I used to think markets moved on information. You know—earnings, cash flow, guidance, innovation, all that clean, spreadsheet-friendly stuff that makes you feel like investing is just math with a little caffeine. Then I started paying attention to what people were actually paying attention to. That’s when everything got weird. Because somewhere between the numbers and the narrative, there’s this invisible force that doesn’t show up in any financial model, doesn’t get discounted in a DCF, and doesn’t care about your valuation discipline. It’s attention. And attention, I’ve realized, doesn’t just influence prices—it distorts them, inflates them, and occasionally hijacks them entirely. Welcome to what I now call the attention premium —the part of a stock’s valuation that exists purely because people can’t stop talking about it. The Moment I Realized Something Was Off I remember the exact moment it clicked. I was watching a stock—nothing special fundamentally, nothing groundbrea...