> I just don't believe even a person with a poor understanding of the market or the underlying technology tosses out bets so casually based only on a name, in the sense that they believe 'oh wow this is actually AGI, I should buy it'.

The CUBA ticker shot up in value after Obama lifted sanctions on Cuba, despite the fact that company doesn't invest in any Cuba companies. People will invest in things just based on a name. https://acrinv.com/silly-true-market-anomaly/

The average person generally doesn't know a lot about anything other than the specific niche that they do for a living. This isn't a dig at their intelligence, or at least I'm not excluding myself. I know a fair bit about computer science, but only a very lay person's understanding of basically everything else.

For example, I know nothing about electric or hydrogen powered cars, so I wasn't able to call bullshit with the Nikola scam a few years ago. I fortunately didn't buy any Nikola stock, but that wasn't because of any insight on my end, just didn't buy it. I am very glad that people who do know about this kind of stuff call it out when companies lie to potential investors.

> People will invest in things just based on a name

Right but it doesn't follow from this that those people were tricked in some way. They can be second- or third-order bettors. Even the most sophisticated quant shop in the world, the literal sharpest players in the market, can bet 'just based on a name' if it fits into some theory about market dynamics or whatever.

> The average person generally doesn't know a lot about anything other than the specific niche that they do for a living.

But so what, it doesn't follow that because they don't know about X they are willing to trivially gamble significant amounts of money on X without even the most basic of research. "I don't know much about this so won't place a bet I'm not willing to lose" is not something that requires any great intelligence.