The Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show opens this week. Yacht executives are betting on wealthy Americans.
Bold strategy. Sell to the people with money.
The headline says a rising tide lifts all yachts. Nice line. It skips the part where the tide is a stock market, the yachts are owned by people who already own the stock market, and you are standing on the dock holding a sandwich.
A tide lifts boats because boats float. You do not float. You have a margin call and a Discord server.
The industry is not worried about you. It never was. A yacht is not sold to a man who checks his portfolio eleven times before lunch. It is sold to a man who has no idea what his portfolio is doing and employs a guy for that.
That guy has a boat too.
Here is the mock-serious analysis. The yacht business depends on a small number of very rich buyers feeling very good about their net worth. Their net worth depends on asset prices. Asset prices depend on a thousand things I find irrelevant. A chart is a chart. A boat is a boat. One of them has a bar.
Retail traders will read this and feel hope. They will think the wealth tide reaches them. They will buy a yacht stock. It will be a boat show sponsor's supplier's parent company. It will drop four percent on a Tuesday.
You will say it is a long-term hold. You said that about the last one.
The wealthy are fine. The brokers are fine. The guy who polishes the brass is fine, probably.
You, meanwhile, are the only thing in Fort Lauderdale that is underwater and not insured.
Photo by Viktor Ritsvall on Unsplash
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