“If you can’t beat them, buy their stock” is the first thing I thought of after reading Josh Brown’s new book, You Weren’t Supposed To See That.
I liked the book, it’s witty, funny, informative, and insightful. From what I can tell, it’s an amalgamation of blog posts and events written over the years and how the current situation has indeed manifested (or metastasized) into our current situation.
The second thing I thought as I read through the book was a recent post I wrote about the 2024 Olympics, Gold Medals and the 80/20 rule. Perhaps unintentionally or intentionally, Josh makes the case for the 80/20 rule when he discusses how the Mag 7 stocks rule the market or how the top 20 percent of anything controls the other 80 percent.
Josh makes some great point about scarcity and overabundance and also hits a point about when after Covid people were given plenty of money and it broke the economy. I wrote a post entitled, “The Hamster Wheel Financial Life” describing just that scenario, when everyone is “rich” no one will work and everything comes crashing down.
Here’s a memorable quote from Josh’s book, “When you can have anything at anytime, is anything worth anything?”
Josh explains much of what is happening on Wall Street today and how investing has been transformed from stock picking to index investing and the reasons behind it. Josh also dives into how the industry will continue to be transformed with AI and bots in the coming decade.
I haven’t finished reading the book yet but I can already highly recommend it to anyone who is an aficionado of investing, stock market, finance or pop culture. I’m about 75% of the way in and I hope Josh writes a follow up in a few years about where we end up in 2030.