ETF Edge - Silver ETFs Spike & The Reddit Factor

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

CNBC'S Bob Pisani spoke with Dan Egan, Managing Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment, Will Rhind, Founder and CEO of GraniteShares ETFs, Todd Rosenbluth, Senior Director of ETF and Mutual Fund Research at CFRA, and Stephen Mathai-Davis, CEO of Q.ai. They discussed the short squeeze frenzy on Wall Street and the red hot rally in silver. In the 'markets 102' portion of the podcast, Bob continues the conversation with Dan Egan from Betterment. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The ETF Edge podcast is sponsored by InvescoQQQ, Supporting the Innovators Changing the World, Investco Distributors, Inc. Welcome to ETFH, folks, your go-to place for everything exchange, traded funds. I'm your host, Bob Pisani. We have an interesting show today, four, not just three, not two, four of the very best in the business. We're going to be talking about the game stock play and its impact on the ETF business here. We're going to be talking with Dan Egan. He's the managing director of behavioral finance and investment at Betterman. Will Ryan, founder and CEO of Granite shares ETFs.

Todd Rosenblut is from CFRA, our friend. And Stephen Mathie Davis. He's the CEO of Pew.AI and AI-driven investment platform. Very interesting crowd. Will, let me start with you. You run a Granite shares commodity ETF. It's a basket of commodities, including silver in it. You also run gold and platinum ETFs.

There's a lot of interest in silver all of a sudden from the Reddit crowd. They seem to think somehow that you can get a short squeeze on this. Tell us why is silver being targeted, do you think, here? And could the Reddit crowd actually move silver like it moved GameStop? Is that even feasible with something like Silver? Well, I think the first thing, Bob, is that silver's been targeted because of the same theory that went behind GameStop. In other words, that Silver is perceived to be. a metal that has a lot of short activity on it, particularly by professional investors and

particularly by banks. So you have right there a classic sort of villain that you can pin up and say that banks are shorting the silver market, and therefore that's a target for retail investors in the same way that GameStop was. The challenge here is that banks are short the silver market because they have very legitimate commercial interests in doing so. But the core reasons that banks do that is because they borrow metal, silver from the market

for their customers. And those customers could be refiners, they could be mining companies, but typically it's legitimate activity. And one important thing is that proprietary trading in banks was banned after the financial crisis. The Volker rule

was bought in to do that. And while it has been relaxed slightly over the last and 12 months or so, it's still in place to limit the exact same activity that retail investors are now claiming still exist within the banks, which is large groups of proprietary speculative traders within the banking system. And that just doesn't happen today to the same degree. Yeah. So the bottom line is, it seems unlikely that a GameStop crowd could move silver. I mean, how much bigger is silver? Silver's got to be 30, 40, 50 times bigger than even GameStop.

No, I mean, it seems highly unlikely that somehow you're going to execute some gigantic move in silver. We're not going to see silver move 300% in three days, right? I would think it's, you know, you use the word highly unlikely. And the simple fact is that silver is just a much, much bigger market, you know, magnitudes larger. My best estimate is just in terms of the value of GameStop before, it went crazy was about 1.4 billion market cap, and that was in a thinly traded, you know, stock with limited float. The silver market, just if you take just the number of ounces of metal sitting in the London vault, so just the physical side of the market, not including futures

or anything else, talking about a market cap of today's price is about 30 billion. So a much, much bigger market. And therefore, I think, you know, in some essence, while by no means this is the this is the end, it's just the beginning, but silver prices are up, you know, about 7% now, probably as high as 10% on the day. But that's much less than the, you know, many, many time increase we saw on GameStop. Right. And I think you and I talked about this earlier, the CFTC is likely to step in, the overall regulator here, if things get crazy. And they do that routinely. They step in and raise margin requirements on these futures contracts. when things get out of whack, correct? Yeah, that's right.

