Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

A few weeks ago, I made a video on meme coins, in particular a cryptocurrency named Flocki

Enu, and how the world of investing has changed over the last couple of years.

I explained in the video how much easier investing had become in 2021, as there's much less

of a need for the type of analysis that people used to do in the past.

The trick today is to invest in things that seem funny and then hope that Elon Musk will

tweet about them.

This approach is what Matt Levine at Bloomberg calls the Elon Markets hypothesis.

Now it's not being thought at business schools yet, it's the kind of cutting-edge financial

theory that's really only available on YouTube.

There are of course boomers out there who don't understand this and lots of people

in my comments section even accuse me of being a boomer who doesn't understand how things

work, even though I had just made an entire video explaining it. Of course I do kind of understand

how these people were confused because I posted my video here on YouTube rather than

on TikTok and it was over 30 seconds long and frankly who was timed for that. Look, here's a quick

example. There's a cryptocurrency called Omicron that rose more than 900% over the weekend because

there's now also a COVID variant called Omicron.

There's already some crypto corksniffer down in the comments section writing, don't make

fun of the Omicron crypto, you clearly don't understand its use case.

And to that person I say, wake up, it didn't rise 900% because over the weekend people suddenly

notice something useful about it.

It rose in price because it's funny.

...