ROAST THE
MARKET

Crypto bros spent 10 years telling everyone banks are evil and obsolete, then discovered what a bank run looks like when FTX collapsed. Turns out 'be your own bank' hits different when your own bank is run by a guy playing League of Legends during board meetings.

Valued at $47 billion. Then $0. Then somehow still existing. WeWork convinced investors that subleasing office space with free beer was a tech company. Adam Neumann surfed and did tequila shots while SoftBank wrote checks with so many zeros they ran out of paper.

'We see no signs of inflation,' said the people who printed $4.6 trillion in 18 months. The Fed looked directly at gas prices, housing costs, and grocery bills, and said 'transitory.' It was transitory the way a tattoo is transitory — technically removable but you're going to feel it for years.

SPAC sponsors getting rich while SPAC investors get wrecked is the most efficient wealth transfer since feudalism. The sponsor gets 20% of the company for free. The investors get a stock that drops 80% and a press release about 'synergies.' The only synergy was between the sponsor's wallet and your retirement account.

Cathie Wood has a 5-year time horizon on every trade. Unfortunately, so do her investors' losses. ARKK went from $159 to $40 while she kept buying Zoom calls and insisting innovation was undervalued. She was right about Tesla once and has been dining out on it ever since. The buffet is getting cold, Cathie.

Someone paid $69 million for a Beeple JPEG. Let that sink in. Sixty-nine million dollars for a file you can right-click and save. The Mona Lisa is behind bulletproof glass. Your NFT is behind the same security as a meme your uncle shared on Facebook. The 'right-click savers don't understand' crowd went very quiet in 2023.

Robinhood — the app named after a guy who stole from the rich to give to the poor — literally stopped the poor from buying stocks when it might have cost the rich money. The GameStop saga proved that the house always wins, even when you catch them cheating. The congressional hearing was like watching a parking violation trial after a heist.

SoftBank's Vision Fund invested $100 billion in 'the future.' The future turned out to be WeWork, Wirecard, and a robot pizza company. Masayoshi Son lost $17 billion in a single quarter and described it as 'a big red mark.' That's like calling the Titanic a boating incident.

Technical analysis is astrology for finance bros. 'The head and shoulders pattern suggests a bearish divergence from the Fibonacci retracement.' Bro, you drew two lines on a chart and predicted the market would go up or down. A coin flip costs nothing and has the same accuracy.

The government bailed out Fannie Mae, then stole all the profits through a net worth sweep, then pretended they didn't. It's the financial equivalent of calling the fire department, having them save your house, and then watching them move in and claim it's theirs now. I wrote eight books about this and I'm still not over it. I will never be over it.

Elizabeth Holmes convinced the world she could run 200 blood tests from a single drop. Turns out the only thing Theranos was good at testing was investors' gullibility. She had Kissinger on her board. KISSINGER. The man who navigated the Cold War couldn't see through a turtleneck and a fake deep voice.

Zoom hit a $160 billion market cap. For a video calling app. Microsoft Teams was free. Google Meet was free. FaceTime exists. Zoom's moat was that your mom figured out how to use it during COVID. That's it. That was the entire thesis. Your mom's technology adoption curve was priced into a $160 billion valuation.

Peloton was worth $50 billion because people were locked in their houses and couldn't go to the gym. Then gyms reopened and Peloton discovered that paying $2,500 for a bike plus $44/month for someone to yell at you through a screen has limited appeal when you can go outside for free. The stock went from $171 to $5. That's not a crash. That's a dismount.

Members of Congress consistently outperform the S&P 500. These are people who can't pass a budget on time but somehow always buy the dip at the exact right moment. Nancy Pelosi's NVIDIA calls were timed better than most hedge funds. It's not insider trading if you make the inside. Galaxy brain.

Meta spent $36 billion building a virtual world that nobody wanted to visit. Zuckerberg's avatar looked like a Wii character from 2008. The metaverse's biggest event had 38 attendees. Facebook rebranded its entire company around a concept that was less popular than Myspace in 2024. The legs update was genuinely the biggest metaverse news of the year.

Silicon Valley Bank's risk management strategy was apparently 'hope interest rates don't go up.' They had no Chief Risk Officer for 8 months. Their bond portfolio was underwater by $17 billion and they said nothing. When VCs told all their portfolio companies to pull out on the same day, SVB collapsed faster than a crypto exchange — which is really saying something.

Elon Musk tried to back out of buying Twitter. A judge said no. So he paid $44 billion for a company now worth maybe $15 billion, fired 80% of the staff, renamed it to X (a letter), and turned it into a place where you pay $8 to argue with strangers. The greatest shitpost in financial history and it cost $44 billion.

The Fed's dot plot is a connect-the-dots puzzle where every dot is wrong. In 2021, the dots said no rate hikes until 2024. They hiked 11 times in 18 months. Fed guidance is performance art. The audience keeps showing up even though the show is always wrong. At least Broadway has better lighting.

92% of actively managed funds underperform the S&P 500 over 15 years. Your financial advisor charges you 1% per year to do worse than a spreadsheet. They call it 'alpha.' It's actually negative alpha with a nice suit. The index fund doesn't take you to lunch, but it also doesn't lose your money while explaining 'Modern Portfolio Theory' over a steak.

The stock market is where everyone thinks they're a genius. The bond market is where the actual geniuses go to make money while everyone else argues about meme stocks. The bond market predicted every recession. The stock market predicted 12 of the last 3. And yet nobody at parties wants to hear about yield curves. The bond market doesn't care about your feelings, your portfolio, or your TikTok thesis. It just wins. Quietly. Every time.