A graded Pokémon card sealed in a plastic slab. A stock that rises because a subreddit decided it should. A crypto token whose only collateral is the hope that someone else will buy it later. A prediction-market contract on whether it will rain in London on Saturday. These objects can look like jokes about value, yet people pour real money, attention, status, and hope into them.
This seminar treats speculation as ordinary social action rather than as a market pathology or a failure of individual reason. Speculation is a way of relating to an uncertain future, and the forms it takes are patterned by culture, networks, platforms, and the devices that make a future tradable. Our recurring question: what makes speculative value socially durable, even when everyone knows it might vanish?
After building a conceptual toolkit (valuation, liquidity, fictional expectations, market devices, financialization), we test it on contemporary cases—sealed collectibles, meme stocks, crypto and memecoins, NFTs, prediction markets, sports betting—and collect data on them directly. The course is open to ISA students and assumes no prior background in finance or economic sociology.
