Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Blots podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Allowin and I'm Chill so Joe. You know,
Speaker 1: we just recorded that podcast with Lee Drogan where we
Speaker 1: were talking about tech stocks and earnings. Right. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: really like that one and is another one of one
Speaker 1: of our podcasts, and they're kind of rare for what
Speaker 1: we do, where we actually talk about markets right now,
Speaker 1: as we're going, as are happening, because we often sort
Speaker 1: of talk about esoteric stuff that doesn't directly involve the
Speaker 1: day to day. So I like that we got a
Speaker 1: chance to actually talk about what's happening right now, give
Speaker 1: the listeners something useful. I really dispute the notion that
Speaker 1: we talked about esoteric stuff, But as I say that,
Speaker 1: I realized that I'm about to start talking about esoteric stuff.
Speaker 1: Well that podcast about Cracy Crazy, do you know that?
Speaker 1: Do you know what our podcast is called Odd Thoughts,
Speaker 1: But that's about bond trading? Okay, yeah, but we all know. Okay,
Speaker 1: that episode about tech stocks got me thinking about I
Speaker 1: guess companies and company earnings throughout history, and I was
Speaker 1: sort of thinking on a very meta level, almost every
Speaker 1: company is a tech stock, right because winners throughout history
Speaker 1: are companies that have either invented new technology or used
Speaker 1: it to the best effect. Right, Yeah, absolutely, And I
Speaker 1: think Lee made that point as well, that really we're
Speaker 1: not seeing an emergence of tech stocks per se. What
Speaker 1: we're seeing is an incredible use of technology across a
Speaker 1: range of industries that allows essentially capital to have incredible
Speaker 1: leverage over labor. And what we call tech stocks like
Speaker 1: your Netflix is and your facebooks are really the companies
Speaker 1: that are at the most extreme dream and of being
Speaker 1: able to get incredible amounts of output without that much
Speaker 1: that many people working for them exactly. So after I
Speaker 1: started thinking about that, I started thinking about what a
Speaker 1: you know, tech stock per se would look like, say
Speaker 1: a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: Like would it be a company that I don't know
Speaker 1: was inventing like new methods of producing railroad spikes or
Speaker 1: you know, something like that. Would that be considered a
Speaker 1: technology company and would investors react to it in a
Speaker 1: similar way that they would to a Facebook or an Amazon. Now,
Speaker 1: luckily for us, there's someone out there who thinks a
Speaker 1: lot about this, so that we don't have to Um
Speaker 1: and his name is Jamie Catherwood. A lot of people
Speaker 1: might know him as finance history guy. Uh. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: he's on Twitter, he's on Medium, and he's always producing
Speaker 1: these amazing articles about incredible episodes from financial history. I
Speaker 1: saw he tweeted something I think it was just yesterday
Speaker 1: about the I p O of the Guinness Beer Company
Speaker 1: and how people talked about that and how oversubscribed it
Speaker 1: was and that was in there. And so looking back
Speaker 1: at financial history, you really do. It's it's sort of
Speaker 1: confirms I think what is one of our general themes
Speaker 1: that to some extent nothing ever changes. And so Mania
Speaker 1: is about what we call tech stocks today presumably have
Speaker 1: many echoes in the past as well, exactly, and so
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about exactly those echoes. And I
Speaker 1: should just say that Jamie has also been a multiple
Speaker 1: listener request for an All Thoughts interview, So I'm glad
Speaker 1: we're finally making it happen. Uh. Jamie Catherwood, a k a.
