The egregious inflation of stock prices at the very center of the market encompassing the S&P 500, NASDAQ 100 and the FANGMAN is surely the mother of all financial contagions. So when it floods into the periphery among the zero profit Russell 2000 disrupters, the rotating cast of meme stocks and speculative insanities like Robinhood and Coinbase you are in a realm of pure financial lunacy that no rational adult should visit ever with his or her money.
Yet the cult of the stock market has become so normalized and pandemic that a washed-up 64-year old fund manager with a lifetime of undistinguished results was able to increase her AUM (assets under management) from $3.3 billion to $45 billion during the course of 2020 alone. And that’s a flashing red warning sign and clanging horn combined because there is virtually no scenario in a world of sound money in which even the most adroit asset manager could attract a 14X gain in funds during the course of just 12 months.