Smart investors look for market segments where people are already spending many hundreds of millions—or, ideally, billions—of dollars, with a growing field of potential customers.

Or take the stock market. The valuation of every company is simply a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

Are stocks overvalued? What is bitcoin worth? How high can Tesla go? You can’t answer those questions with a formula. They’re driven by whatever someone else is willing to pay for them in any given moment—how they feel, what they want to believe, and how persuasive the storytellers are. And the stories change all the time. They can’t be predicted a

bottom left are young companies growing like weeds, but which haven’t yet proven that they can earn a decent ROE—they’re spending tons of money, but they’re not yet making it pay off very well. This is where the most speculative companies hang out. These companies are generally long shots because it’s still unclear whether all of that heavy investm