And whenever you get, I mean, first of all, commodities and commodity futures, it's a highly regulated market. And you have a number of professional market participants in the market. And obviously, the job of the exchange primarily, it sets the margin requirements, is to limit and raise or lower those margin requirements depending on market activity. And so if silver or any other commodities for that matter get out of whack,

or there's a lot of speculative activity, the exchange can raise the margin and force the professional market participants to pose higher amounts of collateral, obviously, against those positions and to limit market risk. Yeah, that seems a very easy way to sort of make people lighten up on their positions.

I want to move on about this. Todd, I want to talk to you a little bit about ETF concentration. So for a while, last week, we saw some of these gaming ETFs, like GAMR, all of a sudden have numbers that were crazy because GameStop became a significant weighting in them. Can you very briefly explain?

ETFs don't want this to happen. So they have ways of limiting these kinds of problems. They have ways of, for example, rebalancing, mostly on a quarterly basis. Can you, without getting too far in the weeds, just explain how rebalancing works and what's the natural process here to make sure GameStop doesn't dominate ETFs that it's in? ETS in general are diversified and diversified at not only the industry level but also the security level. And so when a stock goes up tenfold within a very short period of time, the weighting can often go up quite sharply and almost as much as tenfold. So in GAMR, the ETF that you reference a video game ETF, GameStop was over a 25% position in XR. which is the spider retail ETF.

It was over 20%. And you can obviously see the impact of that if it is not rebalanced faster than the quarterly, and that's what these ETFs tend to be rebalanced quarterly. We have GameStop down today, which is impacting negatively those respective ETS that have a heavy weighting, and an ETF that doesn't have any exposure to GameStop.

For example, Hero, which is Global X's video game ETF, is up on the day, even though gamer, G. or GAMR is down on the day because GameStop is driving it. So when an ETF is not rebalanced and the weighting is 20%, you can obviously have the tail wagging the dog. Yeah. So I think the key point here is,

under the 40 Act, isn't it prohibited to have a weighting of more than 25% for any particular security in the ETF? I'm not sure if I remember that, but somewhere in the foggy areas of my brain, I seem to remember that as a requirement for the 40 Act. and you can't have no more than a certain group of companies can only make up. I think it's over half of the portfolio. It can only be made up of 5% of the companies at some point.

I'm getting a little mixed up in that. But there are limits. There are actual limits on how much you can actually have in these. Correct, Todd? There are limits to it. And so it seems reasonable that if we don't see, and we are seeing a pullback, obviously, in GameStop today, so that may solve the problem itself. But the index providers behind these ETS have the discretion to rebalance faster than on a quarterly basis.

And if we saw a position remain as large as over 20 percent coming close to breaking that rule, we would certainly see the asset manager and the index provider step in. This has happened so quickly, and the ETF hasn't caught up with the change in the stock price. Yeah. Dan, I'm going to turn to you. You are a managing director of behavioral financing and investment at betterment. We've talked to you many times about the behavioral investing aspects of all of this. What does behavioral finance, first off, briefly tell us what behavioral finance does.

I love it because it basically purports to describe how people really act, not how they're supposed to act rationally, but tell us what behavioral finance is. And what does it have to teach us about this whole Reddit GameStop episode? I think you hit the nail on the head there. It's not about how the smartest person in the world or the best economist in the world makes decisions. It's about how ordinary people make decisions. And the ramifications of that for markets and for people like me who look to advise ordinary people. And what...

So go a little further down the rabbit hole on this. What is it... What did you see happening here with the betterment... betterment with the Reddit behavior? Did it confirm everything you always understood about behavioral economics? Did it have confirmed confirmation bias or something like that? What happened here that is illustrative of behavioral economics, or was there anything unusual about this in terms of what your understanding of the discipline is? It brings up a lot of the longstanding features of human psychology when it comes to investing. I think the thing that's different this time

is how technology has amplified certain aspects to it. So there's a lot of underlying things leading to the current mania. The first one, which is very interesting, is commission-free trading. There is a small amount of psychology literature that looks at how people understand free as being fundamentally different than something that costs a penny or five cents. We treat it fundamentally differently, and that we over-consume those things. We're thoughtless about it. We go in and we're like, yeah, sure, I'll try this thing, no problem. A second component to it is that we're in a pandemic, where we are socially isolated from one another.

