Every Company is Schrödinger‘s Company 🐈📦
How the same facts can explain a stock’s rise or fall. 📈📉
Humans are storytelling creatures.
Price action drives narrative.
There’s not a single company where market participants couldn’t *instantly* come up with a perfectly plausible-sounding explanation as to why the stock moved +20% or -20%.
Narratives are quantum ⚛︎
First comes the verdict, then the trial 👨⚖️⚖️
Take your pick: Berkshire Hathaway, Nvidia, Meta, Google, Microsoft, whatever.
What’s most interesting is that the same attributes will often be cited in both the positive and negative cases, just with a different spin on top of them.
Jensen is incredibly aggressive, that’s why he wins!
Jensen is incredibly aggressive, that’s why he drove over the edge!
Zuckerberg is a founder with unchecked power, that’s why he can invest for the long-term and do painful course corrections!
Zuckerberg is a founder with unchecked power, that’s why he wastes tens of billions of dollars on things with dubious ROI.
Google is an entrenched incumbent deeply embedded in the digital world, that’s why they win.
Google has been an entrenched incumbent for so long that they’ve grown fat and lazy.
This isn’t just a thought experiment. Just within the past few years, we’ve seen the narrative pendulum swing back and forth. 2021 was the upswing, 2022 was the downswing. What next?
🧭 This first appeared in Edition 586 of Liberty’s Highlights. New here? I made a page for that: Start Here.