Two Nobel Prize winners sat on the same stage and couldn't agree on whether markets make sense. One of them had a story about a mutual fund that isn't allowed to invest in the one place it's named after.
Eugene Fama built the entire theory that markets are efficient. Richard Thaler spent his career finding the cracks in it. Chicago Booth put them in the same room for a debate called The Big Question, and neither one backed down.
Thaler's favorite piece of evidence has nothing to do with a crash or a bubble. It's a closed-end fund with the ticker symbol CUBA. It has never invested a dollar in Cuba, because that would be illegal, and there's nothing there to buy anyway. For years it traded at a steady 10 to 15 percent discount to the actual value of what it held. Then, out of nowhere, it started selling at a 70 percent premium. Same assets. Same fund. People were paying a fortune for three letters on a ticker.
Fama's answer wasn't to deny it. It was to ask a harder question back: even if a handful of prices go strange, does that mean the whole market is broken, or does it mean a few investors are chasing something that has nothing to do with value? He's spent fifty years arguing you can't tell the difference between a bubble and a rational repricing until years after the fact, and usually not even then.
Neither man walked off that stage having converted the other. Fama still believes prices reflect nearly everything knowable. Thaler still believes people trade on stories, habits, and a ticker symbol that reminds them of a country. Chicago Booth didn't edit the disagreement out. They put the whole unresolved fight on video and left it there.
It's free on their site right now, two Nobel laureates who've spent decades in the same building never fully agreeing on what a price actually means.
$RR This looks like it wants $2+ pretty soon.
Have been building a position in my son's investment account as part of his "high risk" exposure in this name since he said he wants to own a "robot stock".