The Hype Men Have Emerged

Market cicadas... A new crypto ambassador... Harrison Ford's favorite saddle... Chimps throwing feces... It's nice to feel like James Bond... What Dan Ives and JJJ mean for the markets...

For 17 years, periodical cicadas stay quietly underground...  

These little insect nymphs live in burrows 2 feet under the surface. Then, all of a sudden, after years of silence, they're everywhere... You can't escape seeing and hearing them.

But you know that it won't last, and they'll be gone again soon.

These days, another brood is emerging...

It has also lain dormant underground for years. Now that enough time has passed, and the atmosphere has reached a certain temperature, it's coming out to reproduce before vanishing again into the earth.

I (Dan Ferris) shared one example of this new cicada species in last Friday's Digest... what I called "Pee Wee Herman on acid." 

That was my nickname for Wall Street analyst Dan Ives, since he claims his stock picks (overvalued mega-caps) are inspired by his loud, busy, juvenile fashion sense.

And as I explained last week, Ives has a new graffiti-covered clothing line – so far consisting of two shirts. To me, this is a massive sentiment indicator. It shows that Ives is making a lot of noise, and everyone is hearing it.

Likewise, hypesters of various varieties have once again begun to appear in financial markets – for the purpose of reproducing amid the most expensive stock market in history.

The time is right. The market is hot. The swarms are emerging from their yearslong slumber. And this week, another potentially even more destructive variety than Ives has crawled out of its burrow...

NBA star Jaren Jackson Jr. has become the first 'global sports ambassador' for the crypto exchange BTCC...

The new partnership featuring JJJ, as he's widely known, covers BTCC's homepage... with the exchange urging you to "champion your trading game."

I'm immediately reminded of the celebrities who jumped on the crypto bandwagon over the last several years, only to quickly regret it.

Perhaps most famously, football star Tom Brady and his then-wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, became brand ambassadors for Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud-riddled crypto exchange FTX in 2021.

The two were paid a total of $48 million in FTX stock, and they promoted the exchange in a 2022 Super Bowl ad and other marketing efforts. FTX declared bankruptcy that same year – rendering its shares worthless – and Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Brady and Bündchen might be the most famous, but they weren't the only celebrity crypto touts.

Boxer Floyd Mayweather posted on Twitter in August 2017, "You can call me Floyd Crypto Mayweather from now on." In 2018, he agreed to pay more than $600,000 for failing to disclose at least $300,000 in payments from crypto-token issuers.

Oscar-winning actor and recording artist Jamie Foxx endorsed crypto exchange Cobinhood in September 2017. Foxx endorsed one coin that was handled so poorly, including the payment of 100% bonuses to private presale participants (letting them pay half the price everyone else paid), that Cobinhood had to issue a public apology for it.

We could go on... but you can just run a search for "celebrity crypto endorsements" and learn that, among many others, the likes of Matt Damon, Reese Witherspoon, and Gwyneth Paltrow also endorsed cryptos in various ways, all of which ended badly.

I wonder how long it'll take JJJ to join the ranks of regret...

If JJJ knows anything about crypto, nobody mentioned that in BTCC's public statement about the partnership. The company's head of branding, Aaryn Ling, put it like this...

Jaren brings authenticity, consistency, and a championship mindset – values that mirror what we've built at BTCC over the past 14 years... We're not here for hype – we're here for substance and Jaren's personality and traits embodies all that as a sporting, cultural and lifestyle icon. We welcome Jackson to the BTCC family and are excited for what is to come!

JJJ's own statement is similar...

I'm very excited to join the BTCC family. They're not just another crypto brand – they've been in it for over a decade, and that kind of consistency means something to me. I've always believed in doing the work, staying disciplined, and thinking long-term, whether that's in basketball or building your future. Partnering with a platform that shares that mindset is a natural step for me, and I look forward to this journey.

Celebrity endorsements are silly. Do I really believe Morgan Freeman and Peter Dinklage appeared in an ad for Doritos and Mountain Dew Ice because they just love them so much? I bet they didn't even know Mountain Dew Ice existed before agreeing to do the ad.

Now, say the Indiana Jones star Harrison Ford endorsed the saddle brand he has used for years on his favorite horse at his Wyoming ranch. That might mean something.

But when a basketball star who might not know a blockchain from a block of ice puts his face on a crypto exchange's website, it means this marketing push isn't appealing to anyone's logic.

It's like chimps throwing their feces at zookeepers...

According to the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada, in the wild, chimpanzees' favored projectiles are rocks and sticks. But if you lock them in a cage, they'll throw something they know will get a rise out of their targets.

Likewise, BTCC is flinging JJJ at the public to get their attention.

BTCC wants the world to feel the same way about its business that it feels about JJJ. It's a pure emotional appeal and nothing more.

Emotional appeals are all well and good for the makers of, say, clothing or perfume. I feel good wearing the same polo shirt Daniel Craig wore in his first James Bond film, Casino Royale.

