keynesian beauty contest
drill this concept into your brain
the concept was formed around a newspaper contest where readers were asked to pick the six prettiest faces. however, prettiest wasn’t defined by a set of objective standards, it was defined by who was picked the most by other entrants. as a participant, your goal wasn’t to pick who you thought was the prettiest. your goal was to guess who other people would find the prettiest.
john maynard keynes argued that these same principles could be applied to investing. you can be right about the fundamentals or tech of a project, but if the broader market doesn’t have the same understanding as you, then it doesn’t matter. price won’t go up.
this concept is especially important in a bull market, where the depth of due diligence declines and risk appetite increases. investors aren’t studying every nuance of these projects; they are looking to make money. once investors see another group of people making money on a trade, fomo and greed kick in. this creates a reflexive cycle that rewards holding and drives prices up violently.
something that may have started off as a fundamentals-based trade for early, high-conviction investors quickly turns into an attention-based trade as prices move higher. in a bull market, attention matters more than fundamentals, and green candles are often the best way to attract new buyers. as we’ve seen with many assets before, as price goes up, fundamentals improve as well.
we’re currently seeing this play out with zec vs xmr. both are privacy protocols that offer similar features, but zec is up ~3x since the beginning of the year, while xmr is up ~25%. whether xmr actually has better tech than zec is irrelevant. the market has shown that it prefers to put its money into zec. without looking into the fundamentals, it’s clear that zec has captured the attention of the market.
all of this boils down to flows: how much money other market participants are willing to invest in the asset. once you start viewing the market through this lens, you realize that technical details aren't the only thing that matters, and factors like marginal buyers, thesis simplicity, and reflexivity matter just as much, if not more.
more attention → more flows → higher prices → better fundamentals → repeat
would you rather be right or would you rather make money?