The Daejon Love Stock Market
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Words cannot do justice to the sheer idiocy of the story that broke this past week. It is hilarious, depressing, fascinating and deeply embarrassing for the human race all at once…a story that is proof that we may collectively be both far more gullible and far more comfortable with deception than even the most cynical among us previously imagined.
The story centers on a man named Daejon Love who, according to federal prosecutors, allegedly spent years convincing women that he was a professional football player for the San Francisco 49ers when he wasn’t.
Not trying out for the 49ers. Not once affiliated with the team. Not played professionally somewhere else and exaggerated the details. He convinced women that he was an actual NFL player for one of the most famous franchises in American sports when we wasn’t.
Yes. You read that right. In an era in which the entirety of all human knowledge is accessible from a 6 inch by 2 inch rectangle sitting in literally everyone’s front pocket, this 35 year old allegedly constructed an elaborate fictional life around himself that everyone believed and no one took the time to fact check. He did it by, among other things, carrying a 49ers helmet and gear around with him and wearing them…no matter how absolutely f*cking ridiculous it looked…all the time.
He even had a 49ers birthday cake made with his name on it and apparently created a video of himself “signing” with the team. He carried the helmet everywhere, including to the beach, where he filmed himself running some of the worst wide receiver routes ever captured on camera while some rando with a vermicelli noodle for an arm underthrew him passes as he lumbered around full sized telephone company construction cones set up on a beach.
Eventually, according to reporting on the FBI investigation, Love’s fake online footprint became convincing enough that search engines and artificial intelligence occasionally helped perpetuate it. AI started listing him as a professional NFL wide receiver when he wasn’t.
I couldn’t help but read the story yesterday and realize it is a perfect analogue to our modern stock market. You don’t have to be an actual NFL player anymore. You just need the helmet, the jersey, some followers, a few pictures standing next to expensive shit and enough people repeating the story. Eventually an algorithm looks around, sees that everybody else appears to believe you’re an NFL player and concludes that you must, in fact, be an NFL player.
But there’s also a growing number of Daejon Love companies in today’s market, because somewhere along the way Wall Street decided that actually turning a profit no longer mattered. If Jerry Rice is a fat free cash flow yield, Daejon Love is the 10-K of a company posting massive losses while pointing to its revenue, narrative and bullshit future projections instead of its net income and capital needs.
Nowadays, revenue can be projected decades years into the future and slapped with a multiple that would have gotten you involuntarily committed in 1995.
Revenue projections are faking you’re an NFL player when you’re not. Like with Daejon, narratives get you “investors”. If you’re a 35 year old dipshit pretending to be someone else with all your free time instead of working an actual job for a living, revenue projections get you laid under false pretenses by women who’d never want to talk to you otherwise....(READ THIS FULL COLUMN 100% FREE HERE).