Written by insidesources 

Ten years after the greatest bubble-burst in modern market history – which we can’t stop talking about – there’s a bull market in bubbles.

There are bubbly stock markets: The U.S. leads the pack, but it’s only one of many. There are bond bubbles galore: U.S. Treasuries, U.S. corporate bonds, emerging market bonds, subprime auto bonds. And then there are bubbles in art (where a Saudi Arabian prince recently paid US$450 million for a single Da Vinci), venture capital, lithium, student loans… and don’t forget real estate, in Vancouver, Auckland, Sydney, Toronto, Hong Kong, San Francisco and London, for starters.

There’s a bubble in Google searches for “Bitcoin bubble,” as my colleague Tama Churchouse pointed out. And of course, there may currently be a bubble in cryptocurrencies.

And don’t forget the “mother of all bubbles” also known as “the everything bubble,” which infers that a global debt bubble feeds all the other bubbles. It might be time for a Bubble ETF (my proposed ticker symbol: POP), composed of the many bubble markets, to buy bubbles.

What’s a bubble?

It can often be hard to tell you’re in a bubble until it pops – and it’s too late. It would help to know how to tell a bubble is forming.

Luckily, there are about four centuries’ worth of speculative bubbles to study for answers.

The first widely known and the most famous market bubble of all time was Tulip Mania, which occurred in Holland in the early 17th century. At that time, the Dutch became enamored with tulips that had flaming colours on their petals. They coveted the bulbs that grew into these unique tulips.

As demand for the bulbs increased, along with their value, a market in tulip bulbs developed. As word of profitable speculation spread, more people piled in. Prices moved steadily higher.

Then from December 1636 to February 1637, the price of premium tulips surged by 200 percent. At the height of the mania in 1637, the market price of a single prized bulb was sufficient to purchase one of the grandest homes on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam – when the city’s homes were among the most expensive in the world.