The larger bubble is that the market has not yet come to realize how its shifted from day traders on the floor to everyone being day traders. Previously, the day to day movements were mostly made by traditional traders, working off analysts etc. but today, I think the majority of people doing day to day trade are actually regular people globally.

Everything is becoming meme stocks, it's becoming gambling and amateuristic in nature. People do not invest with the narrative and speculation of a company's worth, based on finances and its operation. They rather invest based on popularity and positive headlines in online news and social media.

So everything has become artificially speculative, with no grounding that defines a company's actual worth. We see it primarily in the tech sector, but it exists everywhere.

Stocks are slowly becoming crypto in nature; a company's worth tied to popularity rather than actual business worth. — Christoffer

I think this is a brilliant analysis! I was thinking a couple days ago of discussing with Sonnet 4.5 or GPT-5 about a feature of financial and predictions markets that had bothered me for years. I always felt like those markets (and day trading) couldn't possibly offer any genuine opportunity for investment (with positive expected value) in spite of there being many investors that nourished those markets, as it were, on the basis or transparently unreasonable long run expectations. This led to a paradox. How is not my knowledge of the unreasonableness of those expectations functionally equivalent to a sort of insider knowledge?

The paradox can be encapsulated thus: how can markets be both rational (and hence unexploitable) and irrational at once?

Your meme-speculation framing resolves the paradox, I think, as well as explaining what's insidious about this new emergent phenomenon that further rots the capitalist/neoliberal system from within (with a rot that takes the form of a sort of soapy bubbly foam, in this particular case). Attempting to exploit the disease by means of investment just makes us join an already saturated pool of meme investors and can only yield break-even expected returns, on any time frame, at best. I'm glad I never even tried, moral considerations aside.

On edit: This was the occasion for me to finally share my puzzlement with GPT-5, who greatly helped in articulating the theoretical underpinnings of the issue by contrasting the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) with Keynes’s beauty-contest dynamics, and then commented on Christopher's insight and my reaction to it.

Interesting, reminds me of the antique trade. Traders are looking for what’s in fashion and offloading what’s going out of fashion. What you guys describe is on a much more massive and volatile scale.

The problem I see here is where the foam becomes a house of cards. Inflated by hardware and resources which have no other use than the use they currently have. So when the house of cards collapses, whole swathes of hardware become useless and worthless. Also there is what looks like economies propped up by these bubbles. Economies which have become unsustainable due to Covid shutdown disruption, and tariffs war instability.