Final Thoughts: What 400 Years of Market Bubbles Taught Me
Forty-two chapters. Almost a year of posts. Stories spanning from 1637 to 2018, from Amsterdam flower auctions to cryptocurrency exchanges. And here I am, writing the last post in this series.
When I started retelling “From Tulips to Bitcoins” back in March 2025, I thought it would be a fun side project. Read a chapter, write about it, move on. I did not expect it to change how I think about money, markets, and human behavior. But it did.
So let me share what stuck with me after spending all this time with Torsten Dennin’s 42 stories.
The Same Story, Four Hundred Years Apart
If I had to boil down the entire book to one sentence, it would be this: the names change but the story never does.
Dutch merchants buying tulip futures in 1637. Texas oil heirs hoarding silver in 1980. Day traders buying Bitcoin in 2017. Different centuries, different continents, different commodities. Same human emotions driving the same decisions.
Something appears that feels new and exciting. Early buyers make money. Word spreads. More people pile in. Prices go higher because more people are buying, not because the thing is actually worth more. Then one day, somebody tries to sell and nobody is there to buy. Crash.
I wrote about this pattern in the introduction post. By the time I finished the last chapter, I had seen it repeat 42 times. Not approximately. Exactly 42 times. Every single story follows this script. The details are different. The ending is always the same.
Greed and Fear Run the Show
Here is something that surprised me. I came into this book thinking commodity markets are moved by supply and demand. Rational stuff. How much oil does the world need? How much wheat did the harvest produce? Math.
And yes, supply and demand matter. But after 42 chapters, the thing that actually moves prices the most is emotion. Fear and greed. Over and over.
The Hunt brothers did not try to corner silver because of some spreadsheet analysis. They were afraid of paper money losing value. Anthony Ward did not buy 240,000 tons of cocoa because a model told him to. He saw an opportunity to control the supply and get rich. Amaranth did not blow up on natural gas because the weather changed. They blew up because a trader was too proud to admit he was wrong and kept doubling down.
Supply and demand set the range. Human emotions set the extremes.
Weather, War, and Politics
The other thing I did not fully appreciate before this book is how much the physical world matters for commodity prices.
A monsoon fails in India and sugar prices go through the roof. A hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico and zinc becomes expensive. A drought bakes Australia and wheat prices spike. One country decides to restrict rare earth exports and the whole technology industry panics.
We sit in front of our screens watching price charts go up and down. But behind those numbers are actual fields, mines, oil wells, shipping routes. Real physical stuff that gets affected by real weather, real wars, real political decisions. Commodity markets remind you that the economy is not just numbers in a computer. It is things in the ground, things growing in fields, things traveling on ships.
This was my biggest personal takeaway. As someone who spent 20 years in IT, I am used to thinking in abstractions. Software, data, systems. This book brought me back to the physical world. A single frost in Brazil can do more damage to coffee prices than a thousand analysts with fancy models.
My Favorite Stories
After 42 chapters, some stories stay with you more than others. Here are the ones I keep thinking about.
The Bre-X gold fraud. A company valued at $4 billion. Stock up 500 times from its low. And there was never any gold. Not one ounce. The whole thing was made up. A geologist was adding gold dust to drill samples in a jungle in Borneo. When the truth came out, he jumped from a helicopter. The founders ran to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. Regular investors lost everything. This story is the most dramatic in the book and the most infuriating.
Silver Thursday. The Hunt brothers story is almost literary. Their father won an oil fortune in a poker game. The sons tried to corner the entire global silver market. Pushed prices from $2 to $50. Then lost billions in a single day when the exchange changed the rules. From poker winnings to oil empire to silver bankruptcy in two generations. You could not write better fiction.
Chocolate Finger. Anthony Ward buying 7% of the world’s cocoa production. The press calling him Willy Wonka. Sixteen companies filing complaints. And the thing is, it worked. Unlike most stories in this book, the big bet actually paid off. That one stuck with me because it breaks the usual pattern.
The contango trade. Oil traders renting supertankers to store crude oil and sell it later at a higher price. Something about the image of 80 million barrels of oil floating in ships doing nothing, just waiting for prices to go up. It perfectly captures the absurdity of financial markets meeting the physical world.
Tulip mania. Obviously. It is the origin story. Three flower bulbs worth more than a house. Four hundred painters commissioned to paint pictures of tulips that buyers had never seen. It set the template for everything that followed.