Speaker 1: Finance history Guy. His real life job as an analyst
Speaker 1: over at Arthur J. Gallagher and Company. Jamie, it's so
Speaker 1: good to have you on. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: having me. So I guess just to begin with, I'd
Speaker 1: be really curious to get some insight into how you
Speaker 1: became finance history guy and what exactly piqued your interest in,
Speaker 1: you know, going back to stories from the sixteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and even earlier to talk about finance and investing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I've always been a history that um I did
Speaker 1: history as my major at King's College, London, and I
Speaker 1: became interested in finance. And after joining Twitter, I saw
Speaker 1: that a ton of people were putting out content related
Speaker 1: to you know, just to investing finance in general, but
Speaker 1: no one had kind of focused on history itself and
Speaker 1: just financial history. So I figured I can't compete with
Speaker 1: the people who have been doing finance for decades or
Speaker 1: investing and you know, much smarter than I am. But
Speaker 1: I can bring the history aspect because that's what I
Speaker 1: kind of know. So it was just kind of finding
Speaker 1: my own niche. And I'm lucky that no one else
Speaker 1: was doing it because if they were, I'm sure it
Speaker 1: wouldn't have worked out as well for me. Because there's
Speaker 1: some really good writers out there on Twitter. I like
Speaker 1: that this This goes to my theory of life alpha
Speaker 1: of the idea of finding some profitable niche to exploit
Speaker 1: that other people aren't doing and sort of putting yourself
Speaker 1: out there and uh yeah, making hay in a way
Speaker 1: that others aren't very comparable to investing alpha. Um, do
Speaker 1: you find that it benefits you to study history in
Speaker 1: your day to day career as an analyst, as an
Speaker 1: observer of the market today, certainly, I mean it's I
Speaker 1: even I get tired of hearing it. But you know,
Speaker 1: people say the more things change is the more they
Speaker 1: stay the same, But it is true. It's I mean,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about today, the kind of tech hype
Speaker 1: in the sixteen nineties, it's a kind of good reminder
Speaker 1: to not get caught up with the latest fat and
Speaker 1: I think that whatever everyone's talking about is going to
Speaker 1: be the next big thing, because when you study history,
Speaker 1: you're looking at I mean, I did one article on
Speaker 1: active investing in the Roman Empire. You can kind of
Speaker 1: see that these fads quickly go away, and so don't
Speaker 1: change what your overall strategy is just because there's some
Speaker 1: hot new stock or sector or technology, because odds are
Speaker 1: that's just going to be something that someone's going to
Speaker 1: write about in two hundred years. The next finance history
Speaker 1: guy on Medium, right or on Twitter. Um, so Jamie,
Speaker 1: let's talk about whatever they're posting on but they're just
Speaker 1: gonna wire directly into our brains. That's probably more likely
Speaker 1: download it. Yeah. So Jamie, let's talk about what a
Speaker 1: tech stock might have looked like in say, the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: I sort of alluded to it in the intro, but
Speaker 1: I guess to some extent, every company is sort of
Speaker 1: about technological innovation, but in the sixteen hundreds, technological innovation
Speaker 1: would look very different to what we think about today. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the sixteen nineties was kind of known as a I.
Speaker 1: P O bubble in London on the London Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1: Some people call it a tech bubble and some people
Speaker 1: I mean nerdy financial historians. And basically what spurred this
Speaker 1: kind of hype around tech stocks in that day was
Speaker 1: there's two factors. One was the Nine Years War was
Speaker 1: going on, which restricted trade with other nations, and so
Speaker 1: any capital that investors wanted to deploy they kind of
Speaker 1: had to turn inward and invest within Britain. So when
Speaker 1: they're looking for new opportunities, they stumbled upon new joint
Speaker 1: stock companies that were starting to form more quickly. Than before.
Speaker 1: And there was one quote from a guy who started
Speaker 1: writing a sort of bi weekly financial markets review who said,
Speaker 1: a great many stocks have arisen since this war with
Speaker 1: France for trade being obstructed at sea. A few that
Speaker 1: have money, we're willing it to lie idle, and a
Speaker 1: great many found that they could employ their money more
Speaker 1: easily and joint dock companies than in laying out the
Speaker 1: same in lands, houses or commodities. So I thought that
Speaker 1: was kind of interesting that he was pointing out that
Speaker 1: it's easier to invest in these new text docs than
Speaker 1: other asset classes. But what really set off the hype
Speaker 1: was the success of a treasure hunt by Sir William Phipps.
