Crypto and Cannabis Are the Perfect Post-Crisis Bubbles

Robo-traders and index funds may have taken over most of the stock market, but the psychology of bubbles is still strong.

By Joe Weisenthal

The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll.”

Ever since the crisis, the message to investors has been to embrace the “intolerably boring” style: Index. Rebalance. Diversify. Rebalance again. Reduce your fees. And don’t be so foolish as to think that you, sitting at home, could ever hope to win by picking individual stocks. Investors who have internalized this message have done phenomenally well in the post-crisis years, amid a long and steady — even dull — bull market.

But the gambling instinct can be repressed for only so long. And lately we’ve seen the emergence of strange new bubbles. And, yes, I’m talking about crypto and cannabis. The wild trading in shares of Canadian marijuana company Tilray Inc. in September — in which its market value briefly exceeded that of American Airlines Group Inc. — felt a lot like last year’s Bitcoin frenzy. Despite their…