But with investment-related products and services, that type of appeal seems less appropriate. Investing is serious business, and your investments should be based on research, experience, and accumulated wisdom.

Given that emotional decision-making is more likely to lead to investment losses than anything else, succumbing to overt emotional appeals not backed up by rigorous facts and research (like we do at Stansberry Research) is not merely inappropriate. It's hazardous to your financial health.

With its endorsement, BTCC's goal is to plant a simple heuristic in the customer's mind: JJJ is good, therefore JJJ plus BTCC means BTCC is also good.

Customers feel like they can safely substitute how they feel about JJJ for the due diligence they should do. Unfortunately for them, no endorsement from anyone – not even Warren Buffett – is a suitable substitute for that.

God help BTCC's poor customers if – like Mayweather, Foxx, and Brady before them – JJJ lends his name, and the powerful emotional wallop it packs, to specific cryptocurrency offerings. Since nearly all of the more than 19.5 million cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap.com are worthless garbage, the results will be predictably disastrous.

Doritos, Mountain Dew Ice, cryptos... it's all junk. And the most likely outcome for customers who fall for the pitch is the loss of their health and wealth.

At least Ives' followers won't lose all their money...

Some of the companies he covers, including Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), and Amazon (AMZN), are some of the greatest businesses that have ever existed. They'll very likely still be around and still be doing the same thing in 10 or 20 years.

These stocks would be great investments if you could buy them at a price that promised a reasonable expectation of capital preservation and a decent rate of return. They're cash-gushers with great products and services. They have a lot of value that's probably not going away any time soon.

I doubt investors will make much money from buying these stocks at today's prices. But they're not going to zero.

However, all cryptos from bitcoin on down are speculations. I happen to believe bitcoin and a few others are excellent speculations... But that's a lot different than classifying them as investments that are highly likely to preserve your capital and provide a reasonable return. And many of them are worth nothing at all.

My colleague Eric Wade, who just released a new presentation this week, is the opposite of JJJ... a cryptocurrency expert who can sort through all the garbage to dispassionately recommend winner after winner.

If you're going to invest your money in crypto (or stocks), you need to be capable of conducting legitimate research and analysis – or at least of trusting the right expert to guide you along.

A Wall Street analyst who claims his goofy clothes and stock picks are an expression of the same viewpoint is bad enough. A crypto company flinging a celebrity at its customers to inspire trust in the riskiest investment products ever to exist is quite another thing altogether.

I'm not even saying BTCC doesn't deserve trust. I honestly don't know, because I've never used it. I'm just saying that here we are again at the celebrity crypto-endorsement carnival. How could anyone possibly expect it to turn out differently than it has in the past?

Using the term 'ambassador' just adds to BTCC's hype...

The term is clearly designed to add gravitas to JJJ's presence, like he's representing the United States in international trade negotiations. If BTCC's marketing folks were more honest, they would call JJJ something else entirely: a hype man.

The term "hype man" comes from the world of rap music. It refers to a supporting vocalist who improvises interjections between a lead rapper's lyrics. The hype man's purpose is the same as JJJ's: to get the crowd more emotionally riled up and connected with what's happening on stage.

Beware celebrities pitching cryptos. They generally don't understand that they've lent their names and reputations to the riskiest financial object in all recorded history.

That doesn't mean crypto has no value. It is, in my opinion, a worthwhile experiment. With a total market cap of $4 trillion today, it is a grand experiment. But it is a highly speculative experiment nonetheless.

As a financial undertaking, it requires tight control of your emotions and even tighter control of your wallet.

I'm dwelling on folks like Dan Ives and Jaren Jackson Jr. for a specific reason...

It's the same reason that they're such effective hype men: because you're a human being, not a computer. Stories about colorful individuals are a better way to paint a vivid picture of an overhyped, overvalued market in your mind than all the statistics I could ever muster.

So get used to this sort of thing... By the time I write next Friday's Digest, perhaps some other lively fool will emerge to illustrate some other type of extreme market excess. Like I said last week, "As market excesses get crazier, my job gets easier."

Well... at least the part of my job that's writing to you about the market. At the same time, this mega-bubble stock market makes it much more difficult for value investors like me to recommend stock bargains.

If I'm right about where the market is headed over the next few years, the hype men will once again return to being rich movie stars and athletes who know nothing about finance.

The market cicadas will go dormant for another cycle.

And stock picking will get a lot easier.

New 52-week highs (as of 8/14/25): Electronic Arts (EA), Equinox Gold (EQX), iShares MSCI Italy Fund (EWI), iShares MSCI Spain Fund (EWP), FirstCash (FCFS), Lynas Rare Earths (LYSDY), New Gold (NGD), S&P Global (SPGI), ProShares Ultra Semiconductors (USD), Telefônica Brasil (VIV), and Vanguard S&P 500 Fund (VOO).

A quiet mailbag today... Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.

Good investing,

Dan Ferris
Medford, Oregon
August 15, 2025