Speaker 1: He was actually eventually the first governor of the Massachusetts
Speaker 1: Bay Colony, which is kind of interesting, and he oversaw
Speaker 1: the Salem which trials, but he went out and convinced
Speaker 1: a duke in England he could kind of think of
Speaker 1: as like a VC firm in the modern day, to
Speaker 1: invest in his voyage to go find some treasure. And
Speaker 1: the first time he failed, but then he came back,
Speaker 1: got more financing, went back out, and he had just
Speaker 1: heard rumors of some sunken treasure ship in the Caribbean
Speaker 1: and he goes out finds it and he hauls up
Speaker 1: thirty two tons of treasure, which I can't even begin
Speaker 1: to kind of wrap my head around, and brings it
Speaker 1: back and the investors received a ten thousand percent return,
Speaker 1: which is just unbelievable. And as soon as that happened,
Speaker 1: that kind of just sparked a menia because dozens of
Speaker 1: new companies started forming to either provide the technology to
Speaker 1: retrieve treasures. So that was the kind of hype tech
Speaker 1: stock of the day. It was these diving companies that
Speaker 1: had either suits or other diving apparatus is and you
Speaker 1: just have to look up the drawings of these because
Speaker 1: they're insane. There's one was like the Edmund Halle bell,
Speaker 1: and it was this weird contraption where they would lower
Speaker 1: you down into the water and like this bell, but
Speaker 1: trap air so that divers could stay down longer and
Speaker 1: search for treasure. And so all these companies form basically
Speaker 1: promising investors and one of the prospective is for this company.
Speaker 1: One of these companies actually put in the prospectives. We
Speaker 1: promised a hundred percent return to investors, and their whole
Speaker 1: pitch was, you know, oh, look at that guy you
Speaker 1: know who made ten percent on the Phipps treasure hunt.
Speaker 1: This technology will do even better or just the same,
Speaker 1: And so investors just poured money into these stocks and
Speaker 1: it didn't it didn't end up so well. Um, but
Speaker 1: there was Yeah, it was just crazy there. From sixteen
Speaker 1: seventy two to nine there were five patents related to
Speaker 1: diving technology, and then in just two years from six
Speaker 1: there were seventeen patents filed. And it was of all
Speaker 1: patents filed in those two years, So the kind of
Speaker 1: hype was clear. I already loved this story so much.
Speaker 1: First of all, it would just have never occurred to
Speaker 1: me that in the sixteen hundred they had any technology,
Speaker 1: no matter how rudimentary, that could get lower someone to
Speaker 1: the bottom of the sea for long enough to dig
Speaker 1: up treasure. I would have just assumed then the six
Speaker 1: dreds there was no way to do this. So the
Speaker 1: fact that they invented various ways to do that, that
Speaker 1: already blows my mind. What were the returns like? So
Speaker 1: obviously I don't you know, I don't think I'm going
Speaker 1: out on a limb much to imagine that most of
Speaker 1: these endeavors did not produce ten thousand percent returns and
Speaker 1: probably many of them didn't return anything like that. Is
Speaker 1: there a distribution of returns though that like that one
Speaker 1: can collate that sort of resemble, you know, like if
Speaker 1: you talk about you compared the initial funding to kind
Speaker 1: of like a VC funding, and vcs sort of they
Speaker 1: famously are willing to take losses on a lot of
Speaker 1: their investments to hit the occasional home run or a
Speaker 1: mega home run. Like if you have a portfolio that
Speaker 1: has Facebook and then fifty losers, you're totally fine. So
Speaker 1: is there was there a sort of power law distribution
Speaker 1: like that to the companies that were able to successfully
Speaker 1: uh dig up or find sunken treasure. So obviously we're
Speaker 1: kind of restricted by what has survived since in terms
Speaker 1: of sources, there's a there's not a good data set exactly.
