Gazing at the New Year’s ball for Wall Street – here are some things to look out for in 2024

There’s a general feeling among Wall Street’s top players that 2024 is going to be a really insane year — far eclipsing 2023 in terms of crazy town. That says something, of course.

In 2023, lots of weird stuff went down: A former president, who might be our next president, was criminally indicted a bunch of times. Recently, a Senate aide was caught filming some amateur gay porn (as opposed to the real stuff) inside an upper-chamber hearing room.

Still, predicting inordinate weirdness is a fool’s game because most such extreme predictions often never materialize. If Armageddonists were right about the environment in pushing all those dopey ESG mandates, the East River would be covering Manhattan and I wouldn’t be hosting a dinner at Elio’s this week.

So in pulling out my 2024 crystal ball, I’m going to focus on stuff I think has a better-than-even chance of actually happening. In no particular order of importance, here are my not-too-extreme predictions for 2024:

Meme-stock investors will continue to get creamed. If you don’t believe me, just take a gander at the social-media hysteria surrounding something called MMTLP, a delisted preferred stock that attracted an insane amount of interest from the meme crowd in 2022.

The meme money — retail investors who seek to prop up shares of balance-sheet-challenged companies — plowed into something that was supposed to be a stake in some oil wells somewhere in West Texas. That’s not why many bought this thing, however.