There's a classic scene in "The Big Short" where Mark Baum looks at a table of traders celebrating and asks: "Do you have any idea what you just bought?"
Yeah. It's 2025 and the script hasn't changed. Nvidia drops an earnings report (or even an optimistic whisper), and on the other side of the planet, at three in the morning Tokyo time, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese traders are already slamming the buy button like it's Black Friday at the New York Stock Exchange.
Asia goes up because Nvidia went up. Period. That's the headline. That's the "fundamental."
Let me translate the Wall Street jargon into plain English: the Asian market is essentially riding a wave of sentiment generated by a single American semiconductor company. One. Company.
The domino effect of blind faith
Let me tell you a story Nassim Taleb would love.
When you have a global market that moves based on the mood of a single stock — no matter how extraordinary it is — you don't have a market. You have a casino with pretty lights and people in suits pretending they're doing "asset allocation."
Is Nvidia an amazing company? It is. Is Jensen Huang a genius in a leather jacket? Probably. Are their chips the fuel powering the AI revolution? No doubt.
But seriously, since when does "great company" mean "buy at any price and drag the entire Asian market along with it"?
Warren Buffett has a quote I'll repeat until I'm blue in the face: "Price is what you pay, value is what you get." When the entire Asian market goes up because sentiment improved after an Nvidia earnings report, we're not talking about value. We're talking about herd mentality. Institutional FOMO. People with MBAs from Wharton acting like teenagers buying meme coins.
What the headline doesn't tell you
Bloomberg drops the pretty title: "Asian Stocks to Climb as Nvidia Boosts Sentiment." And the average investor reads that and thinks: "Oh nice, time to buy!"
But nobody stops to ask:
- Which Asian stocks are going up? Are they local semiconductor companies that supply Nvidia? Banks? Chinese real estate developers that have NOTHING to do with AI? Does everything just get tossed in the same basket?
- How long does the sentiment last? Last time Nvidia disappointed — even slightly — the market dropped like someone had announced the apocalypse.
- Does the real Asian economy justify a rally? China is fighting deflation, Japan is still running that Frankenstein monetary policy, and South Korea lurches from one political drama to the next.
But no, the vibes are good. Nvidia smiled. Let's buy.
The "skin in the game" problem
You know who's selling you this "markets are up, time to ride the wave" narrative? Analysts on a fixed salary. Fund managers who charge management fees regardless of performance. Influencers who get paid per click.
None of them lose money when the house of cards collapses.
The one who loses is you. The guy who read the headline, opened his brokerage app, and bought an Asian ETF because "the trend is bullish." The retail investor who's always one step behind the smart money.
Ed Thorp — the guy who literally invented card counting in blackjack before becoming one of the greatest quant traders in history — used to say that the edge isn't in following the crowd, but in knowing when the crowd is wrong.
So what should you do?
I'm not a guru. I'm not going to sell you a course on how to get rich in 90 days. But I'll tell you what I'd do:
Look at the fundamentals, not the sentiment. Sentiment is smoke. Fundamentals are fire.
If Nvidia is pulling all of Asia upward, ask yourself: what happens the day it stumbles? And believe me, every company stumbles. Cisco was the Nvidia of the 2000s. Until it wasn't.
Anyone who built their position based on fundamentals sleeps like a baby. Anyone who bought riding the sentiment wave is going to find out, in the worst possible way, that euphoria doesn't pay the bills.
The question is simple: are you investing or are you cheerleading?
Because if it's the second one, at least with the Powerball the numbers are honest.