Speaker 1: And uh so from what I've read, there was a
Speaker 1: nineteenth century historian who wrote a like really intricate um
Speaker 1: detailing of all the joint stock companies of that day,
Speaker 1: and he wrote, I have a quote that none of
Speaker 1: the companies or expeditions because in addition to just the
Speaker 1: diving technology companies, there were a lot of groups of
Speaker 1: actual treasure hunters who would set up like the Jamie
Speaker 1: Catherwood Exploration Company and they were just dedicated to treasure hunting.
Speaker 1: But this nineteenth century historians said that none of these
Speaker 1: companies or expeditions were successful. Indeed, the only finds consisted
Speaker 1: of a few cannons at the bottom of the sea.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't sound like any of them really worked out. Um,
Speaker 1: and so I wish it was more optimistic, but it
Speaker 1: sounds like Phips kind of got the job done and
Speaker 1: then no one could replicate his success. Another fault question
Speaker 1: that I have related to this. So you talked about
Speaker 1: the mania, You talked about them, the surge and patents
Speaker 1: that were associated with the treasure hunting diving technology. One
Speaker 1: of the things that we see in modern bubbles and
Speaker 1: even tech is you start with something like Okay, a
Speaker 1: few vcs invest in tech companies, and then a few
Speaker 1: years later, I'm getting ads on my iPhone on Instagram
Speaker 1: to say invest in tech startups for as little as
Speaker 1: ten dollars a month, and people find a way to
Speaker 1: democratize what had been this sort of very exclusive and
Speaker 1: difficult way to invest. Talk to me about the mass
Speaker 1: participation and the degree to which this extended beyond the
Speaker 1: vcas and the dukes to normal people who just wanted
Speaker 1: to put some money down in search of massive returns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it definitely was a wider spread investment than just
Speaker 1: these vcs as we're calling them, because these companies are
Speaker 1: formed as joint stock companies and so the average investor
Speaker 1: was able to put their money into these companies. Obviously
Speaker 1: that probably wasn't necessarily a benefit in hindsight once the
Speaker 1: kind of crash came, but yeah, it was definitely a widespread,
Speaker 1: uh sort of speculative mania. And there were and there
Speaker 1: was an account later of the Treasury, the British Treasury
Speaker 1: starting a lottery system because that's how they did a
Speaker 1: lot of their financing in the day, because they wanted
Speaker 1: to kind of pull the money away from these speculative
Speaker 1: joint stocks into funds that benefit the government. And there
Speaker 1: was an analysis done that showed that something like eighties
Speaker 1: seven percent of the money that in your average investor
Speaker 1: had been putting into these joint stock tech companies then
Speaker 1: went to these lotteries. And I thought that was interesting
Speaker 1: because it was kind of just proving that investors didn't
Speaker 1: have a specific you know, dedication to these tech stocks.
