The stock market melt-up, three trillion-dollar IPOs ringing the bell at the top, a woman whose entire life savings vanished from Fidelity overnight — and why I’m still buying gold and “playing in the dirt”.
I asked Doug straight out whether we’re in a market melt-up, and he didn’t hesitate. NVIDIA is worth about $5.5 trillion. Jensen Huang name-drops an AI company on stage and it pops 30% on the spot. I brought up Micron — it’s gone from a $30–60 billion company eighteen months ago to north of $1.2 trillion today. That kind of move makes the dot-com era I sat out feel small.
“We’re living in a fool’s paradise in the market,” Doug told me. And it isn’t just the headline names. Everybody’s trading options now, same-day expiration included. “It’s a gambling casino. It’s completely crazy.” When I looked it up, there are now roughly as many ETFs as there are listed stocks. The whole thing, the way Doug puts it, is “a floating abstraction, a moving paper fantasy. It’s gotta end badly.”
The part I keep wrestling with is when. I told Doug my own portfolio peaked back in late January, and I’ve since moved more to cash worrying about exactly this — which, looking at what the Nasdaq has done since, hasn’t exactly felt smart. He’s been here before; he and Bob Prechter have both called the top more than once and watched it run higher anyway. But one thing has him more confident than usual: almost nobody else feels the way he does. “That’s one of the many bells ringing.”
Speaking of bells — OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all headed public at trillion-dollar-plus valuations in the weeks ahead. Doug’s read: “I kind of think their bell’s ringing at the ultimate top of the market.”
Then there’s the story that made me want to download every statement I own. Doug sent me a New York Times piece about a woman who logged into Fidelity to find her account — her entire life savings — simply gone. When she called, she was told she didn’t have an account with them at all. It took her two weeks of detective work to prove she’d ever existed in their system.
“It can vanish just like it did for this poor woman,” Doug said. The lesson is the one he’s been making for as long as I’ve known him: the only money you truly own is the gold and silver in your own hands — “what I got in my own clammy little fingers.” On that note, I picked up another five ounces yesterday, a few Philharmonics from a private seller down here.
Which brings us to the irony neither of us can get past. Trillion-dollar AI companies are minting new billionaires by the hundreds, and here we are “playing in the dirt” — gold and silver miners with $10, $20, $50 million market caps that don’t add up to a rounding error on a single one of those IPOs. Oil and gas were 30% of the S&P in 1980. Today it’s 4%. “Nobody cares about them.” I asked Doug if I’m crazy to sit on cash when these things look this cheap. He thinks it’s exactly backwards — and exactly the setup for the runaway bull market in resource stocks nobody’s watching.
Also in this episode: the data center buildout that my own digging suggests is really an effort to “birth their AI god”; the new $650,000 Ferrari EV that even a former chairman calls an embarrassment, and what the EU’s electric-car mandate says about Mussolini’s definition of fascism; where I am on the Battle Bank waitlist (still waiting); and why a British Sovereign in your pocket beats a one-ounce coin at the border.
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