Let me tell you an old story from 110 years ago. If it bears any resemblance to recent storage/chip market trends, it's purely coincidental.

In 1916, Brooklyn Dodgers player Hy Myers went to his boss Charles Ebbets to negotiate a salary raise. His bargaining chip was:
"I have a very profitable ranch back home. If you don't raise my pay, I'll just retire and raise cattle."

The boss didn't believe him and decided to visit the farm in person. When Myers heard the boss was coming, he borrowed all the cattle from his neighbors overnight and herded them into his own corral.

The boss arrived, saw the full corral, and thought: "Wow, this guy really doesn't need the money." He agreed to the raise on the spot.

Now we're in 2026... this story seems to have played out in reverse, with "cattle" replaced by "GPUs."

Myers borrowed cattle to say "I'm wealthy." Tech companies hoard cards and computing power to say "I'm scarce—there's never enough compute, so you must give me a high valuation."

Wall Street, like that team owner back then, has personally visited the farm: capex in real dollars, data centers rising from the ground, orders booked through the year after next... After seeing it, they gave out a trillion-dollar valuation.

Using a visible circle of assets to make the other party believe a hard-to-disprove expectation.

What happened next is well known: On July 1, Meta said, "I have extra cattle in my corral—you can rent them." And Meta wasn't the first. xAI had already leased Colossus's compute power to Anthropic and Google. Those who hoarded cards are now selling to each other. The market is starting to doubt: is scarcity really real?

In this round of the storage/chip rally, half of it is indeed strong earnings, but the other half is probably a panic premium driven by the "never enough" sentiment.

This premium is likely to be squeezed out by some facts. The recent downturn in storage stocks can be seen, to some extent, as a realization of that premium.

At this point, the ones most wronged are the brothers who bought in at the top during that premium sentiment.

Just like that winter of 1916, the ones who ultimately lost money were neither the cattle-borrower nor the cattle-raiser—they were the boss who thought he had seen it with his own eyes and therefore couldn't be wrong.