Speaker 1: They were just going wherever offered the higher return. So
Speaker 1: as soon as these lotteries offered a better chance at that,
Speaker 1: they ditched the joint stock companies and kind of forgot
Speaker 1: about them. So, Jamie, the natural route for a lot
Speaker 1: of companies, and tech companies in particular, is that you're
Speaker 1: a startup and you get started out of someone's garage,
Speaker 1: and then you get venture capital funds, and then you
Speaker 1: eventually do a listing and a big I p O
Speaker 1: and then you have public investors. You wrote a really
Speaker 1: interesting post, I think it was back in October about
Speaker 1: how a lot of the companies um that happened I
Speaker 1: p O ing in the US over the past year
Speaker 1: have basically never produced a profit, and a lot of
Speaker 1: those companies would be tech companies that investors are just
Speaker 1: sort of betting on on the off chance that they
Speaker 1: will get a big payoff eventually. What's the historic parallel
Speaker 1: to those sorts of I p o s that you
Speaker 1: were looking at. Yeah, So in the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: there was a rubber boom, if you can believe it,
Speaker 1: and essentially these rubber plantations in Malaysia were they're like
Speaker 1: the largest plantation I believe is in Malaysia. There's one
Speaker 1: in Brazil, so I might botch which one it was,
Speaker 1: but closed down, which meant that the supply of rubber
Speaker 1: was going down and prices were shooting up. And so
Speaker 1: as investors saw that, they did what they always do
Speaker 1: and kind of flocked to rubber as their new hot,
Speaker 1: hot fad, and a lot of companies in England, interestingly
Speaker 1: not Malaysia, were setting up rubber plantations, or at least
Speaker 1: claiming that they were in Malaysia to take advantage of
Speaker 1: this rubber boom, and investors just poured money into it,
Speaker 1: and companies were listing their shares on the market without
Speaker 1: even actually having a plantation. Yet. There was one company
Speaker 1: that put in their prospectives that they would basically offer
Speaker 1: the secrets of the company in exchange for a direct
Speaker 1: buyout of the whole company. So I don't know, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say that was reassuring if you were just investing
Speaker 1: that the founders were looking to get out so quickly. Um,
Speaker 1: But yeah, there's some guy who went to Malaysia and
Speaker 1: basically they're just like these stubs of rubber tree, whatever
Speaker 1: the tree is that they're planting on these plantations and
Speaker 1: there was nothing even growing. And the perspectuses back at
Speaker 1: home in England were saying that they had, you know,
Speaker 1: these really high yielding plantations and everything was going great,
Speaker 1: but in reality there was nothing even set up in Malaysia.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it was a case of kind of just
Speaker 1: listing a prospectus to raise money or just you know,
Speaker 1: ly in your pockets before doing any actual work. And
Speaker 1: no one was doing real due diligence. So look for
Speaker 1: a while, I'm curious about that because you're talking about
Speaker 1: the perspectuses of this rubber company. You mentioned the perspectuses
Speaker 1: of this uh, the companies that the Sunken Treasure I
Speaker 1: mentioned in the intro. You tweeted about the prospectus and
Speaker 1: the initial subscribe subscribe over subscription of the Guinness I
Speaker 1: p O. Was there any when we think about perspectus
Speaker 1: is today and companies file s one FI length and
Speaker 1: they're all very regulated and there's very sort of strict
Speaker 1: patterns about you talk about this and then you lay
Speaker 1: out the balance sheet and then you lay out the
Speaker 1: income statements. Was there any sort of common approach to
Speaker 1: laying out a prospectus or was it in those days,
Speaker 1: basically you just write whatever you want. I'm not an
Speaker 1: expert on this, but from what I've seen, that kind
Speaker 1: of I mean, I can't imagine a government that was
Speaker 1: regulating perspectuses would let someone say I'll give you the
Speaker 1: secrets to the company if you buy me out, um,
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't say that. Looking at various perspectuses, there
Speaker 1: seemed to be a kind of common format or approach.
Speaker 1: So it certainly didn't seem to me that there is
Speaker 1: any regulation of it. But I could read something that
Speaker 1: proves proves me wrong. So what are some of your
Speaker 1: other favorite finance stories, especially anything related to sort of
Speaker 1: tech or mania, which seems to be what we're what
Speaker 1: we're discussing here. I gotta say reference the Guinness example.
Speaker 1: That's probably one of my favorite examples a kind of
Speaker 1: a mania in history, because it was just insane that
Speaker 1: sources describing what went down on the actual day of
Speaker 1: the quote I p O. I mean, the economist said
Speaker 1: something like it's a day that witnesses will never forget.