A lot of our social interactions are happening through screens. We have a lot more time if we're working from home or if we're unemployed working from home to spend time on those screens looking for connection through message boards, through tribes of people like us. And there's a neat sort of participation support component to that feeling now where if you gang up with enough other people and focus on one specific thing, you can actually move the share price of these publicly listed companies. I think there's an element that we're hitting on now, which is that a lot of this is also sort of social network driven and novelty driven. And as we're already seeing, it's very hard to have a stock remain in the spotlight as the novelty thing.

It's the thing that's going up 200% day over, day over day. Attention from these message boards tends to wander, too new, to something else. And that's bad from the sort of squeeze perception in that they, they want it focused on one thing. As we see attention drift away from game stock to silver and then to other things, a little bit of the pressure comes out of the bag. So we're already seeing that tendency to look for novelty and to what's next to fracture away the attention that was focused on one thing for so long. Yeah, and I think that's a very good point. First, your overconsumption based on free

commissions is a really good point. People tend to use stuff more when it's free. And of course, it's not free. They do sell the order flow. They don't quite understand it, but it appears to be free. Of course, we get back to the, I had to live through and report on the chat rooms in the 90s. I was still the real, the stocks correspondent even then. And would you agree that it's the same, but it's not the same as the chat rooms? The chat rooms help pump up stocks, and yet the gamification of trading, the intensity of the social media situation, the free commissions, all that kind of combines. So the behavioral economics part, the brain chemistry part is virtually the same, and yet the medium is amped up, hyper-a-empt-up in a way. So I'm trying to say it seems like

this is the same, but it's different at the same time. Does that make sense? Yeah, it sort of feels like the markets are all in a vodka red bull. You need the red bull for the energy and the intensity and vodka for the questionable judgment. Yeah, that's exactly right. Stephen, let me just turn to you and get your thoughts on this, too. And feel free to, everybody, feel free to jump in at this point. I've got four very smart people here. You're the CEO of Q.AI.

This is an AI-driven investment platform, folks. You spent a lot of time surveying the Reddit crowd and the Facebook investment crowd. I guess as part of your way of setting up this particular platform, you spoke to several thousand of them or surveyed them. What did you find out about them? What do they need and what do they want? Bob, thanks for having me on the show today. We actually spoke to a couple thousand people, both through Reddit, Instagram, and through Facebook to really understand the problems they're facing today. I mean, a lot of the feedback we were getting was product offerings are limited. They can't tell the difference between different products. They don't have access to the best

and class managers. And really the problems that we start to crystallize around was that people had trouble focusing on how to cut losses and to take profits. How do they actually build a diversify portfolios with different stocks and ETS? And how to trade the current market environment, which is increasingly more volatile. You know, we've talked about the Reddit movement. We've been really active in Reddit now for four or five years. I don't think this is a fat. Now, is this a movement? Well, it's been occurring for the last seven to eight years. I don't know if you'd call it a movement right now. There has been a secular movement to digital financial investing tools from traditional finance over that period of time. It's definitively countercultural,

in my opinion, as you see this movement to decentralized online communities where people are learning from each other. It's quite fascinating. We're talking about the Wall Street Betts community. It's got 7.9 million users. But what about the stocks community? It's got nearly 2 million. If you talk about the Facebook stock market group for 2021, it's already north of a hundred 170K. So these movements, these online communities are growing exponentially. I can rattle off a few more of them. We're active in on Reddit. Well, I want to just sort of channel this a little bit more. And guys, feel free to jump in if you want to say something. You say it's definitely countercultural. I would agree with that. I guess the longer term question is what happens here. How do you,

