Cartoon Monkeys Sold for Six Figures. What a Racket.

A few years ago, cartoon pictures of monkeys were selling for six figures apiece. I remember seeing one of those prices and thinking two words. What a racket.

And it was never just the monkeys. Every couple of years the frenzy finds a new thing. Coins with dog faces on them made some people rich for a while and then took most of it back. Meme stocks ran for weeks on jokes. Watches went vertical through the lockdowns, people paying multiples of retail for steel on a bracelet, and then the market handed a big piece of it back. Even the chip stocks, actual companies with actual products, get dragged into it, loved on a Monday and doubted by Thursday, because the frenzy needs somewhere to live and it is not picky.

Now here’s the part I have to say honestly, because it’s true and it’s exactly what makes this dangerous. Plenty of things in money never made sense to me. Crypto never did, the meme coins made even less, and some people still made real money in both, big money in a few cases, because a thing does not have to make sense to anyone to work out for somebody. But when I look at who won, I mostly see timing and luck, right place, right time, in early and out before the mood turned. You hear all about the winners, and you don’t hear much from the people who paid for them.

Because when I call it a racket, here is what I actually mean, hype and speculation with no real value being created underneath, nothing you could measure or put a number on, just a price held up by agreement. Rare is real, I’ll give the cards that, but rare only pays while everyone agrees it matters, and nobody signs anything promising to keep agreeing. A Pokémon card sold for millions this year, quite a bit more than it went for just a few years back, and maybe the next one sells for even more. Or maybe the agreement moves on to something else. Who decides when it isn’t worth it anymore? Nobody rang a bell when the monkeys stopped being worth six figures. Nobody ever does.

So I sit these out. All of them, every time, and not because I’m above it. I spent my late teens and early twenties chasing exactly this kind of stupidity, and the lesson those years taught me has kept me out of every frenzy since, more than twenty years now. And it is not a young person’s mistake. I see it at every age, every day, because the pull doesn’t care how old you are.

Sitting out is not a shrug, it is a decision I make on purpose, in the calm, knowing exactly what it can cost me. It cost me the monkeys on the way up. It also spared me the monkeys on the way down. I own things that earn, because a thing that earns gives me something real to judge, and a mood gives me nothing, and I don’t want my family’s future graded on a mood.

And the next one is already forming somewhere. It will sound smarter than a cartoon monkey, they get more convincing every round, and somebody you know will be early in it and glowing at a dinner. That glow is the most persuasive thing in money, and sooner or later it gets pointed at you.

On Tuesday I’ll give you the question I ask before anything new gets a place in what I own. It’s one question, it’s short, and the racket hates it.

And if you own some of this stuff because you genuinely love it, the cards, the watches, whatever it is, then enjoy it, that is a fine reason to own almost anything. Just be honest with yourself about which game it’s in.

Talk Tuesday.

— Mateo