Risk On, Cash Everywhere, Gold Flying, Rare Earth Hoarding, Parabolic Stocks, Wall Street Adores Retail Investors and Predictions, Trading is a Spectator Sport, Silicon Valley Lives In The White House and Peace In The Middle East...What Could Go Wrong?

Place your bets…

Or as Fred Flinstone likes to say…

Not to give away my opening keynote at Stocktoberfest next week, but I wanted to at least get some of the thoughts down here as I put the pieces together.

Next week will be our biggest Stocktoberfest ever with nearly 400 people (there are still a few tickets available) at The Del on Coronado for a few days of networking, sun, fun, golf, sailing, navy seal beach runs and of course deep dives into the markets with incredible investors and traders. The schedule with topics and speakers is now up on the website.

The year 2025 has been wild for markets from the 1 month tariff bear market and $vix 60 to the AI battle and compute spend to the Gold all-time highs and the parabolic moves in so many small cap stocks and unindexed sectors like space, rockets, nuclear, rare earths and quantum computing. The quantum stock moves are probably the most divorced from reality as the week began…

Here is Uranium breaking out of a long base (it has already had an incredible run) versus the S&P. Uranium is the fuel for nuclear power so I think it is a trend that will be here to stay for a while.

I thought all earth was ‘rare’ but turns out some earth is rarer. In an era of ‘compute’ rare earth hunting and gathering is on top of mind. Ben Thompson has a good overview of all this.

The fact that Silicon Valley has merged with the White House and Wall Street has quietly kissed the ring to bank the world and embrace retail investors are massive developments changing markets.

The Trump family is now on almost every important venture backed cap table in prediction markets, defense, nuclear, energy, ai and infrastructure so they do not even need to pillage versus inside information (which they still seem to be doing).

The bright side is that the government should be more focused on more modern defense, manufacturing, hardware, robotics and ai.

Wall Street used to prey on retail, but retail is too important to them now…

Goldman, JP Morgan et al also missed the web 2.0 financial boom as Robinhood and Coinbase and Draft Kings and Crypto were ignored and funded by Silicon Valley and retail investors.

They do not intend to miss the next boom and have rushed into prediction markets with $ICE ( ▲ 0.12% ) recently investing $2 billion in Polymarket.

The ‘degenerate economy’ was born of all this along with ZIRP, COVID, the cloud and smartphones.

Forbes wrote a very in depth piece on my ‘degenerate economy’ theme and thesis that was published today. I am very grateful for it because it is well researched.

The degenerate economy entered what I called ‘ludicrous mode’ back in January and that is before prediction markets exploded in popularity and raised billions of fresh capital behind them. Trading is becoming a speculative sport…

There is something for everyone to invest in or bet on right now. The oldest and original Bitcoiners on earth are ‘gold bugs’ and they are having a year for the ages…

As for ‘peace’ in the Middle East…if you believe that…I have some rare earth deposits in my backyard I’d like to sell you.

I’m an optimist, but a cynic and a realist that knows 2,000 prisoners including terrorists and murderers will be a problem for the world at some point. For example, this human trash terrorist/murderer will not disappear plans on quietly to his condo in Qatar or Gaza…

As for ‘what could go wrong’?

The unintended consequences of everything going right is how you uncover the next great trends.

I’m too busy trying to ride the current trends to speculate on all the things about to go wrong.

I do like this take from Matt Hougan on US dollar ‘debasement’ which he calls the dark matter of finance…

It has never been easier to ‘start’ investing and it has never been harder to ‘hold’ or stay invested (as you are inundated with noise, misery and anger bait).

Because it has never been easier to start investing and trading, it has never been more important to find the right filters, mentors and networks.

That is what Stocktwits and Stocktoberfest are all about.