Moonshot

“You want the Moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.” That of course is George Bailey's famous line from It's a Wonderful Life, intended as romance, not investment advice. Yet it is remarkably appropriate this week.

As a sultry early summer settles over New England with the kind of air you wear rather than breathe, overhead the Moon is waxing crescent, barely visible against the evening sky. You would never know it from down here, where investors are behaving as though it were full, low, and hanging directly above Zoltar, the famous fortune-telling machine from Big.

Wall Street, never content to let NASA have the only launch window, has found its own way to chase the heavens. The SpaceX offering with a valuation drifting toward the trillions, has investors lining up as if Zoltar himself were dispensing allocations. Demand is so intense that even seasoned investors cannot agree on what exactly is being priced: future cash flows or the oldest human impulse there is, which is to look up and want the Moon.

The Knicks, meanwhile, now sit one victory away from completing a moonshot of their own. After half a century of frustration, false starts, and patience bordering on religious devotion, their fans may finally receive a return on their investment.

Every meaningful advance in human history began as a moonshot. Someone looked at a distant objective and declared that, with enough effort, ingenuity, and perhaps a bit of luck, it was reachable after all. Investors live for moonshots, the talented and the reasonable understand that aspiration and execution are not the same thing. Still, even the most disciplined investor is entitled to an occasional moment of exuberance.

A rocket company is worth more than most countries. The Knicks are on the verge of rewarding decades of stubborn faith. Strange times, indeed.

The Moon has seen all of this before. It moves the tides every day. It never mistakes movement for progress. As investors, neither should we.