Dr. Adam Link: Stop Paying for Someone Else's Exit Plan By Buying Their IPO

The market right now is touching valuation levels we haven't seen since right before the dot-com bubble burst. Retail investors are piling into AI and space stocks, chasing SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs like it's 1999 all over again — and Dr. Adam Link, CFP, founder of Fireweed Capital, joins Mookie on this episode of Bald Ambition to explain why the euphoria and the underlying risk have almost nothing to do with each other.Adam's central reframe should change how you think about every IPO headline you read: when you buy into a hot IPO as a retail investor, you're not catching early-stage riches — you're the exit plan. Your money is what turns an early employee's shares into a house and a car. The fortunes in companies like SpaceX were already made years ago; what's left for the public is a bet on the next decade, not a quick flip. Adam's own advice to a client asking about SpaceX: don't buy it because you think the stock goes up next week. Buy it because you actually believe in a multiplanetary future, because that's the only version of this bet that makes sense.From there, Mookie and Adam dig into how professional money actually behaves in a market like this. Adam walks through his firm's approach to a hypothetical $100 portfolio: the first question isn't "where do I invest," it's "should I be invested at all right now," his current model holding 14% in plain cash as a defensive position because avoiding a downturn compounds better long-term than chasing every rally. He also draws a sharp, funny distinction between real algorithmic active management and what he calls "four guys in a conference room with a box of donuts," the kind of gut-feel "active management" a lot of investors are unknowingly paying for.The conversation closes on crypto, where Adam is blunt: the millionaire-maker days of putting in a thousand dollars and waking up rich are over. He tracks where the speculative money actually went instead — into prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, and increasingly into perpetual futures — and makes the case that blockchain technology will absolutely transform financial infrastructure, just not through the decentralized, governmentless future crypto's earliest believers were promised. It'll be Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Western Union building the rails, not getting cut out of them.The GuestDr. Adam Link, CFP, holds a Doctorate in Computer Science and founded Fireweed Capital in 2022, based in northern Minnesota. Before launching his own firm, he spent nearly a decade in the crypto industry and worked in actively managed portfolios at Merrill Lynch. Fireweed Capital runs eight rules-based, algorithmic trading strategies for clients, built on the belief that avoiding market downturns — not just chasing the upside — is what actually compounds wealth over time.More from Dr. Adam Link: https://fireweedcapital.com/Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show