It happens In the glossy boardrooms of Wall Street as much as it does in the stuffy offices of small brokerage houses in Karachi and at the desks of armchair investors sitting at home. A quiet spectacle unfolds each trading day of a game not unlike Jenga. That iconic tower of wooden blocks, so innocent in its premise and so ruinous in its end, offers a fitting metaphor for the modern stock market.Â
Each rally in the market, each new record high, adds another block to the structure. Stocks—blue chips, tech startups, meme darlings—are carefully balanced atop one another, pushed ever skyward by earnings reports, monetary policy, and investor euphoria. Confidence builds as the tower grows.Â
But much like in Jenga, elevation does not mean stability. The higher the tower climbs, the less secure it becomes. Each block removed to be repositioned like each stock sold, each sector rotation, each speculative reshuffle weakens the base. Portfolios are rebalanced not with safety in mind, but with an eye on the next big winner, on beating the crowd. The tower doesn’t just stand tall; it sways and the players watch on in a mix of giddy anticipation and frozen horror.
The longer the game goes, the more complex the tower becomes, and the more sensitive it is to movement. All it takes is one piece of unexpected news really. In a market stretched thin, perception alone can be the final block pulled from the bottom row. A war, a pandemic variant, a central bank misstep, or anything under the sun could become the errant hand that finally nudges the tower into falling apart.Â
Eventually, gravity asserts itself. It always does. The crash comes not with a bang but with a shudder, a hesitation, and then the clatter of falling blocks. Panic is not born in the moment the tower falls, but in the silence that precedes it. In those final moments when every player realises there is no safe move.Â
For anyone that has studied stock markets, this is a familiar and inevitable pattern. The Roaring Twenties ended in the Great Depression. The dizzying highs of the dot-com boom became abysmal lows. The mortgage-backed optimism of the mid-2000s toppled into the Great Recession. These were not mere downturns; they were the inevitable consequence of believing a tower could rise forever. The content in this publication is expensive to produce. But unlike other journalistic outfits, business publications have to cover the very organizations that directly give them advertisements. Hence, this large source of revenue, which is the lifeblood of other media houses, is severely compromised on account of Profit’s no-compromise policy when it comes to our reporting. No wonder, Profit has lost multiple ad deals, worth tens of millions of rupees, due to stories that held big businesses to account. Hence, for our work to continue unfettered, it must be supported by discerning readers who know the value of quality business journalism, not just for the economy but for the society as a whole.To read the full article, subscribe and support independent business journalism in Pakistan
