Bet on or Against the Unicorns
Also the meme-stock revival, home insurance and tokenized crypto treasury companies.
We have talked a few times around here about two related problems:
The natural solution to both of these problems is: side bets. I think SpaceX stock will go up, so I would like to buy some, but I can’t. You think SpaceX stock will go down, so you would like to short it, but you can’t. We could just do a swap. We each put up $100, and in a year you pay me $1 for each percentage point that SpaceX has gone up, or I pay you $1 for each percentage point it has gone down. Nobody needs to own stock, or borrow stock, or deal with SpaceX; it’s just a bet between us. All we need is some way to measure SpaceX’s stock price. That’s easy if SpaceX goes public in the next year (just look at its trading price), but if it doesn’t, we’ll need some agreed-upon measure of its stock price to settle the bet.