The Upward Sloping Demand Curve

Demand curves are usually downward-sloping because people will buy more of a product when it is cheaper and less of it when it is more expensive. See, you just passed 11th grade Economics.
Some things – like stocks, and especially bitcoin – have upward-sloping demand curves, which should be theoretically impossible. But they are observable in the real world – people really want bitcoin when it is expensive, but nobody was interested when it was cheap.
Every day when I am sitting at my computer, stories and anecdotes are pouring in from my readers about how grandma is suddenly interested in bitcoin, or maybe conservative grandma is suddenly interested in tech stocks, when perhaps she should be interested in 1-year bills at 1.66%, which I wrote about last week. Or a 5-year CD ladder for over two percent, which will give you income that is superior to the dividend yield on the S&P 500 index. Or some ultrashort duration bond funds. There are lots of ways to make 2% without taking a whole lot of duration or credit risk. Hardly any at all.
But nobody is interested in making 2 percent! People want to make 79,000% percent, which is about what you would have made in bitcoin had you held it since inception. You’ve seen these comments floating around the internet. ‘If you invested $10,000 in bitcoin in 2010, you would have $710,458,109 today.’

This post was published at Mauldin Economics on DECEMBER 14, 2017.