Honest Book Review
I spent almost a year with this book, so I think I earned the right to give an honest opinion.
What Dennin did well. The structure is great. Forty-two self-contained stories. You can read them in any order. Each chapter gives you enough context to understand the event without needing to know the previous chapters. He covers a massive range of commodities, from tulips and rice to oil, gold, copper, cocoa, uranium, and crypto. The geographic diversity is also impressive. Stories from the Netherlands, Japan, the United States, Indonesia, Australia, South Africa, Congo, and more.
He also did a good job including real numbers. Prices, dates, quantities, percentages. You can actually follow the math in each story. That is important. A lot of popular finance books go heavy on narrative and light on data. Dennin gives you both.
What could have been better. Some chapters feel a bit too similar in structure. After reading twenty or thirty of them, the pattern of “here is the setup, here is the boom, here is the bust” starts to feel repetitive. That is partly because the stories genuinely follow the same pattern. But a bit more variety in structure would have helped.
Also, the later chapters covering events from 2005 to 2018 sometimes feel like they were written too close to the events. Some of those stories had not fully played out when the book was published in 2019. The battery metals chapter, for example, was written during the 2017 excitement. With hindsight, some of those projections look different now. Earlier chapters about events from the 1800s and 1900s have the advantage of knowing how the story ends.
And a small thing. Some chapters could have been longer. A few of the most interesting stories get only a few pages. I wanted more detail on some of them, particularly Metallgesellschaft and the rare earths story.
Overall verdict. If you are interested in financial history, commodity markets, or just good stories about people making and losing fortunes, this is worth reading. It is not a textbook. It is a collection of 42 stories, each one interesting on its own. You can read it cover to cover or pick chapters that sound interesting. I recommend it, especially for people who think “this time is different” about whatever the current hot thing is. It is never different.
Who Should Read This Book
Yes, if you want to understand how commodity and crypto markets work through real stories instead of theory. If you are interested in financial history. If you want to spot the signs of the next bubble. If you are new to investing and want to learn from other people’s expensive mistakes.
Maybe not, if you want deep technical analysis of specific markets. This is a storybook, not a trading manual. Each chapter gives you the overview, not the full academic treatment.
The Line From Tulips to Bitcoins
Dennin titled his book perfectly. The line from tulips to bitcoins is not a metaphor. It is a direct connection.
In 1637, Dutch merchants bought the right to tulip bulbs they had never seen, based on paintings. In 2017, crypto traders bought digital tokens they could not touch, based on whitepapers. The tulip merchants traded in pubs. The crypto traders traded on exchanges that ran on phones. The technology changed completely. The behavior did not change at all.
Both were driven by the same belief: this new thing is special, it will only go up, and I need to get in before everyone else does. Both ended the same way. A crash that destroyed the latecomers while the early insiders walked away with the money.
After 42 stories across 400 years, the lesson is simple. Humans do not learn from other people’s mistakes. Every generation discovers greed on its own. Every generation invents its own version of “this time is different.” And every generation gets the same result.
That is depressing if you think about it too long. But it is also useful. Because if the pattern never changes, then recognizing the pattern gives you an edge. Not to time the market perfectly. Nobody can do that. But to know when to be careful. When everybody around you is saying something can only go up, that is when you should start asking questions.
Thank You
If you followed this series from the start, or even if you just read a few chapters that caught your eye, thank you. This was a bigger project than I expected. Some weeks writing about commodity history felt like a strange hobby. But I kept going because the stories were genuinely interesting and because people kept reading.
Writing about the Hunt brothers and Silver Thursday felt different from writing about battery metals and Bitcoin. The older stories have a completeness to them. You know how they end. The newer stories are still playing out. Some of the themes from the last few chapters are in the news right now. That is the point. These stories do not stop when the book ends.
If you take one thing from this entire series, let it be this: the next bubble is already forming somewhere. It might be in a commodity, a currency, a technology, or something that does not exist yet. But the pattern will be the same. It always is.
Thanks for reading along.
Previous: What’s Next for Commodities and Crypto
This is the final post in my From Tulips to Bitcoins book retelling series. Thanks for reading along!
Book: “From Tulips to Bitcoins” by Torsten Dennin (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7, River Grove Books, 2019)