I think this is wonderful. I have been worried for years and years about the concentration of wealth in the stock market. We all know, we use these statistics all the time, the top 10% of households by net worth control 87% of the stock market worth, the top 20% control 94%. Essentially, you know, the top 10% control the majority of the stock market wealth of households by net worth. And how do you expand that? Now we have a younger bunch of people. A lot of this is COVID-related. They're home. They're getting stimulus checks. Who cares? I'm in favor of them coming in. I guess the question is, how do you channel all of this? They're not going to go rampaging around screaming for years and years and years and years. The question is, how do you, corral is not the right

word. How do you turn them into long-term investors, Stephen? They're not going to go out and, you know, call up Vanguard and open a mutual fund next month. Okay, I understand that. But what else are they going to do? We have these ways where you are helping people set up mutual funds on their own from separately managed accounts, SMAs. Tell us where these people are going to go. Are they going to end up with their own separately managed accounts and become regular bests, or are they going to get blown out and blown up and leave and be angry and bitter? Or is it a little bit of both? Yeah, I actually think there's a secular shift towards the SMA structure. I mean, with us, especially based on the research we've done before we launched our robo investment manager,

There's been a focus on people moving away from stocks and ETS to building portfolios, building themes. For us, we see the SMAs as the future. And let me tell you why, because we're really talking about the millennial demographic, who's going to experience a massive wealth transfer over the next decade. SMAs will permit bespoke solutions. You can personalize it, you can tailor it. Now, you and I, Bob, could invest in our global macro strategy, right, which is going to build off what Bridgewater does.

but you may want to tweak it in a certain way that fits your goals, whereas I may want to tilt it in another direction. And you can now do that with quantitative techniques as well as AI. And for this group, to me, that means that's the future, right? Because, again, it's customer-centric with the focus on how they're perceiving value. I think too often the finance industry really focuses on the value ad we're delivering to the user. That's supposed to focusing on what the user really wants as value. And I think that's going to lead to more ethethetic consumer-centric approach.

Yeah, Dan, weigh in on this. This is in your wheelhouse as well. For those of you who don't know the jargon, he's referring to SMAs as separately managed accounts. Dan, is there a future in separately managed accounts? And what's your thoughts on where this crowd is going to go, or is it too diverse to make generalizations? Yeah, I wanted to come back to that original question because I think it's very important. I'm worried we're going to see two sort of barbelled outcomes from people who have gotten involved in this.

One is the successful people who hopefully are going to end up in an unusual position of either they made a large gain and they cashed out, and they're going to have a tax bill that they're going to owe at some point in the future, and I hope they keep enough money and they've got money to meet that tax bill. But they've been in a single position stock, and it might be very hard for them to move from saying, oh, I can pick winners, I can pick out a portfolio of max four or five stocks and do well at it. So the first thing is they'll have developed a sense of high confidence that they'll be able to do this on an ongoing basis. The second, which again is successful, is they'll realize that they're going to owe very high capital gains taxes if they sell out at short term or still pretty significant at long term.

And they end up stuck in that stock waiting for it to be worth less or the tax rates to be lower. And they're in a very concentrated portfolio for a long period of time. That's the people who did well in this. I'm also worried about, you know, part of this movement has been about, oh, the stock market. is rigged, ordinary people can't do well at it. I think ordinary people have been doing very well in index or passive investing for years by avoiding high cost, by avoiding concentration. They're going to people who now say, no, I went in. I was part of this movement, and I ended up just losing money, and I'm never going to never going near it again. And for the rest of their lives,