Speaker 1: And then another newspaper the time called the Spectator said
Speaker 1: that the scene that took place on Saturday outside of
Speaker 1: Barings Bank is enough to show that a speculative mania
Speaker 1: exists or something along those lines. And as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: I tweeted all these takes at the time by analysts
Speaker 1: or you know, writers at The Economist and this other
Speaker 1: newspaper kind of taking their different views of the valuation
Speaker 1: of the company because a lot of investors were getting
Speaker 1: hyped up around Guinnesses ramped up production and there I
Speaker 1: guess new technology to bring it back to tech that
Speaker 1: was allowing them to produce more at a lower cost.
Speaker 1: But then some analysts were saying that was really just
Speaker 1: because the materials had gotten cheaper, and so that was interesting.
Speaker 1: But in terms of mania, when the Guinness I p
Speaker 1: O actually took place, the Bearings Bank basically came out
Speaker 1: and said that it would be open for thirty six hours,
Speaker 1: and investors who wanted to get in on the action
Speaker 1: had to come with their subscription form and deliver it
Speaker 1: to the bank, all signed and everything, and the bank
Speaker 1: only ended up being open for three hours because there
Speaker 1: was such a mad rush and they had to call
Speaker 1: in a special police brigade to police the area because
Speaker 1: investors were going crazy. They had to barricade the doors
Speaker 1: so they couldn't let anyone in but people still wanted
Speaker 1: to get their shares in. But obviously this was way
Speaker 1: before anything electronics, so they still had to deliver their
Speaker 1: subscription form. So seen as there was police lining the
Speaker 1: perimeter and the doors were barricaded, investors started tying their
Speaker 1: subscription forms two rocks and literally throwing themselves at the
Speaker 1: opportunity by launching these rocks with their subscription forms like
Speaker 1: through the windows of Barings Bank in order to get
Speaker 1: their shares in. Uh So that is I don't know.
Speaker 1: To me, that's one of the craziest stories, because you
Speaker 1: just imagine some i PO today and investors sitting in
Speaker 1: Manhattan somewhere just launching rocks through banks windows and buy shares.
Speaker 1: That kind of reminds me, Tracy. Remember when we did
Speaker 1: the episode about the housing bubble in Florida like a
Speaker 1: hundred years ago, and we talked about the binder boys,
Speaker 1: just like we're out on the street in Florida who
Speaker 1: just had these binders full of properties for sale and
Speaker 1: these manias in essentially in the days before electronic trading,
Speaker 1: when things had to be done physically, when you had
Speaker 1: these manias that people actually had together in one place.
Speaker 1: In the case of Miami was just sort of gathering
Speaker 1: out on the street. They're actually like all kinds of traffic,
Speaker 1: traffic jams and other stuff like that, because essentially everyone
Speaker 1: was out in the street trying to buy property. And
Speaker 1: so it very much reminds me of that that sometimes
Speaker 1: these things get so intense that they start to like
Speaker 1: break down the physical infrastructure of the place where transactions
Speaker 1: are done. Yeah. Um, it makes you think a lot
Speaker 1: about like whether current manias are more difficult to spot
Speaker 1: because they don't happen in some physical capacity, Like you
Speaker 1: don't have a bunch of people standing outside the New
Speaker 1: York Stock Exchange hurling rocks in order to get their
Speaker 1: share subscriptions. But I but I did think of that
Speaker 1: that the the analogy would be remember in late seventeen
Speaker 1: when all the cryptocurrency exchanges couldn't handle the traffic load
Speaker 1: and start going down right, and they would have these
Speaker 1: crashes and people complained that their trades weren't going through.
Speaker 1: So even though it's digital, I do think that there's
Speaker 1: some interesting analogies where you just get such a rush.
Speaker 1: In that case, it was digital infrastructure that they were
Speaker 1: just buckling onto the load. Yeah, so maybe when demand
Speaker 1: starts to overload the market infrastructure. That's a bad sign. Um.
Speaker 1: But we're speaking over Jamie, so I feel bad, Jamie. Um.
