The traditional stock market has been adopting strategies from the crypto market, which has led to new trends and challenges. Low float, big narrative, high market cap are now common characteristics of speculation in this financial cycle.
Take Zhipu's stock price, for example. It surged 25 times in six months after its Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing. However, the company had only about 17.35 million shares available for free trading on the market, representing less than 4% of its total share capital. This is a typical example, but not unique.
SpaceX was listed with a valuation of $1.77 trillion, but only 4.3% of its shares were publicly circulating. Nasdaq directly abolished the 10% minimum public shareholding threshold that had been in place for decades to accommodate its listing. SPCX's market cap peaked at over $2 trillion, but its daily trading volume was only about $100 million.
The era of pricing based on financial reports has come to an end again. The most sought-after companies in the AI industry are actually losing money, yet their stock prices have surged significantly. CoreWeave's revenue grew from $16 million in 2022 to $5.1 billion in 2025, but its net losses expanded from $31 million to $1.2 billion.
Traditional pricing methods such as DCF and PE are no longer effective in valuing these new assets. The core assumption of traditional pricing methods is that future cash flows can be extrapolated from historical financial data. However, the revenue curve for AI companies depends on leaps in model capabilities, network effects of open-source ecosystems, and sudden shifts in policy and industry cycles.
The market's tolerance for narrative-driven investing is rising because those who believed the narrative have indeed made money. Those who bought Nvidia without looking at financial reports made ten times their money, while those who bought Zhipu made 24 times their money.