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First up, there’s Uber Technologies (UBER). The boys on Wall Street like it for the usual reasons: it’s the kingpin of ride-sharing, it has institutional buddies with pockets nearly as deep as their egos, and it’s waving its hands at tomorrow—robotaxis, ad dollars, logistics. “Visionary,” they call it. I call it hopeful.

If you’re thinking, “Wait, wasn’t AMC the stock that made Reddit users into stock market influencers?” you’re not alone. During the pandemic, AMC became the poster child for meme stocks, with r/WallStreetBets fans pumping it like it was the final season of a bingeable series. GameStop, BlackBerry, and Bed Bath & Beyond were also in the mix—though the latter is now a cautionary tale about what happens when you bet on a company that sells bath towels.

To understand Opendoor, suppose you fused the renegade optimism of the internet—where you can buy everything from avocado-shaped pool floats to advice about buying avocado-shaped pool floats—with the labyrinthine drama of real estate. The result is a business model best described as “i-Buying,” which, much like “i-Anything,” promises to reformat a process that already works, but with more algorithms and fewer humans (with mixed results, like trying to automate the making of tea when the kettle is possessed).

Fast-forward to today, and Lululemon’s stock price has limped to around $220, like a marathon runner who forgot to hydrate. Its growth in North America stalled, competitors sprang up like mushrooms after rain, and tariffs—those ever-delightful trade taxes—put extra weight on the balance sheet. Investors are now left wondering: has Lululemon’s moment passed, or is this just savasana before the next big move?

TI and ASML—the once-proud workhorses of the sprawling semiconductor jungle—just got blindsided by their own “earnings.” No warning, no note: the lights flickered, trigger pulled, and the numbers fell. TI lost 13.9% in just three sweaty days after reporting, while ASML’s shares did an equally shameful swan dive of 13.6%. You could almost smell the burning circuit boards and panic sweat in the air. We are living through the Age of Artificial Intelligence, but there’s nothing artificial about the terror in the eyes of bag-holding investors.

Nevertheless, we are assured that Sherwin-Williams (SHW), Pentair (PNR), and McDonald’s (MCD) are all poised to join this rather exclusive club within the next five years. Whether they will do so, and whether it will actually *matter*, remains to be seen. One approaches such pronouncements with a healthy dose of cynicism, naturally.

The path of least resistance, they claim, is to purchase these index exchange-traded funds—these modern-day talismans—and let the alchemy of dollar-cost averaging work its magic. With $1,000, one might build an empire, or at least the illusion of one. But let us not mistake arithmetic for wisdom. Let us dissect these five ETFs, these supposed pillars of prosperity, and examine the souls (and balance sheets) behind them.