Speaker 1: There's one thing that you pointed out in your your
Speaker 1: post about Guinness, which was that, you know, when this
Speaker 1: all was happening in the late eighteen hundreds, there were
Speaker 1: a bunch of commentators who were watching this from afar
Speaker 1: and going, oh, yeah, this is crazy and it's definitely
Speaker 1: a speculative mania, and yet it's still happened. Why was that.
Speaker 1: That was the craziest part to me is that we're
Speaker 1: you know, I'm writing today, you know, all high and mighty, like,
Speaker 1: look at these it's you know, launching rocks through windows.
Speaker 1: But people were saying the same thing at the time,
Speaker 1: which it was kind of depressing but also fascinating. Depressing
Speaker 1: in the sense that we're still having those same sorts
Speaker 1: of manias in different ways today, but also just that
Speaker 1: we kind of always assume that in the past when
Speaker 1: these manias happened, everyone was caught up in the mania.
Speaker 1: But there were people who sound just like I would
Speaker 1: write today, saying that this is absolutely ridiculous. You know,
Speaker 1: there's no guarantee that this company is gonna be a
Speaker 1: success and its valuation is ridiculous. UM. And so that
Speaker 1: just really that's particular Spectator article UM really stood out
Speaker 1: to me because the guy had some really good quotes
Speaker 1: about how the public will public will never listen to
Speaker 1: someone talking about fraud when returns are good, just as
Speaker 1: a soldier will never listen to a thirsty soldier will
Speaker 1: never listen to someone talk about poisoned water. Something along
Speaker 1: those lines. Basically, you know, it falls on deaf ears
Speaker 1: because if there's returns, you're gonna go for it, and
Speaker 1: if you're some parched soldier in the middle of the desert,
Speaker 1: you're going to drink the water no matter what someone
Speaker 1: tells you. Definitely, the idea of nobody wanting to hear
Speaker 1: about fraud in good time, it definitely falls with that
Speaker 1: category of the more things change, the more things stay
Speaker 1: the same, Jamie, before we go, I do think there
Speaker 1: are probably a lot of listeners that are interested in
Speaker 1: economic history, and probably people are sorry financial history, and
Speaker 1: people have read a lot of books. But do you
Speaker 1: have any favorite resource material for what you learn that
Speaker 1: maybe people haven't heard about that they should check out. UM.
Speaker 1: The easiest way would be to plug my own own
Speaker 1: account and follow me. But outside of that, um archive
Speaker 1: dot org is just an unreal resource that I've kind
Speaker 1: of recently stumbled a upon. You can search like stock
Speaker 1: market and then do sort by date published, and they
Speaker 1: have like source material archived from literally like six hundred
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds, and it's just full PDFs that you can
Speaker 1: look at and go through. So if that sounds interesting
Speaker 1: to you, then that would be my recommendation. But there's
Speaker 1: probably a lot of people who won't do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's safe to say. Yeah, but I find that stuff fascinating.
Speaker 1: That's where I find a lot of these kind of
Speaker 1: interesting stories and quotes is just from reading the stuff
Speaker 1: written at the time. All right, But but the best
Speaker 1: way is for people to follow you on Twitter. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be my recommendation, but I'm biased, all right.
Speaker 1: Jamie Catherwood, a k A finance history guy, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for coming on. Finally. I'm glad we could
Speaker 1: make it happen. Yeah, thank you so much so, Joe.
Speaker 1: I found that conversation really, really great, and I just
Speaker 1: love the notion that you know, we're sat here in
Speaker 1: the year nineteen. I had to think about that for
Speaker 1: a second, it is, and we're talking about technology like
Speaker 1: social media and you know, microchips and things like that.
