The Big Take
A Wild, Emotional Year Has Changed Investing—Maybe Forever
Everyone seemed to become a trader, taking chances on outlandish ideas as excitement and fascination mixed with fear and greed.
There was a huge merger in 2021: the combination of popular culture and modern finance. Tom Brady and Matt Damon were suddenly shilling for cryptocurrency exchanges. Digital tokens that started off as elaborate pranks represented tens of billions of dollars of paper wealth. And cartoon pictures of apes were selling for millions of dollars on something called the nonfungible token market, which almost no one had heard of in the long-ago days of 2020.