beneath the surface, a rather nasty little suspicion began to wiggle its way into the brains of the investors. It seems their new lending doodads might not be quite as profitable as they’d hoped. And then, as if things weren’t messy enough, the Head Honcho, Dave Girouard, decided to hand over the reins to his co-founder, Paul Gu. A perfectly sensible move, perhaps, but it gave the market jitters, like a sudden sneeze in a quiet library.

It is a tale, alas, too common in the annals of commerce: a company blessed with expansion, yet haunted by the specter of diminishing returns. Investors, those ever-fickle patrons of the marketplace, grow uneasy, fearing that the pursuit of volume has eclipsed the reverence for profit. The stock, once soaring to unprecedented heights, now languishes thirty-two percent below its zenith – a misfortune rarely witnessed in recent years.

February saw a particular fondness for stocks from Developed Economies, excluding our own. The Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets Index Fund ETF (VEA 2.36%) climbed a respectable 6.1%, and is currently boasting a 7.5% gain for the year. A solid performance, though one suspects the numbers are being massaged by highly-trained accountants and a liberal application of wishful thinking.

Joby, at present, is mostly a collection of very clever engineers and a rather substantial burn rate. They’re spending a lot of money trying to build something that, until recently, existed primarily in science fiction. There are other companies chasing this dream – the sky, it seems, is becoming rather crowded with hopeful aircraft designers – but they’re all, at this stage, largely preoccupied with getting their machines approved by regulators, a process that can take longer than building the aircraft itself. It’s a bit like trying to launch a rocket while simultaneously writing a 500-page environmental impact statement.

Everyone’s talking about AI stocks being under pressure. AI. Honestly. It’s a buzzword. A very irritating buzzword. And AMD’s valuation took a hit because of it. Meanwhile, they’re actually doing things. Delivering results. But no, let’s focus on what might happen. It’s exhausting.

The company’s ambition – to harvest mineral wealth from the abyssal plains of the ocean – is, to say the least, unconventional. Rather than excavating the earth, a practice fraught with both expense and social disruption, they propose to gather polymetallic nodules, those curious formations lying upon the seabed, containing a concentration of nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese most gratifying to the modern industrialist. It is a scheme promising, should it succeed, to diminish our dependence upon foreign suppliers – a circumstance ever desirable, and increasingly so in these unsettled times.

The company, you see, began by crafting these curious devices for forklifts – mechanical beasts employed in the endless shuffling of goods within vast warehouses. But the true peculiarity lay in the fuel itself. They would supply the hydrogen, purchased from others at a considerable cost, and then sell it to their customers, accepting a loss with the solemnity of a funeral procession. It was a business model built on the principle of cheerfully throwing money into a bonfire, a spectacle that attracted the attention of investors with a particular fondness for self-inflicted wounds.

If you have precisely $1,000 burning a hole in your digital pocket, which one deserves your attention? Let’s unpack this, shall we? (Unpacking, incidentally, is a severely underrated skill in the modern world. Mostly because everyone just throws everything into boxes and hopes for the best.)

Here’s the thing. Guardian Capital didn’t own a single share of Boyd Group as of September 30th. Zip. Nada. Then, suddenly, over 448,000 shares appear. It’s like they realized, mid-quarter, that collision repair was a growth industry. Or maybe their analyst had a particularly bad parking experience.