There's a type of day in the financial markets that I call a "selfie day."
Everyone's smiling, everyone's posting green charts on social media, the suit-wearing analyst shows up on TV with that deep voice of someone who has all the answers, and whatever the narrative of the moment is becomes absolute truth. Nvidia went up. Oracle went up. The market "recovered." Applause for everyone.
But let me ask you something before you join the herd in celebrating:
Do you know why it went up? Or do you only know that it went up?
Because there's a massive difference between those two things. And that difference is exactly what separates people who actually build wealth from people who surf news waves like a teenager chasing the latest TikTok trend.
The Same Old Show
The American market strung together another up day, continuing Tuesday's "comeback." Nvidia up. Oracle up. The indexes in the green. CNBC in full celebration mode.
Beautiful. Wonderful. Spectacular.
Now tell me: what was the real trigger? Was it fundamentals? Was it solid economic data? Was it an earnings revision with actual substance?
Or was it simply the market correcting for the previous day's bearish overreaction, with a little speculative flow piling into assets that became the darlings of the AI narrative?
Because look — Nvidia didn't become a more valuable company in 24 hours. Its chips didn't get better. Demand didn't explode overnight. What changed was collective mood — and collective mood, my friend, is the most volatile and treacherous thing that exists in financial markets.
Nassim Taleb would call this noise being mistaken for signal. And he's absolutely right.
Skin in the Game or Bleacher Talk?
Here's a truth the financial circus hates to admit: most of the people celebrating a market rally don't have any meaningful position in the asset. They sit in the bleachers cheering, posting screenshots of portfolios with fifty bucks in them, feeling like they're part of something bigger.
They're not.
The people with real skin in the game — with actual capital at risk, who lose sleep over it, who feel it in their wallets — those people don't celebrate a green day like they just won the Super Bowl. They analyze. They question. They think about what could go wrong.
Bruce Wayne didn't walk through the streets of Gotham celebrating every time things went well for one day. He knew the city was unstable by nature and that any victory was temporary if you didn't understand the forces behind the chaos.
The market is Gotham. And most people are at the Joker's party thinking they're on the right side.
Nvidia and Oracle: Great Companies, But Prices Are a Different Conversation
I'll be straight because that's my style:
Nvidia is an extraordinary company. Its dominance in GPUs for artificial intelligence is real, documented, and impressive. Jensen Huang built something most people couldn't have imagined ten years ago.
Oracle is no joke either. Larry Ellison is one of the most underrated and relentlessly persistent businessmen in the history of tech. The company reinvented its business model with cloud and has been delivering.
But — and this "but" is worth its weight in gold — a great company is not the same thing as a great investment at any price.
Benjamin Graham hammered this point for decades. Buffett built his life on it. A company can be excellent and its price can be so stretched that the future return is mediocre or even negative. This isn't theory. It's history, repeated over and over again.
When the market goes up on a given day because of sentiment and speculative flow, you're not buying fundamentals. You're buying the hope that someone more optimistic than you will show up tomorrow and pay even more.
That has a technical name: the Greater Fool Theory.
So before you open your brokerage app and hit "buy" because you saw a green chart and read that Nvidia went up, stop for two seconds.
Ask yourself: do you actually understand the business? Do you know what you're paying relative to what you're going to get back? Do you have a thesis — a real thesis, not a Twitter thread — or are you just following the herd because you're afraid of missing out?
Because the market will keep having green days and red days. The circus will keep running. The suit-wearing analysts will keep showing up on TV looking like they have all the answers.
The only variable you control is whether you think or whether you just react.
Choose carefully.
