Is Fomo the new greed when it comes to investing?

IF INVESTORS insist on trying to time their moves in stock markets, said Warren Buffett almost 20 years ago, they should be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy only when others are fearful.

It is good contrarian stuff. And the time-honoured depiction of markets in the permanent push-pull grip of these two animal spirits has an enduring appeal because (nuance and caveats aside) it does actually explain a lot of market psychology quite neatly. The difficulty arises, as now, when greed and fear start defining themselves as the same thing.

In the parsing of the FTX collapse — and a string of other recent debacles that seem ominously comparable as phenomena of the loose money era — fear of missing out (Fomo) has repeatedly emerged as the critical ingredient in the investment build-up before the fall. Fear, in this usage of the word and in the context of the FTX and wider crypto run-up, was creating something that looked an awful lot like irrational exuberance. This exuberance, in turn, was fuelling something that behaved from a market standpoint an awful lot like greed does during its periodic stints at the wheel.