Chasing Value, Not the Next Shiny Train

US markets are setting record highs on the AI tsunami — a nation at war, and the indices don’t care.

I’ll confess as a user of AI, I’m a fan — the value versus what I pay is absurd. As an investor, I’m suspicious.

Value comes down to two tests: is there a real consumer problem being solved — and can the price consumers pay cover the cost of producing, marketing and distributing it? Twenty-five years ago we forgot the second and valued “eyeballs over earnings.” The dotcom survivors addressed clear consumer needs, and learned to deliver real value at real profit.

Then came blockchain, with Bitcoin as cheerleader: a distributed ledger no one owns, value settling in seconds, no middleman, trust by math not governments.

But what happened? Bitcoin trades ~45% below its peak — far from the digital gold it promised. Ledger adoption began in banks and supply chains, hardly transforming the industries it targeted. NFTs were to remake the creator economy — one sold for $69M — but struggle for traction. Meme coins shedding 90%+ only deepened a ‘trust deficit’ the space never shook.

The one case that scaled — stablecoins, moving more value a year than Visa and Mastercard combined — won by focusing on the pain point, not the ideology. No decentralization, no disintermediation. Just a digital dollar that solves a real problem and pays.

Three whammies for the rest of crypto: the use cases never fully landed; most who invested never used crypto and knew little about how it worked; and mining now collides with AI for the same power. And the big one — the FOMO crowd spotted a shinier train: AI.

So is AI earning its valuation? Its most valuable segments sit in two buckets — hardware demand outrunning supply, and in the augmented value it provides AI users. The rest are leaky buckets for now: compute capital, talent wars, marketing spends, significantly uncovered by what cautious users and enterprises pay. Better odds than crypto, but odds all the same.

FOMO is a drug for retail investors. Which of the next trains — Robotics, Quantum, or Space — gets overhyped first?

At Ask GeKo, our advice never changes: Always chase value that is proven and real. Bet on the FOMO roulette table only with chips you can walk away from.