Chicken and eggs? A cart before a horse? Is one 6 and the other 6? After a while, you realize there are no simple words to capture the connections between alternative investments that cloud your money-making opportunities. What kind of alternative investments am I hinting at? A damped power source, including uranium, to meet the demands of data centers A small number of quantum companies (all of which are thought to be able to neutralize the need for large-scale normal computation with all their damped power demands), or companies that can break into Bitcoin Crypto-related companies such as Coinbase, Bullish, Circle, and Robinhood (which have huge crypto businesses) Alternative Auto Parts I Want Too much has been written about the amount of capital expenditure we’ll see from so-called hyperscalers and how that could spell the end of the Magnificent Seven, but not nearly enough about these alternatives, including double and triple exchange-traded funds that use leverage and have very few winners, although the winners are well-fed, so I’d like you to focus on these for a while. Let’s introduce zero-day options. Then we have a huge amount of money in a cul-de-sac and can’t do anything but move around until it’s all gone. Before I go into further detail, I would like to point out that one of the reasons I wrote How to Make Money in Any Market was to show you the way to investing in stocks rather than trading these instruments. All of this is speculative, and so I think it’s very difficult to really make a case on a yearly, monthly, or even daily basis. I don’t mean to express disappointment in the conversation surrounding this book, but I do recognize that it is far too ambiguous to actually have a conversation about the role of speculation in this market, a role as overwhelming as it was in 2000-2001. Except this time, it’s a story about esoteric, high-risk-to-fail companies that weren’t created for the challenge at hand, but have been around for a long time and have typically captured the interest of younger investors. In this book, I wanted to straddle indexing, growth investing, and speculation, splitting my portfolio into 50% index, 40% growth, and 10% smart speculation (meaning looking for stocks that could become the next Nvidia, rather than hourly-traded replacement stocks). Many interviewers could not understand the radical nature of the text. Unlike in the past, when retail investors didn’t have professional insider information readily available, today’s investors have a wealth of useful information to help them do it themselves. This is due to a combination of Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure), which prohibits public companies from selectively disclosing information to certain individuals, and the proliferation of sites and news sources aimed at public investors. Throw in incredible chatbots (at least when prompted), and the idea that individuals can’t pick stocks becomes ridiculous. Those who still preach index-only are threatened by investors with even 50% index allocations – which is why they are being bought and paid to be bought by asset collectors, showing how financial dogmatists they really are. But in the case of index funds, it’s because so many young people are embracing speculative junk and high-risk options. Other than saying that these are all related, I find it strange that no one has seriously investigated the mental illness and addiction to these at best zero-sum means on a serious level. What I want to think about is how they are actually connected. How does QuantumScape work with D-Wave? How can Bloom Energy easily track the Direxion Daily Uranium Bull 2X ETF? Does anyone really know why Solana is trading with Palantir? If asked, I could easily name 50 of these relationships, but not the one well-traded index that ties them together. Yet we all accept that they are a group. That’s not a guess. It’s a reality. A lot of energy is being spent on the so-called nonsense of semiconductor companies being the biggest companies on the planet, and more, and it’s become a poisonous cancer for the AI industry, as if there would be an industry without Nvidia. I have yet to hear anyone support Nvidia CFO Collette Kress’s view that buyers of Nvidia chips are already making billions on their chips. So the argument for cap ex as a dead weight loss may not hold much weight. But the idea that these alternative investments somehow produce anything all at once is almost absurd. This means that the alternative energy to power data centers is most likely natural gas, which is abundant and easy to connect to data centers at a very low cost. Quantum science is best done at the university level or by Alphabet and IBM. All cryptocurrencies, the whole damned edifice, could be destroyed by the failure of Strategy, the old Microstrategy, and despite all the organizations involved claiming to exist and have it in abundance, no one of any importance uses cryptocurrency transactions in any commerce. All these flaws are conveniently ignored by the suppliers of all these instruments, and in a way that belittles those who challenge or quibble with them. There are simply no proponents who would decry what I think is a far greater threat to the investment environment than Metaplatform or Amazon’s leveraged balance sheet. So what should we make of overlooking this market corruption? Like the big corporations that orchestrated the downfall of the so-called “little guy” in the travesty of 2000-2001, they encourage this anti-investment mentality from all sides. They sense what individuals want and are happy to put together leveraged ETFs that link anything that can be linked. They’re all about active ETFs, but to me it’s just another way to recoup fees that mutual funds don’t do anymore. While their top executives may have doubts about cryptocurrencies in any company, they are actively pumping out all kinds of derivatives around these alternatives, including stocks that represent their own companies. No one is saying these aren’t the best ways to increase wealth. They accepted it because of the huge fees and being ridiculed to avoid missing a quarter and not being generously paid with bonuses. You could say it’s always been like this. I come back and say, “That’s not true.” Something like this happened in 2000-2001, and we’re still playing around with the same amount of clearly illegal garbage, except this time, and there’s no excuse to turn a blind eye. Because it wasn’t that long ago. Or maybe that’s where I’m wrong. Maybe 25 years ago is a long time, and we’re just doomed to lose the next generation of investors like the last ones who got screwed and beaten up, and it’s all just part of a process where only the issuer really makes money, everyone else breaks even at best, and loses it all at worst. (See here for a complete list of Jim Cramer Charitable Trust stocks.) As a subscriber to Jim Cramer’s CNBC Investment Club, you will receive trade alerts before Jim makes a trade. After Jim sends a trade alert, he waits 45 minutes before buying or selling stocks in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim talks about a stock on CNBC TV, he will issue a trade alert and then wait 72 hours before executing the trade. The above investment club information is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, along with our disclaimer. No fiduciary duties or obligations exist or arise from your receipt of information provided in connection with the Investment Club. 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