Morgan Stanley published a list of table-pounding buys this week. SpaceX made the cut. SpaceX is not publicly traded. You cannot buy it. The table-pounding was for nothing.
Warner Music and EchoStar are public. SiTime is public. SpaceX employs rockets and exists as a private company owned primarily by a man who posts through every business crisis like it's a competitive sport. Morgan Stanley's analysts looked at the entire universe of investable securities and said yes, the one you cannot purchase, that's the one.
Retail traders saw the headline. Got excited. Opened their brokerage apps. Searched for SpaceX. Found nothing. Googled whether SpaceX has a ticker. Discovered it does not. Bought Virgin Galactic instead because it also involves space. Virgin Galactic is down 47% this month.
The research note did not explain how clients should express bullish conviction on an asset with no ticker, no public float, and no mechanism for price discovery outside Elon's margin calls. Table-pounding typically requires a table. Also a thing to buy. Morgan Stanley provided neither.
SiTime makes timing chips. EchoStar runs satellites. Warner Music sells you the same Dua Lipa song sixteen times across sixteen subscription services. All fine companies. All traded publicly. None of them generate the same buzz as telling wealth management clients they should definitely buy the company they definitely cannot buy.
Some intern is getting fired for including SpaceX in a stock picks list. Or promoted. Hard to say anymore. Financial media covered it without irony. Headlines screamed about Morgan Stanley's conviction. Nobody mentioned that conviction without access is just noise with better fonts.
The real alpha was never reading the report in the first place.
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