these people are going to hold their money in savings accounts. They're going to say the stock market is too risky, or you can't trust it. It's corrupt. And they're going to miss out on sort of the core economic engine of growth over the rest of their lives. That could have helped them with their retirement savings. Yeah, Todd, one of the things I do not understand is one of the the the feces of these people, of the Reddit people, and they're all, like I said, I'm very happy to have them, is we've been disrespected, we've been left out, we're not getting in on this. I just don't understand it because anyone who has put $1,000 to the NSP 500 index fund for the last 10 years has made a fortune. The little guy has not been left out at all from any of this. There is no nefarious price. plan and the average investor has done fabulously well. Now you can say, well, I don't have any money to put in,

but that's a different kind of problem than saying I'm actively getting screwed by everybody. Is there a way to kind of make that blatantly obvious point to everybody? Well, we talked about free. You know, you can get S&P 500 index ETS with just three basis points from I shares, from Vanguard, and from State Street. You get the benefits of diversification. You can actually get an ETF for free from Bank of New York, Mellon, and a couple other firms and get that diversification. So the American consumer, the American investor, has never been in a better place to participate in the ongoing bull market. And I think that ETS offer a great solution to those folks. You're obviously not going to see a thousand percent returns in the individual ETF within a week or two weeks time.

but slowly building up a nest egg has worked for many investors using S&P-based ETFs. Yeah. Todd, I just want to come back to you briefly, since you're the commodities guy here. I know today that ETFs, not just associated with silver or up, ETFs associated with platinum or up, uranium is up, copper ETFs are on the upside. You know, there's a big macro question here about whether there is going to be commodity supply inflation that's going on. People have argued for years that we've been underinvested in commodities for a long time. Is there a point, independent of the Reddit crowd, is there a point to be made about why commodity prices should be higher? Absolutely. I mean, for the first time, I think this could be the start of a new commodity

super cycle. And the real reason behind that is, you know, for the last, well, for the last sort of decade or so, you've seen a massive divergence between, you know, the stock market and the commodity markets. And one of the things that the pandemic's done is it's had a big effect on supply of commodities into the market because some of the worst affected companies in terms, or areas of the market from the pandemic have been the traditional commodity heavy sectors, particularly sectors like energy. And so, you know, the effect of that has been, you know, firms cutting back on production, firms consolidating, doing what they can to try and manage their way through the crisis. On top of that, you've got a Biden administration now obviously in place

with a strong environmental remit that we think will make or bring significant change within the industry going forward. And so I think coupled with the recovery, you've now got a position where you know, commodity prices have real legitimate reason to be rising right now. And as you rightly said, Bob, I mean, we're seeing today, we're seeing action in broad commodity ETFs, in platinum and gold, all across the board. And for the first time, it looks like sort of concentrated buying. And again, you know, obviously the Reddit will take the headlines, Silver will take the headlines. But I think this could be the start of a new bull cycle for commodities. Nothing like asking a commodities guy, whether he thinks commodities are going up.

Got your answer, folks. I want to thank Will and Stephen and Dad and Todd. That's it for this week's EF Edge. By the way, I'm going to keep Dan Egan here because I love talking about behavioral finance. I always learned something talking to him. We're going to keep him for a few minutes to give us more lessons in behavioral economics

for our ETF Edge podcasts. Now it's time to round out the conversation with some thoughtful analysis and perspective to help you better understand ETFs with our Market 102 portion of the podcast. Today will be concerned. continuing our conversation with Dan Egan from Betterman. Dan, thanks so much for sticking around.

I want to just use this as another teaching opportunity about the lessons of behavioral finance. We had talked in the ETF show about how one of the problems that some of these Reddit people have is just figuring out how to trade dynamically and how to even cut their losses. We had a guest on Stephen who talked about that is a major problem. They don't quite have enough education to do that. What do you think is going to happen here with this particular crowd? Already today, we see a little less interest. The volatility in GameStop is a little smaller.

