Move over, French bulldog. There is a new breed that is the talk of the dog park, and it got there the way everything gets there now: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have one. It is a Samoyed — a big, white, perpetually smiling Siberian sled dog that currently ranks 55th in American popularity. Breeders, the Journal reports, are hoping for a halo effect.
They have good reason. The last time this happened, the French bulldog went from curiosity to the number-one dog in the country, and along the way the price of a puppy went somewhere between a used car and a new one.
How halos end
This is the part the breeders know and the buyers forget. The French-bulldog boom created a shortage, the shortage created a price spike, the price spike created an industry of people breeding as many as they could as fast as they could, and the rush produced a generation of dogs with the breathing and spine problems the breed is now famous for. Demand driven by who else owns something is the purest kind of demand, and the purest kind of demand is the kind that does not care what it is buying.
None of that is the dog’s fault. The Samoyed is, by most accounts, a lovely animal that sheds roughly its own body weight weekly. It is simply about to meet a lot of people who chose it for a reason that has nothing to do with it.
The version with a ticker
We run a financial-planning practice, so forgive us: this is the stock-tip story. A famous person is seen with something. The thing gets expensive. People who would never have looked at it twice buy it — not because they have assessed it, but because of who else has it. Later, quietly, the famous person has something else, and the people who bought at the top discover that what they actually own is a fluffy white reason to have asked more questions.
The evergreen rule: buy the dog, not the owner. Evaluate the thing for what it is and what it will cost you to keep. That applies to a Samoyed, a stock that a billionaire mentioned on a podcast, and a fund your brother-in-law will not stop talking about at Thanksgiving.
If you already own the dog, congratulations on your good taste and your new vacuum cleaner. If you own the stock, the question is the same one we ask about every concentrated position: did you choose this size on purpose, or did somebody famous choose it for you?