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One hears talk of a $72 billion market by 2035, which, frankly, sounds a bit like claiming you’ll build a castle in a day. The industry is scarcely a twinkle in the eye at present, but when a new game is afoot, the chap who backs the right horses can find himself in a remarkably comfortable position. A bit of judicious investment now could yield results that would make even a duke blush. Let’s have a look, shall we, at three firms quietly laying the groundwork for this potentially lucrative spectacle.

Robinhood Markets (HOOD +8.12%), you see, had dared to offer the illusion of flight to those tethered to the ground, a democratization of fortune that proved, as all such endeavors eventually do, to be more dream than reality. The company, once a beacon for the impulsive trader, now finds itself haunted by the very volatility it once embraced. The numbers, cold and unyielding as polished stones, tell a story of a 24% plunge in February, a fall masked by the usual pronouncements of “market conditions” and “long-term vision.” But Mateo knew better; he had seen this pattern before, the slow creep of disillusionment.

We’ve examined several instruments designed for this purpose – exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, for those unfamiliar with the jargon. Three, in particular, caught our eye. They share a certain… frugality, shall we say? The expense ratios are practically homeopathic – a mere 0.03%. And they boast diversification that would impress even a seasoned bureaucrat attempting to spread the blame. Perfect for the long haul, a truly permanent addition to a portfolio, if one believes in such things.

Investors, those fidgety creatures, had been expecting more of the same magic. They wanted the upward jiggle to continue. But the market, that grumpy old badger, decided otherwise. It re-evaluated. It sniffed. And it decided that Intel wasn’t quite as sparkly as everyone thought.

Netflix, bless their little streaming hearts, announced they weren’t going to bother matching Paramount’s offer. Said it was “superior.” What they meant was it was a slightly less monstrous pile of debt. They’ll be getting a tidy sum as a consolation prize – a ‘break-up fee’ they call it. Sounds rather sad, doesn’t it? Like a divorce settlement for corporations. A very large divorce settlement.

The question of a future price of 1,000 units is, naturally, posed. It is a question asked not out of genuine inquiry, but as a procedural formality, a required utterance in the ongoing audit of expectation. The machinery of finance demands such pronouncements, even when the underlying logic is… tenuous.

Old Mr. Buffett, a man who’s seen empires rise and fall (and, one imagines, quietly profited from both), once peered into the murky depths of the market and foresaw the bursting of the dot-com bubble. His method wasn’t divination, mind you, but a rather pedestrian ratio – the total market capitalization versus the Gross Domestic Product. A curiously simple metric, really, for discerning the delusions of an age. He called it, rather prosaically, the “Buffett Indicator.”

They blamed it on earnings reports and the general panic around artificial intelligence. Everything’s about AI now. As if silicon and algorithms will solve the fundamental mess we’ve made. They had an investor day, naturally. A chance to tell stories about growth. Everyone has a growth story. It rarely involves actual growth.

Here we have a pair of dividend-paying contraptions – ‘stocks’, they call them – that claim to be rather unconcerned about these tariff tomfooleries. Whether that’s true, or just clever marketing, is another matter entirely. Let’s have a poke around, shall we?