it's definitely a bit of a generational thing. i think as the robinhood demographic inherits wealth from the boomer jp morgan demographic, this attention-centric, proto-social investing behavior will only become more influential in the market
we're already seeing some interesting examples of companies leaning into this. AMC doing free popcorn for stonk holders, tesla offering stonk holders early access to the cybertruck, and palantir going out of its way to engage retail investors
i think this trend of companies realizing that retail is an important hodler constituency will only rise over time and prob shift how these co's do PR and IR comms
re: quantifying and valuing attention
this is something i really struggled with while writing the piece. i initially wanted to try and quantify + offer up some rough framework for how to think about valuations. but the truth is, i don't really have a great idea here, or at least not something i'd be comfortable acting on and putting my personal capital at risk. so, the piece erred a bit more on the side of theory than i would have liked. maybe I'll do a follow-up at some point with some more practical applications of attention-driven investing
the hard part is attention is much more subjective than, say, revenue or cash flows, which makes it harder to put 'attention' into a financial model. people have historically looked at stuff like sentiment data from socials for rough proxies. i think this stuff maybe works on shorter time horizons. but I'm always skeptical of using this as the sole justification for longer-term positions. imo the best way to play the attention game in crypto is to simply identity narratives that you think have some sorta durability (months not days) and buy coins that fit into them before the market fully catches on. dogwifhat is a good past example of this. all you had to do was see doge/shib from last cycle and bonk early this cycle and then people talking about WIF. the politifi meta is also interesting right now bc the attention there seems more durable than most other stuff