Speaker 1: But in the sixteen hundreds, there were a bunch of
Speaker 1: people sitting around, you know, tables in London thinking about
Speaker 1: technology as a diving bell that would let them go
Speaker 1: underwater and search for sunken treasure. Yeah, the first thing
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do after I get out of the studio
Speaker 1: here is go google images of the diving bell, because
Speaker 1: I still find it almost unfathomable that in the sixteen
Speaker 1: hundreds they created ways for people to get to the
Speaker 1: bottom of the sea and be able to breathe. So
Speaker 1: that's I wonder how many people died. You have to
Speaker 1: wonder in those endeavors. But anyway, because that's the first
Speaker 1: thing I'm curious about, because I still almost find it
Speaker 1: impossible to believe. But there are I mean, there's this
Speaker 1: sort of thing that seems to happen in all these
Speaker 1: instances of big technology breakthroughs, which is you get maybe
Speaker 1: you know one person who innovates and I think Jamie
Speaker 1: has made this point on his on his Medium page,
Speaker 1: but you get one innovator, then you get a bunch
Speaker 1: of imitators. And then inevitably you get a bunch of
Speaker 1: fraudsters who just sort of mess up the whole space
Speaker 1: and make it a lot more dangerous for all investors,
Speaker 1: and there's sort of an oversupply, and it becomes very,
Speaker 1: very difficult for investors to pick out who is actually
Speaker 1: doing something substantive in the space. It really does seem
Speaker 1: to be the classic pattern of history in so many ways.
Speaker 1: I mean, again not to just keep going back to
Speaker 1: the crypto bubble, but you couldn't have a more perfect
Speaker 1: sort of description of what happened there. Some people earlier
Speaker 1: early on tinker as computer scientists, uh, sort of radical anarchists,
Speaker 1: and then by the end essentially like pure scammers and fraudsters.
Speaker 1: And just as the mania grew and the demand for
Speaker 1: supply grows up or accelerate, people will just put up
Speaker 1: any sort of paper or coins because they know there
Speaker 1: will be a thirst for it. Yeah, start Bucks. What
Speaker 1: was that? Um, sorry, we did an episode on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did know, we were we were among the early crowd.
Speaker 1: Was just you know, we were not in it for
Speaker 1: the money, We were not scammers, and you were in
Speaker 1: it for the technology. Okay. On a serious note, though,
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, the good news is the good
Speaker 1: news is uh Stalwart Bucks never they they never acquired
Speaker 1: any monetary value relation. So the good news is no
Speaker 1: one right lost anything. Okay, that's all I wanted to say. Okay,
Speaker 1: I wanted to pay you a compliment and say that
Speaker 1: I thought your observation about um market manias and how
Speaker 1: you know, again going back to crypto, but when we
Speaker 1: saw a lot of the blockchains and the exchanges being
Speaker 1: sort of overwhelmed by demand, that might have been a
Speaker 1: good indication of basically a speculative mania taking place. And
Speaker 1: I think, I think you're onto something because I think
Speaker 1: if the existing infrastructure can't handle demand for a particular security,
Speaker 1: then it's usually a good sign that something is out
Speaker 1: of balance in the market. Yeah, I mean you see
Speaker 1: this pattern pattern repeat in thousand. A lot of the
Speaker 1: online brokerages the people are using to trade tech stocks
Speaker 1: or head regular outages. You can go back and look
Speaker 1: at those, going back to the Florida bubble. Just even
Speaker 1: the trains to get into Florida started getting too crowded
Speaker 1: because so many people are traveling down there. So whether
Speaker 1: it's digital in person or people throwing rocks into a
Speaker 1: window because they can't get into the bank. I do
Speaker 1: think that, um, it's one of those telltale signs that
Speaker 1: mania is afoot. All right, this has been another episode
Speaker 1: of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe wisn'hal.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. And
Speaker 1: you should definitely follow our guest today on Twitter because
Speaker 1: we keep referencing how great his Twitter account is and
Speaker 1: his Medium account, Jamie Catherwood. He's JFC Underscore three Underscore.
Speaker 1: Check him out on Twitter, and you should definitely follow
Speaker 1: our producer to fur Foreheads. He's at foreheads T, as
Speaker 1: well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Princesca Leavy at
Speaker 1: Francesca Today. Thanks for listening.