The Wildest Stock-Market Prices Ever

Why pay $1 when you can pay $2 or $12 for the same thing? Here is a tour through the most entertaining anomalies in history

- Jonathan Weil

Seasoned investors have a chuckle when the investing masses pay two bucks for a dollar in the market, and sometimes they even hop onto the crazy train briefly themselves if they think it can temporarily go to three dollars. But pricing anomalies can be a sign of froth for the broader market.

In the latest high-profile example, MicroStrategy's share price implies a value for its main asset-a huge stash of bitcoins-that is more than double the price of bitcoin on the open market.

Even more extreme, a closedend investment fund called the Destiny Tech100 recently was trading for 11 times as much as the fund's net asset value, or NAV, as of Sept. 30, down from as high as 21 times earlier this year. Investors have been clamoring to buy shares of the fund, best known by its ticker symbol, DXYZ, because it owns shares of Elon Musk's SpaceX and other closely held tech companies. Individuals have few other ways to gain exposure to them.

A new phenomenon? Not at all. There are no new stories, only new investors, as the saying goes. Nonetheless, situations such as these are strange and worthy of a good gawking.

They violate the principle known as the law of one price, which holds that identical goods should have identical prices.

They also can be a symptom of speculative euphoria in the stock market, although it is impossible to know how long the mood might last or whether it will intensify.

"Weird things can happen without bubbles, but bubbles can't happen without weird things," says Owen Lamont, a portfolio manager at Acadian Asset Management who has studied such anomalies for decades, dating back to his days as a Yale finance professor. "When there are optimistic retail investors, they will overpay in crazy ways, and you can't always tell that they're overpaying. But you can tell when there's a substitute that they're ignoring."