It's down. The market tends to be up when these trades are moving in the opposite direction. What's your take on where we go from here? Yeah, I would start off by saying it is dangerous when you come in investing with the idea that you want to be part of a movement, part of something that is on the way up, without considering necessarily what the exit strategy is. And in the case of things like this where there's a short squeeze, where you expect something to go up quickly, it works out well if you get in early and can get out while it's still at a high price. You need to know when that's going to happen and so on. but you have to remember that you have to sell to somebody and who is that other person. As manias grow, they start off with people who are looking at achieving something like

this started off with a deep value investor. And it grows to include people who are consider more normal people who are momentum traders, who are looking to be able to get it and get out and hope that there's somebody else that they'll be able to sell to at the end of this. I'm worried that in cases like this, the market goes up quickly. And as we were talking about, it can now go down to. very quickly as well. GameStop obviously triggered circuit breakers on the way up. It can trigger them on the way down. But the ability of people to count on it to go up and stay up permanently is pretty

low. And I think that either way, Wall Street's probably going to be okay. But I worry about the people who get in at the tail end of this, not realizing that they might be caught out holding the stock at a high price. Yeah, I think you make a good point about it. It's not really a movement. And yet it's something. It is something. So if I cynically say, guys, please, let's get real. This is, you know, a lot of people sitting around with not a lot to do, looking at the chat rooms, doing a little education, and it's a get-rich-quick scheme. I get people say, no, no, no, that's not true. It's more than that. And I think they're right, but it's not quite a movement. So how do you address that? First of all, most of these people

followers, right? Even people who were sort of like ideologically affiliated, it's countercultural, whatever you want to call it, only a few people had the initial observation, okay, there are some stocks that are stupidly heavily shorted here, and if we get enough people, we can move it. There weren't 100,000 people who had this insight. There were probably, you know, a dozen who initially did some research and then went out and promoted the idea. That's not really a movement, but there was a crowd there that was susceptible to some kind of message. So I'm not trying to split hairs and say, this is not a movement, it should be named something else,

but something was going on. And yet at the same time, there was still elements of a get-rich-quick scheme associated with it. I mean, when I talk to a guy, I say, you know, the stock market's done really well for the last 10 years, if you would have put $1,000 in, you know, in 2000, and then put another $1,000 every year for the next 10 years, you would have made a hell of a lot of money from 2000 to, I'm sorry,

2010 to 2020. And I said that to one kid last week. He said, yeah, but that's boring. Who wants to do that? That's not, you want to just sit there and look at this? So there's something else going on here. There are elements of the get rich quick. There are elements of that dopamine rush of all of that. So it's complicated, right? one of the things that we talked about is how the human brain craves stimulus through change, right? So one of the real challenges to these sorts of things is that they need to keep the attention on themselves by doing greater and greater and more unusual things. And that's really hard. It's easy to go from 30 to 60, but it's really hard to go from 300 to 600. So what we're already starting to see is that that sort of attention is getting fractured to other things that might have. that possibility of going up, so you're looking at silver, other commodities, et cetera. But that also means that you don't have quite as much focus and sunlight being directed towards one specific

stock. So I think there might be, it might be really hard moving forward. I think a lot of people think that this has been a sea change in how the market works, that as long as a message board or a community of people can focus attention on one specific stock, they can really move it around. It'll happen again, but it's going to be harder because people are going to understand that it's a little bit of a mania Ponzi scheme thing. You need to get in at the right time and get out at the right time. And they're also going to be looking around for a variety of positions to do it in. And once you remove that ability to focus everybody on the same stock, the ability to push the price up goes down. And where does this go ultimately? I know we chat about this, but I'm

fascinating by how most of these people are not going to go out and decide to call T. Roe Price up next month, even if they made some money and say, I want to set up a mutual fund account. What are they going to do? Is it going to barbell and splinter into the winners and losers? Are they going to be SMAs? Are there going to be long-term investors or a lot of people are going to get out? How does this play out? One thing I'm really looking forward to in more ways than one is come June, July, August, once vaccines have been rolling out for a while and all sorts of restrictions are starting to be released. I think people will stop paying so much attention, both to the message boards as well as to markets, because they'll get that stimulation and more meaningful stimulation somewhere else. You'll be able to go to sporting games again, to, you know, the movie opening that you wanted to go.

