The Pinta landed in the bay of Baiona alongside the castle of Monterreal on Mar 1, 1493.

Those of you who learned that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 will make the connection.  His Santa Maria foundered on a reef off Haiti around Christmas 1492 but the other two modest caravels made passage back to the Old World.

One of those was the Pinta. You can tour a replica in the bay (pick it out in 2-3 photos here). Anyway, it was the first word of the New World, in Baiona, Spain, in Galicia, where we spent the night.

You never know what you’re going to learn traveling this planet.

In addition to Galicia and its vintners like young Rodrigo and the elegant Marta, and Santiago Compostela packed with trekkers (some of faith, others not), we rode bikes in Portugal’s Douro Valley, learned to make pastel de nata in Porto and bolstered the local economy with our wine and port consumption. 

What’s this got to do with the stock market and looming 24-hour trading, and tokens and the market manically clinging to Nvidia like a champion in Homeric hymns?

It’s good to get a different perspective. 

The people of Porto were all about beating Norway and its “Row! Row!” chanters. The town was packed with red Viking jerseys, but the river people prevailed. We could not find anyone the next day – which was just Monday Oct 5 – who wasn’t on hand for it. Our driver. The hotel staff. The customs guy at the airport. They were all in the stadium.

We get caught up in things and you have to step outside those things to see it.

We do what we do in investor relations.  We’ve got analyst days, non-deal roadshows, earnings. We do it because it’s what we do.

We try as investors to diversify risk.  Buy a mix of bonds and stocks, and so on.

Bonds have been routed like the Cicones in Round One of the Battle of Ismarus.  Read the rest of the story of what happened to Odysseus’s men there, who lingered to eat and drink.

Coming back from bikes in the steep reaches of the Douro, wine and pilgrims in Galicia, you have a sense of meaning.  Like for instance stocks will soon trade all the time, everywhere.

Well. What should public companies do? 

Nobody asked you if you cared if your shares traded all the time, did they?  When should you report earnings?  Do you have any fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to answer that question?

It’s like that movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won basically everything – seven Oscars in 11 nominations, including Best Picture. It was production house A24’s all-time best box office feat at nearly $150 million. Yet nobody knows what it means.

I use the term “nobody” loosely.

And tokens are coming for your stocks. NIRI CEO Matt Brusch wrote about it.

Most public companies are caught up in what we do as public companies and missing what’s happening. Most go right on doing what we were doing in 1995.  It’s crazy – like Daniel Kwan’s movie that won all the awards.

Public companies: Your stock is collateral. It’s more like…gold? Than a story.  Is it useful as a store of value?  Is it predictable? Is it easy to use in place of money? 

And what happens if stocks are collateral? 

Not a trick question.

What sets your price?

Something else that can be used for collateral. 

You follow? 

The dollar is largely priced by a combination of euros, yen, and other currencies, plus the output capability of countries in the “currency basket.” France is about broke by the way.

The dollar isn’t valued on fundamentals. Its value is relative and driven by size and supply.

Consider the weight little Switzerland and its mighty franc pack by virtue of living within its means. Switzerland is among three countries that don’t behave like the rest, the other two being Singapore and Norway. They don’t finance profligacy, like us. 

You don’t have to compete with China. You don’t have to win the AI race, whatever that means. You don’t have to borrow stupid amounts of money and blow it on AI tokens. 

You can just. Balance your budget. These are the things one thinks about when looking back at the USA from abroad.

And I think the big AI CEOs should be thinking about it too.

When your food companies, toilet paper companies, clothing companies aren’t doing great and travel stocks track the rise and fall of bets on chips, you should probably stop and visit a winery in Galicia where they’ve been growing grapes since the Romans thought Galicia was awesome.

And ponder it. Compute won’t wipe your behind or fill your fridge.  Just saying. 

I’m often reminded of a line attributed to John Maynard Keynes, who propounded deficit spending, proving that geniuses can be one-dimensional.  He’s reputed to have said, “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” 

Just because something is crazy doesn’t mean it’ll go badly. Crazy stuff sometimes works. But not most times. And we are in some crazy times. I miss Portugal.