Let me guess. 

Somewhere around 2017, or maybe 2021, a guy showed up at Thanksgiving talking about Bitcoin. 

A cousin. A brother-in-law. Your daughter's boyfriend with the laptop stickers. You had some fun with him. 

Fair enough—he made it easy. 

And in 2022, when the whole thing collapsed—Luna, Celsius, FTX—you got your victory lap. You passed the stuffing and asked how his magic internet beans were doing. 

He stopped bringing it up. You went back to your index fund, feeling like the last sane person in America.

Today I bring unwelcome news.

While you were enjoying the victory lap, the entire market—your market, the respectable one—quietly turned into the thing you were laughing at.

And the guy you roasted? He's the guy at the table who's trained for it.

The Casino Came to You

Look at it.

Figma popped 250% on its first day of trading, then handed most of it back within weeks. Circle popped 168%. Newsmax rose 700% and round-tripped in days.

That's the exact chart every crypto token drew in 2021—now printed on the NYSE.

Sure, our 1999 veterans have seen pops like these before. VA Linux rose 698% on day one, back when the fad was adding ".com" to your name instead of "AI."

But here's what we haven't seen before:

Zero-day options—contracts that expire the same afternoon—now make up roughly two-thirds of all S&P 500 options volume, per Cboe's own data. 

In 2016, it was 5%. 

Most of the "smart money" activity in America's flagship index now has the shelf life of a carton of milk. That’s a market that's calm almost every day, and fragile on exactly the day it matters.

And here's the part you should take personally: your index fund is in on it. 

The top 10 stocks are now 36% of the S&P 500—at the dot-com peak, the number that scared everyone was 27%—and eight of the ten are the same AI bet.

Thirty-six dollars of every hundred you contribute buys those names automatically, at any price, because they're on the list. 

The weird guy has a word for that. In 2021, he said he was “aping in”—or buying in because everyone else is, at any price, no questions asked. He did it with a dog coin. You do it every other Friday.

Point is… 

Your instincts were built for a market that ran on earnings and analyst reports. 

The new market increasingly runs on attention—which arrives in seconds, concentrates in narratives, and leaves without saying goodbye or cleaning up afterward. 

Crypto was this market with the training wheels off. The people who survived it were doing their residency.

What the Weird Guy Knows

Every scar he picked up maps onto today's tape. 

Three of them are worth stealing.

ONE: Narratives rotate, and the rotation is the trade. Crypto compressed a full hype cycle into 18 months, sometimes 18 weeks, and he sat through three of them: majors → L1s → DeFi → dog coins → exit. 

The AI trade is running the same sequence. When a stock goes vertical on a story with no revenue attached, he knows what inning it is while the experts declare a new paradigm. 

Your move: when the narrative reaches the no-revenue tier, you're in the dog coin phase. Sell the dog coin phase.

TWO: Size positions so you can be wrong twice. Crypto's deepest lesson: survival. Being early looks identical to being wrong and your portfolio can’t tell the difference. 

Your move: run the 60% test. If a 60% drawdown in any single position changes your life, the position is too big, whatever the thesis.

THREE: "Up only" language is a countdown clock. When your barber, your group chat, and CNBC agree something can't go down, the marginal buyer is already in. Crypto traders learned to become allergic to euphoria.

Your move: you have it easier—FactSet counts how many S&P 500 earnings calls mention "AI." When that number sets records while the no-revenue tier leads the market, tighten up.

Most have spent years learning none of this. Now they’re walking into a market where stocks gap 40% on a tweet. Unarmed. Wearing loafers.

But your loafers can be reinforced. 

This Thanksgiving, pass the stuffing. Ask the weird guy what he's buying. 

And maybe, unless it’s dogcoins… consider it.