Pumping the Magic Mushrooms
Also Tether as the global reserve currency, cat bond basis risk, nuclear reactor financing and sports latency arbitrage.
Most cannabis companies used to be gold mining companies. That’s probably not true. It can’t really be true. But man are there a lot of cannabis companies that used to be gold mining companies. Some of them were crypto companies too, or became crypto companies after being cannabis companies, or did Covid-19 testing or artificial intelligence.1 There are not a lot of obvious synergies.
The point is not that the expertise and capital equipment that make you good at mining for gold would also make you good at manufacturing and selling cannabis products. The point is that there are some public companies lying around that no one is really using, shell companies, companies whose stock is registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and so can be sold to retail investors, but that do not have any actual operations. And what you do is, if you have a business with a trendy idea and not much revenue, you go out and do a reverse merger with one of those shell companies, which gets you a publicly traded stock without the expense and scrutiny of doing an initial public offering. And then you go around telling people about your trendy idea, and the stock goes up, and you sell some of the stock you got in the merger and get rich.