Markets have always been emotional, but in the last few years, emotion has learned how to travel at internet speed. That is how memes are born. A meme is not a financial argument; it’s a viral identity. It offers belonging, certainty, and the thrill of being early to something important. When memes take hold, investors often confuse collective excitement for conviction, and conviction for truth.
2025 gave us a clear reminder that memes are not an artifact of the past. They are a feature of modern markets. We saw it in stocks, in crypto, and even in the way AI became the year’s dominant investing narrative. The good news is that you don’t need to fear memes. You just need an anchor that memes can’t move. That anchor is meaning.
2025: Meme Stocks Redux
In the summer of 2025, retail speculation returned in a way that felt very familiar to anyone who remembers 2021. A new class of meme stocks took center stage, driven by social-media coordination, app-based trading, and options-fueled short-squeeze narratives.
Business Insider dubbed the group the “DORKs,” shorthand for DNUT (Krispy Kreme), Opendoor, Rocket Lab, and Kohl’s. The numbers captured the phenomenon better than any description could.
Opendoor surged about 310% in a month as online communities rallied around short interest and turnaround hopes. Kohl’s jumped roughly 38% on Reddit-driven speculation, with no fundamental catalyst required. Rocket Lab was up close to 50% in a month amid retail excitement tied to space-sector narratives. Krispy Kreme and GoPro spiked sharply on the same short-squeeze logic, then cooled when the crowd moved on.
These moves weren’t about cash flows, balance sheets, or long-term value. They were about momentum, identity, and community energy. That doesn’t mean every retail investor was reckless. It means that the structure of modern markets makes viral narratives more powerful than they used to be. When trading is frictionless and social proof is constant, excitement becomes a strategy faster than fundamentals can keep up.
Crypto: Classic Cycle Euphoria
Crypto in 2025 was a perfect study in how institutional legitimacy and human psychology can coexist. Crypto grew more institutional, but stayed emotionally wild. On the institutional side, spot Bitcoin ETFs continued to broaden access. Inflows remained positive on the year, even through volatility. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF net creations were about $22.3 billion in 2025 through early December, showing ongoing mainstream demand.
But the emotional side never left. Bitcoin hit an all-time high around $126,000 on October 6, then slid to the low $80,000s within weeks. That is a roughly 35% drawdown, delivered at full speed. Somehow, the term “bear market” never seems to apply to crypto, but that is likely a feature of meme mentality, the “this time it’s different” dodge.
The ETF wrapper didn’t smooth the ride. It transmitted the emotion into traditional portfolios. Spot Bitcoin ETF assets peaked at $169.5B on Oct 6, then dropped to about $120.7B by Dec 4, a $48.9B decline in two months. Most of that drop came from price and sentiment, not from steady outflows.
This is what “institutional but emotional” looks like. The on-ramps became mainstream, while the behavior stayed human. Crypto was still prone to the classic cycle: euphoria near tops, despair near bottoms, and a story that always feels urgent in the moment.
AI Was Real, But Also a Meme
AI was the master narrative of 2025. It drove real productivity investment and real earnings optimism. It also became a canvas for projection and hype. Three statistics say almost everything.
First, the real-economy scale was enormous. Reuters estimates that AI investment in 2025 alone was about $375 billion, more than the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo program. That is a genuine capex wave, not a fad.
Second, markets priced AI winners aggressively. AI-linked stocks outperformed sharply during the year, and index leadership became highly concentrated in those beneficiaries. That translated into big gains for AI platform owners and chip makers, reinforcing the narrative.
Third, the hype signal showed up in valuations. Reuters tracking of private-market AI giants showed valuations climbing at a rate that reflects expectation running ahead of certainty. The story became so dominant that every company and every stock was either “an AI winner or an AI laggard.”
In other words, AI in 2025 was both a legitimate technological shift and a meme-like market story. Both can be true. The risk comes when investors treat real change as cycle-proof, which leads to the most dangerous sentence in investing: “This time it’s different.”
“This Time It’s Different”
Myths are old stories that refuse to die. Memes are new stories that spread faster than the truth. Their overlap zone is where investors get trapped. That overlap is the belief that today’s excitement has escaped history. It is the claim that the innovation, the crowd, or the moment has permanently rewritten market gravity.
Sometimes innovation truly changes the world. But even in those moments, markets still overreact, extrapolate, and price tomorrow as if it has already arrived. Different does not mean immune to cycles. It means the cycle will wear a new costume.
The investor who thrives is not the one who rejects every new thing. It is the one who can hold two truths at once: This phenomenon may be a real change, but a market is still a market.
Meaning is the Evolved Investor’s Unfair Advantage
So what protects investors in the meme era? It isn’t cynicism, it’s meaning. Meaning is the why behind the wealth. It is what keeps your decisions from being hijacked by the crowd’s excitement or the urgency of a narrative. Meaning shows up in three practical ways.
First, legacy is measured in values, not just dollars. Legacy is not only what you leave behind, it’s who you leave behind. It’s children and grandchildren who understand stewardship, responsibility, generosity, and purpose. Some families express legacy through entrepreneurship, others through philanthropy, and others through a life well lived together. But all of them see wealth as a tool, not a scoreboard.
Second, meaning values outcomes over optics. Meaningful wealth management treats the portfolio as a servant of life goals. It starts with outcomes such as sustaining a lifestyle, transferring assets wisely, protecting family security, and creating resilience across generations. When meaning leads, performance becomes context, not identity.
Third, meaning creates advisors built for alignment. The more precise you are about meaning, the harder it is for myths and memes to pull you off course. You demand a process. You demand coordination. You choose advisors whose incentives are designed around your outcomes, not around the crowd’s momentum.
The Simple Year-End Takeaway
2025 reminded us that memes can return quickly and violently, even in an otherwise healthy market. It reminded us that crypto can become institutional and still remain emotionally extreme. It reminded us that AI can be real and still turn into a story that runs ahead of itself.
Memes fade because crowds move on. Meaning compounds because it is yours. If you want to revisit your plan through the lens of purpose, outcomes, and legacy, we would be glad to be part of that conversation.
