The Age of Everything & Excess

It’s October 2033. You get a notification about the markets on your smart glasses.

You glance to the right to dismiss it as you mow your yard in the fading evening light.

The market is recovering from a sell-off over the summer.

Your retirement is going fine. You hung it up in 2029. You sometimes wonder what life would look like if you had played your cards differently back in the 2020s. But AI took over the world, the markets and economy changed, and you just got swept up in it all.

You feel like you live in the age of everything and excess.

I want to give you a window into that future this week. This newsletter is called tmrw for a reason, not today or yesterday.

My job is to keep you informed about what you are investing in now and to prepare you for what’s coming next.

Your money and the markets are always evolving, as you’ll see in a moment.

It’s critical that you understand some of the ideas, the people, and the forces shaping the markets and their future.

The implications are real.

Why?

Because markets reward investors who have an edge.

And the greatest edge I want you to have is wisdom and knowledge.

The story above is likely what life will look like in the 2030s. You will have instant access to everything. Markets will never close. There will be AI news anchors. Reality itself may start to feel optional.

Today I want to share a few thoughts about where I see the world heading, particularly the markets, and how these changes will shape your financial future. Chances are, in ten years, you’ll still have a brokerage account, an IRA, and perhaps a new kind of account that doesn’t exist yet. Those accounts will be filled with investments, themes, and strategies that you’ll rely on to put food on the table and gas in the car.

Your future portfolio is being shaped by what is taking form today.

These new trends run deep. They prey on human weakness. And they will affect you and your family in fascinating ways.

You don’t need to wait until 2033 to see what this future looks like. It’s already happening.

It’s October 2033. You get a notification about the markets on your smart glasses.

You glance to the right to dismiss it as you mow your yard in the fading evening light.

The market is recovering from a sell-off over the summer.

Your retirement is going fine. You hung it up in 2029. You sometimes wonder what life would look like if you had played your cards differently back in the 2020s. But AI took over the world, the markets and economy changed, and you just got swept up in it all.

You feel like you live in the age of everything and excess.

I want to give you a window into that future this week. This newsletter is called tmrw for a reason, not today or yesterday.

My job is to keep you informed about what you are investing in now and to prepare you for what’s coming next.

Your money and the markets are always evolving, as you’ll see in a moment.

It’s critical that you understand some of the ideas, the people, and the forces shaping the markets and their future.

The implications are real.

Why?

Because markets reward investors who have an edge.

And the greatest edge I want you to have is wisdom and knowledge.

The story above is likely what life will look like in the 2030s. You will have instant access to everything. Markets will never close. There will be AI news anchors. Reality itself may start to feel optional.

Today I want to share a few thoughts about where I see the world heading, particularly the markets, and how these changes will shape your financial future. Chances are, in ten years, you’ll still have a brokerage account, an IRA, and perhaps a new kind of account that doesn’t exist yet. Those accounts will be filled with investments, themes, and strategies that you’ll rely on to put food on the table and gas in the car.

Your future portfolio is being shaped by what is taking form today.

These new trends run deep. They prey on human weakness. And they will affect you and your family in fascinating ways.

You don’t need to wait until 2033 to see what this future looks like. It’s already happening.

Seems like just another picture of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

But this outfit change caused quite the stir over the summer and became a lightning rod event for the fast-growing prediction markets.

Source: Getty, AAP

When Russia invaded, his attire famously changed to his all-black wartime outfit, as you see on the left.

In early summer of this year, nearly $200 million was wagered on whether he would switch from that outfit to a suit between May 22 and June 30.

The bet was spurred by comments from President Trump earlier in the year about Zelensky wearing a suit.

Think about that for a moment. People spent $200 million betting on a man’s clothing choice over forty days.

Bizarre.

I have no doubt this is the first time in human history that people have bet on a wartime president’s outfit change.

But here we are in 2025, not investing in the future, but betting on it.

This wager happened on Polymarket, a prediction market based in New York City.

A prediction market is a marketplace where people bet on future events, and the prices reflect the crowd’s collective belief about what’s most likely to happen.

Unlike most investing, these events have binary outcomes. You either win or lose all your money.

So who cares?

Because gambling and investing appear to be on a collision course.

While investors today rightly obsess over whether or not we are in an AI bubble, the long term outlook for what investing will look like is becoming more and more clear, with the implications being more and more unclear.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha, particularly men, are being groomed to bet.

Look no further than the explosion of sports betting, which is simply another form of prediction market.

Prediction markets are everywhere, betting on anything and everything. And the financial backers behind them have deep pockets.

Here are a few key milestones just from this year in the predictions markets:

• Robinhood and Truth Social enter prediction markets

• Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the New York Stock Exchange) invests $2 billion into Polymarket.

• Kalshi wins a crucial court case against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, allowing political and sport events contracts to be legal.

• Prediction market volumes top $2 billion per week.

Let me break this down simply, you have major players, including the President to the United States, pushing prediction markets.

This means you, and your 18-year-old son, will soon be able to place a wager on anything, anywhere, at any time.

Meanwhile, Nasdaq, the exchange that lists many of our top tech companies, is preparing to move to 24/5 trading. Pending regulatory approval, markets could be open around the clock during the business week as early as next year.

The stock app on your iPhone, the one you use to check your portfolio, will soon never stop moving.

You will be able to bet on anything, everywhere, anytime.

Remember how I said your edge in all of this needs to be wisdom and knowledge?

You’re going to need both as this new world seeps into the markets, and into our minds.

“Screw it, put it all on red.”

This global push to create prediction markets feels like an attempt to give millions of people an easy way to say, “screw it, put it all on red.”

Investing has always had a degree of speculation, but long-term investing has always been tied to one important concept: profitability.

Creating profits and investing in businesses like Apple, for example, is taking the long view.

Albert Einstein once said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.

Compound interest is how money grows. It always has been, and it takes time.

The problem today is that we all have the equivalent of Albert Einstein sitting on our iPhone home screens through AI.

We are being tempted to think we are smarter than we really are, and it is easier than ever to pair that illusion with instant-access gambling.

What happens when more and more people start to think that is what investing is, like some sort of financial fast-food drive-through where you get what you want in a minute?

I do not have all the answers, but this is where we are headed.

As this unfolds, and to help you resist the animal spirits that rise when markets are ripping higher, here is a simple set of questions to keep at the top of your mind as you invest at record levels:

1. Am I gambling or investing right now?

2. Do I clearly understand how I get my money back?

3. Does this produce profits?

4. What is my timeline for this?

They may seem almost insultingly simple.
And that is the point.

Nearly a billion people will use ChatGPT today. They will all get long, meandering replies that may or may not be helpful. The response will be fast and satisfying, regardless of its accuracy.

We are being wired in real time to expect things faster and faster from ourselves, our family, our work, our clients, our everything, which is the opposite of how long-term investing works.

The generations below us will only know this to be true.

To bring this home:

The world will keep changing, but some things will not. You will still take your grandkids to swimming lessons in ten years. You will still head south for the winter. A new TaylorMade driver will probably cost over a grand in the 2030s.

And those are the things you need an income-producing, inflation-beating portfolio for.

Prediction markets may blur the line between investing and gambling, but that does not mean you have to play that game. Because in every casino, the house always wins.

Stay wise. Stay compounding.

Tom