You'll go to restaurants with bars and family. So I think that we'll start paying attention to sort of three-dimensional real-world things rather than what's going on on the screen that we pull out of our pocket because we're bored. I think that's going to take a lot of oxygen out of the room for these sorts of bubbles in the future. What are you seeing at Benner-Bent? I mean, are you seeing any ripple effects from this? What are people over, what are your people doing? What are your investors seeing? We see almost nothing related to it.

You know, one of the things that I've learned over the years about how people think about investment accounts is that they have some that are like Las Vegas. And when they go to Vegas, they want to have a good time. They want it to be entertaining and bright lights and glitzy things. And other things, they want it to be like going to the gym, where it's the right thing, it's healthy. They go in, but it's not particularly entertaining. And our customers in betterment in general tends to be like going to the gym. It's a good, virtuous thing. And we have great customers who do it on a regular basis.

but what goes on in Vegas doesn't really affect whether or not you go to the gym. Yeah. I guess the question is, I mean, it seems that way with a lot of people. I'm really fascinated by already I see the temperature sort of coming down on this play. So I'm wondering if, and with the whole thing was silver today, there were accusations around that, oh, no, actually, the Wall Street Betts community wasn't really heavily pushing silver. Maybe these were professionals pushing it under the guise of. So already the conspiracy, and to me that says the community is already fracturing. Again, I'd hasten to call it a community, but it's fracturing already,

which immediately starts reducing the impact of it if that actually is happening. So I think this is following a natural evolution of what you were talking about. You can only get completely hyper-excited about something for so long. It's highly unlikely that games. game stop is going to be $1,000. At 325 on Friday, the 500 options were already, the weekly options were already stupidly priced. They were really expensive. So what happened is the market adjusted to this. They're not going to get fleeced every week, the options guys on this. They had to pay out a fortune last week. So the market quickly adjusts. You have go on with other

ideas. The community is not, you know, a committee. It's not an investment committee. It's not Vanguard meeting deciding that our analysts are now pushing the following four stocks. It's just a bunch of people. And whoever has the loudest argument, and as you get people successful, I think, I'm asking you about this, but it seems like you get more, the versus, the voices fracture, essentially. Yep. They're all going to pull off in different directions. I think that they had, they have a few people who you would consider leaders, but aren't necessarily there to lead. They were accidental leaders. They're losing the sense of FOMO, the fear of missing out on something that's already sort of happened.

That's a big driver of bubbles is people wanting to not regret partaking in sort of a social event. So that's going down as well. I also think to your point, these message boards, for the most part, are public. And their ability to bring in a lot of people and focus that attention depends upon them being public. But that also means that, you know, you can be an analyst at a bank and you can read these message boards just as much. So the ability to kind of surprise professionals has gone down dramatically now that this has happened once. Yeah, I would agree with that. You know, Dan, I've kept you longer than I thought I would, but it's always fascinating for me.

I had to run into this problem in 2000 after the chat rooms all kind of blew up in the dot-com thing. And I remember Robert Schiller's book, Irrational Exuberance, came out the height of that market in March 2000. And that's when I became a behavioral economist, when I realized people don't buy low and sell high. Homo economicus, as we used to call it, doesn't exist. And I picked up Schiller's book and looked at random walk down Wall Street and started paying attention to behavioral economics. And so that was my birth by fire, the dot-com boom and the aftermath of that. So I want to thank you always for your insights. Dan Egan, everybody, is the managing director of behavioral finance and investing.

at Betterman. Everybody, have a healthy, happy, and safe trading week. InvescoQQQQ believes new innovations create new opportunities. Here's the greater possibilities together. Learn more at investco.com slash QQ. Investco Distributors, Inc.