The welcome death of the ‘my truth’ investment boom

A colourful selection of news items this week seem to have a central thread. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the Theranos fake blood-test venture once valued at $9 billion, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, the collapsed crypto exchange once valued at $32 billion, was holed up in the Bahamas awaiting extradition to face US justice. Despite continuing crypto mayhem, Binance – the Cayman-based rival exchange that declined to rescue FTX – announced the auction of ‘seven animated NFT statues’ celebrating the triumphs of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.

Also still making headlines, Elon Musk appears set on destroying his $44 billion Twitter purchase – and former shareholders must think themselves lucky to have been bought out at a 38 per cent premium to the last traded price before he came over the horizon. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq-100 tech stock index is down 40 per cent from its peak, and the Cambridge-based semi-conductor designer Arm Holdings has deferred flotation for fear of not achieving the $40 billion-plus valuation sought by its Japanese owner, Softbank.

What ties this bundle together? It looks like the end – if only for the time being – of what we might call the ‘my truth’ investment boom, in which delusion, falsehood and the cult of fake genius have bloated the prices of so many fashionable but flimsy financial objects of desire. That evaporation of hype can’t be a bad thing – and now is surely a good time to revisit the merits of ‘value investing’ (picking and holding stocks, however boring, whose price is low compared with the intrinsic value of their underlying business) as practised by 92-year-old Warren Buffett, with his long-term holdings in the likes of Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz, American Express and Chevron.

Noting another of this week’s revelations, that the Paris stock market is now worth fractionally more than London’s – both being close to $2.8