There’s a certain kind of investor who treats the stock market like a casino attached to a caffeine laboratory. Every week they’re chasing the next AI moonshot, the next quantum computing miracle, the next startup promising to “disrupt” an industry nobody asked to be disrupted in the first place. These people wake up every morning spiritually prepared to lose 18% of their net worth before breakfast. I used to envy them. Not because they were making money — most of them were just aggressively converting optimism into tax-loss harvesting opportunities — but because they seemed to possess something I lacked: faith. Faith in exponential growth. Faith in innovation. Faith that a company with no profits, no moat, and a CEO who dresses like a motivational podcaster was somehow worth 47 times future sales. Then reality happened. Inflation happened. Rate hikes happened. Market corrections happened. Geopolitical chaos happened. And suddenly investors rediscovered something Wall Street p...