I’ve been either investing or writing about investing for 22 years, and I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff, but nothing as weird as Dogecoin, the lighthearted dog-themed cryptocurrency that was created as a joke. It’s now valued at more than $50bn, exceeding Ford and many other companies with extensive histories. It’s not the first worthless financial instrument I’ve seen soar to great heights — it happened to dot-com stocks at the start of my career — but the first one intentionally designed to be worthless. Elon Musk thinks this is funny. I don’t find the humour in it.
These are strange times. Stock market operators who have been around for a few cycles know the sentiment implications of something like Dogecoin: time to grab the canned goods and head for the bunker. As a professional investor, common sense dictates that you should be hedging or derisking, but there seems to be no end to fiscal and monetary stimulus. As former Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince infamously said in 2007 ...
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